Sahil Bloom joins Sam and Shaan to discuss his journey from no-name private equity VP to newsletter writer, fund manager, and incoming author. He pitches three business ideas — a LinkedIn growth agency, a newsletter growth service, and a mobile podcast/video studio van — and the conversation expands into the economics of PE, the cringe calculus of content creation, crypto losses, and what it takes to build a durable personal brand.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Sahil Bloom (guest, investor/writer)
Cold Open: Mobile Studio Van Pitch [00:00:00]
Sahil: Buy like a few vans, get them out with a pretty fire setup — just in the back of a normal-sized van, doesn’t even have to be an RV. Two to three people could fit. Deck it out with a few good DSLR cameras that can do the recording, dual camera setups, a few mics hanging off the sides. Basically go and post it up in a couple of major cities — one van in each major city — and rent it out for like $500 for two hours to do podcast recordings, or a couple hundred bucks for people going in and filming Instagram Shorts, TikToks, stuff like that. If you put one in LA and one in New York City, I bet you could kill it.
Introductions: The Hair Appointment and the No-Name PE Guy [00:00:30]
Shaan: The man who answers the question: what would happen if Shaan was better looking, smarter, and harder working? Sahil Bloom is smarter.
Sahil: What’s up guys, happy to be here.
Sam: How often do you get your hair cut? Let’s start with the most important question.
Sahil: Every other week at this point. My wife is making fun of me for this because it used to be once a month — wasn’t a big deal. Now I’m going every other week because I like to keep it tight, and she keeps giving me grief because we have a newborn at home and I’m like, oh, I gotta go. So yeah, it’s becoming an issue.
Sam: You don’t call it a hair appointment. That’s the only thing you can’t do as a guy. The place can’t be called a salon — that’s always been my rule.
Sahil: Easy. Barbershop.
Sam: You seem like a salon guy though, man. You’ve got like a Wharton sweater on. You look like you’re getting ready for Christmas — it’s 85 degrees in Austin today.
Shaan: It actually does look like you should have a fireplace in the background and you’re going to be reading us nice stories in a soothing voice.
Sam: I’m definitely drinking tea right now. So basically your bio is pretty easy — you were a nobody private equity guy, the pandemic hit, and you said, I’m gonna be somebody. In a matter of two years you got famous on Twitter. What do we have, eight or nine hundred thousand followers? You basically transformed your life, all because of Twitter and COVID. Is that right?
Sahil: I mean, the “nobody private equity guy” designation is not unreasonable. That’s totally fair.
Sam: That would have stung, but now you’re famous and stuff, so now it’s okay to laugh at it.
Sahil: I mean, there are a lot of nobody finance guys making bank out there, right? That’s a thing.
Sam: But do you think — if you’re making pretty good money doing something like that, VPs in private equity at this point, if you’re doing well, you’re making seven figures. Name four of them.
Shaan: Dude, I hung out with some PE guys the other day and I didn’t know them well enough, but in the back of my head the whole time — how rich are you? That’s all I wanted to ask. If you own a PE shop, is it safe to assume you’re just wealthy? How much do they actually earn?
Sahil: If you are a GP — one of the principal owners of a private equity fund — and you’ve been doing it across multiple funds that have performed well over a period of time, it’s pretty safe to assume you’ve got a net worth north of $50 million. Simple math: most of those funds are taking one and a half to two percent management fees. On a big fund — $500 million, a billion-plus — that’s $20 million-plus coming in per year on a billion-dollar fund. Realistically most of them don’t have that many employees, so they’re not having to pay out a ton in operating costs. Then you have carry — they’re taking 15, 20, 25 percent of profits above the hurdle rate, whatever that is, eight percent. So if they double the fund, there’s $200 million-plus of carry to go around. The principal owners are taking the lion’s share of that. If one principal owner owns 20 to 30 percent of that, it’s a ton of money.
Sam: I’ve always gone back and forth — I can’t decide if it’s jealousy, because I’m like, you guys are making a lot of money for what feels like not a lot of work. Or if it’s actually that I dislike them because they’re just Excel sheet monkeys and not actually creating value. Where’s the reality?
Sahil: They work crazy hard, man. I don’t know anyone who’s a long-time GP in private equity who doesn’t work 70-plus hours a week of stressful work. It’s the type of thing Shaan would absolutely hate. If you care about leverage on your time, it’s pretty poor leverage, and it’s high-stress because you’re putting a lot of debt on these companies. During a downturn like right now it’s hugely stressful — you’re constantly dealing with breaking covenants on debt and having to restructure. What ends up happening is you spend 80 percent of your time on the couple of losers in the portfolio, and the winners you just kind of set and forget because they’re growing. You’ve got levered upside on them because you put 60 to 70 percent leverage to buy the company. But you’re dealing constantly with the ones that are losers.
Information Economy vs. PE: Where the Real Value Is [00:07:00]
Sam: Shaan and I have our hands in this world where we’ve definitely sold and continue to sell courses and information stuff, we have a podcast, and we’ve built nice-sized companies. For you — you have your foot in the PE world as well as in this information thing. Where do you think one drives more wealth?
Sahil: You have to think about it in terms of profit potential multiplied by the time freedom that comes with it. Getting to $50 million in PE from a time-adjusted standpoint is a pretty grindy way to go. It’s high certainty if you’re at a good fund and rolling as a partner — a pretty low-beta way to generate that net worth — but you’re going to be working your ass off until you’re 60 doing it. Versus the information side — newsletters, podcasts, courses — where Shaan might do his course and in a week make $300K and then be able to chill for two or three months if he wants, because who cares. It’s a totally different time leverage. So it depends on what you want.
Sam: What’s your job now?
Sahil: I do like ten different things. I’ve got the fund — I ended up raising a $10 million venture fund from a handful of institutions and a bunch of GPs at big funds invested in it, basically sharing deal flow. I’ve got the newsletter, which monetizes — 125-ish thousand subs, makes anywhere from $3,500 to $6,000 per send right now, and I send it eight to ten times a month. Pretty nice business that scales. I write the same two newsletters a week and it’s a pretty nice setup. Then I had this agency business that started as something I saw as an arbitrage opportunity in early 2021 and ended up scaling to order of magnitude close to six figures a month in gross revenue with super high margins.
The Fork in the Road: Leaving PE [00:11:00]
Shaan: I know we had some conversations about this back in the day — you had started tweeting regularly, you had momentum, you were good at it, maybe 100K to 200K followers at the time. But you didn’t have the fund, the newsletter revenue, the agency. You didn’t know exactly what was on the other side of that hill. The fork in the road a lot of people face: do I stay in my cushy job, or do I take this leap of faith? Give us the two-minute story of how you thought about that.
Sahil: Like a lot of people, I had that COVID moment of what the hell am I doing with my life. For the first time in six years of working in private equity — which at the time was 80 to 100 hour weeks — I had time to look up and actually think. I just started writing on Twitter, I didn’t ever think of it as a way to make money or get another job. But as it started to grow, I started seeing friends from the tech world leveraging platforms to make money, and I was like, huh, I wonder if there’s a way to build a little side hustle here.
And I had a conversation with you, Shaan, that I remember being really impactful. I was at a real crossroads. I thought I was going to go join another investing firm and move back to the East Coast to be closer to family. I remember you saying to me: it sounds like you’re just going to go do the thing that kind of sounds like it sucks instead of the thing that you actually get a lot of energy from, which is all this new stuff that feels scalable and you’re fired up about. So why are you making that decision? Until someone reframed it for me like that, I’d never thought about it. I was just going to continue down the path that felt safe.
Shaan: You had described it as path A or path B, but the way you described path A it sounded terrible — super hard, not that much fun — and path B sounded like a lot of fun with some unknowns but definitely good stuff coming out of it. I was like, how is this even a decision? Sounds like you’re choosing between a bad option and a good option. Go with the good one.
Sahil: Funny story about path A — it was joining a crossover hedge fund, one that also does investments in private tech companies. My final interview, I had to pitch a stock. They gave me Stitch Fix. I had a week to decide whether it was a buy or a short. I did a week of research, made this long deck, did all this work — it was miserable. It was trading at $46 at the time, had come off from around $100 after the whole Archegos thing. I pitched it as a buy. Got rejected because my pitch was bad. And now that stock is trading at $3.56. So I would have taken path A and gotten fired within six months.
The Twitter Agency: Ghost Writing and LinkedIn Arbitrage [00:17:00]
Sam: Something interesting — I get asked maybe five times a week if someone can write tweets for me or cut videos for me. It’s pretty crazy. And there’s this weird thing where people ask, are you in Sahil’s circle, are you connected to this person, because there’s this circle of Twitter people connected to tens of millions of followers. There seems like something going on with your agency. It feels like the dark underground cabal that runs Twitter.
Sahil: No — Shaan, you remember this, right? Didn’t some kid hit you up saying he ghost-wrote tweets for me, and you texted me asking if it was true?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sahil: I was like, I’ve never heard of this kid in my life. He was just lying. I hit him up saying, yo, why are you lying to this person? And he completely panicked.
The world of ghost-writing tweets has become a meme — Business Insider wrote an article about VCs getting ghost writers. But that wasn’t how my agency thing started at all. It started in late 2020 because I had figured out that threads were the way people were growing on Twitter. This was before threads had become the “thread boy” meme — there was legitimate arbitrage in writing quality threads. I had all these startups I’d invested in, and the founders were like, we see a ton of value in having a platform and a brand, can you help us? I had around 75,000 followers at that point, so I started an LLC, an advisory business, basically giving strategic support on content.
Sam: How much were you charging them?
Sahil: Five grand a month per startup, basically texting and maybe one call every other week. Super low time commitment. Since these were personal investments, if I was making back my $25K investment in five months, that was a pretty good cash-on-cash return.
Then in early-to-mid 2021 a few clients came to me saying, the biggest struggle is we don’t have people that can write this content — we don’t want to build a content team when we’re focused on product and engineering. Do you have people who can write? At that point I had done the Maven course with Julian Shapiro on how to build your audience on Twitter, and I had this pool of 400 students who had gone through it and knew how to write threads. So I was just a connector between freelance writing talent and these startups.
Sam: What are the one-two-three bullet points you’d tell these founders?
Sahil: Basically: establish your two or three content pillars — what you’re going to talk about consistently. At the time it was like, if you’re a founder, talk about building companies and what you’re learning along the way. Now that’s ultra-saturated, but at the time there weren’t that many founders doing it.
Also, use the Pratfall Effect — have you ever heard of that? When people who you perceive to be perfect show chinks in their armor, we find it very endearing. Sharing your struggles along the way makes people like you more. So play on that vulnerability.
The fundamental of any agency business is price arbitrage: charge a client $5K to $10K for something that costs you $1K to $2.5K. That was when it really started to scale. But it was never VCs for me — all founders. Half tech founders, half meat-and-potatoes founders.
Sam: Sam’s guys.
Shaan: No, you’re the meat-and-potatoes guy. Shaan’s the tech guy. If something’s cool or interesting, it’s more my thing. If something’s boring and generally correlated with obesity, it’s yours.
The Three Business Ideas [00:26:00]
Sam: People always tell us — you gotta do ideas with guests. They want to hear: you’re Sahil, you see a bunch of different worlds, what opportunities do you see? Cool startup idea, niche opportunity, something maybe you’re not doing. You have any on your cheat sheet?
Sahil: I’ve got three for you guys.
Sam: Let’s go.
Idea #1: LinkedIn Growth Agency [00:26:30]
Sahil: First is on the agency side — two really obvious ones that honestly anyone listening could probably go action on.
One is a LinkedIn growth agency. Massive opportunity right now in audience growth. Twitter has become more saturated because of the thread-boy thing. LinkedIn — you can go post a few things and immediately be getting 10K-plus impressions. For founders and business builders there’s so much business on those platforms for recruiting, deal flow, everything.
The way I’d do it: go find someone who has a Twitter presence, use TweetPik — the web service I use — to turn their well-performing tweets into carousels. Carousels are the big growth hack on LinkedIn. Say to them, look, I’ll take over your entire LinkedIn presence, you never have to open LinkedIn. Two to three times a week I’ll post carousels made from your proven tweets — or from their existing blogs. Say it’s Ryan Holiday — he’s written a ton of blogs but doesn’t have a massive LinkedIn presence. Turn those blogs into posts, charge $2,500 to $5,000 a month, and the time it’d take you is maybe an hour a week per person. That’s an awesome arbitrage opportunity.
Sam: I think it’s awesome. I actually hired a guy as a content remixer — take content from the pod or Twitter and remix it onto other platforms. I focused him on LinkedIn. I had a hypothesis that what you just said was true, and now I’m at 38,000 followers on LinkedIn and I haven’t opened LinkedIn once.
Shaan: Same thing happened to me.
Sam: But hold on — 38,000 followers on LinkedIn, let’s say that happened in two months or something. Say you post your power writing course, a thousand-dollar thing. How much revenue will you make from 38,000 followers?
Shaan: I don’t know, haven’t tested it. But I also haven’t been doing it long enough to expect to harvest value — I don’t think I’ve given enough yet. Like with Twitter, people see oh, you guys can sell a course, you get a bunch of sign-ups. Yeah, but I’ve been doing this podcast for three years, 300 episodes, hundreds of hours of content. Somebody’s listened to all that. They trust you, they’ve made the determination on whether you’re smart and interesting or full of it. They’ve done all that work. So when I make an offer, it’s a simple yes or no.
Sahil: I think like 100K is probably the point at which you can start harvesting value from LinkedIn. Justin Welsh is a guy — the Godfather LinkedIn influencer — and he’s now making $100K-plus per month on auto courses that he just promotes through LinkedIn. He built a newsletter on the back of LinkedIn, and now he’s bigger on Twitter too. He set those courses up and puts in no time now.
Shaan: Sean — have you seen what Sahil’s been doing on Instagram?
Sam: So Sahil and I, around the same time, were like, all right, let’s take Instagram seriously. I started and I was beating him nicely — adding a thousand people a day, going from 5,000 to like 48K or 50K pretty fast. And he was doing his thing. I told him, you need to post twice a day. He starts doing that and just rocketed past me — now at 62,000 followers, adding one or two thousand a day. He’s doing this exact same thing, taking his tweets that do well and just posting them on Instagram.
The question is: is this total vanity nonsense and a distraction, or can it actually drive revenue if your goal is to sell more of whatever you own?
Sahil: Right now Instagram is generating about 1,000 newsletter subs per month for me just through the link in my bio. I had around 35,000 followers on average during the month. As it scales, it’ll drive well north of that. And a newsletter subscriber is worth probably $3 to $4 to me on average from sponsor revenue alone — plus if they buy my book, it’s very valuable. So it’s a bunch of money per month scaling over time.
There are also people selling products mostly on Instagram without ever posting their face. This guy Dakota Robertson — I think his handle is “Writes to Riches” or something — has 250,000 followers from posting his viral tweets to Instagram, almost never shows his face, and has a thriving ghost-writing business from it.
Shaan: I’m torn. On one hand, you are perfect execution of a strategy that I now hate. I know what’s going to happen — this podcast is going to breed 9,000 new people who go, this is my thing. And their execution will be nowhere near yours.
Sahil: That’s an important point. When I started writing threads, Shaan, you were the same way — any thread you wrote would blow up early on because there just weren’t that many of them. The market wasn’t saturated. Now it’s pretty hard to get a thread to really take off unless you’re doing “10 YouTube channels that will change your life for free.”
Shaan: Which is like… getting fit through power walking. Will power walking burn calories? Yeah, for sure. Are you probably not going to get injuries? Yeah. But you have to look like a doofus doing it. Everyone in the neighborhood’s going to know you as that weirdo power walking.
And I’m guilty of this too. I was like, I’m gonna create content for fun initially — this podcast, Twitter — and then, oh, if I sell five percent of my soul to the algorithm, I think I can get this bigger. Okay, I started doing that. And that feels fun. But as a public service announcement: this was awesome to do when it wasn’t figured out. Now that it’s figured out, this is certified official small-boy stuff and I do not recommend it to anyone else. I myself have stopped doing this too.
Sahil: But the difference is execution. I’m sitting in this house because of it. I tweeted this stuff and got a lovely house. Look, you have to figure out what area you’re going to do it in that’s not crazy saturated and cringe. And you’ve got to figure out what percent cringe you’re willing to be.
If writing a thread is 10 percent cringe — what level above that are you willing to go? If 100 is “10 Chrome extensions that will change your life,” and 50 is “TED Talks that changed my life,” then 20 is some of the stuff I post. Probably. And if that helps a few people and a bunch of people get pissed and think it’s not for them, I genuinely don’t care. If I help one person and they hit me up saying that changed my perspective — that’s what Gary Vee’s been doing for decades. That guy’s a legend. He puts out content that’s listicles and motivational stuff. Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone — these guys get hate because it works and it helps people.
Sam: Have you been to a Tony Robbins event?
Sahil: Yeah.
Sam: I loved it. I thought it was amazing. And he gets on stage and does all the things you could criticize someone for — clapping, saying “when I say this you say that,” asking basic questions the crowd just says yes to. But he’s doing it at an A++ level. Probably the best public speaker I’ve ever seen.
Sahil: Even more powerful than Obama, I’d say. Obama is smooth, but Obama doesn’t get people to walk across coals and shout their greatest fear out loud. I’ve never seen Obama control a crowd for 12 straight hours like Tony Robbins will do at an event.
Sam: But here’s what happens — you look around and you meet a bunch of people who thought they were the next Tony Robbins. Life coaches, motivational speakers, change consultants. Every cringe name you can think of. You go look at their stuff and it’s the same concept, just not executed at that level — because they didn’t have the hard-won life experiences that Tony had to actually create the content. They didn’t have 40 years of sharpening their craft. They didn’t have the natural talent and charisma and larger-than-life presence.
You can look at the best — the Gary Vees, the Tony Robbinses, and Sahil on Twitter — and say, that’s dope, I could do that. And some people can. But most people will fall into the pit of cringe because they’re not going to execute at that same level. And they’re going to end up in this weird middle ground.
Sahil: That’s like any market though, right? Someone starts a restaurant chain that’s the A+ version of a thing, and a bunch of people come in to try to mimic it and it’s the B+ version. But do you care that you’re the diluted version of Tony Robbins if you’re making money and taking care of your family? I know a lot of people who say, I don’t give a damn — I grew my audience with super cringe stuff and I’m making $25K a month. I was making $5K or $10K at my prior job. Now I’m doing this sitting at home, spending time with my kids. What do I care if tech people think I’m cringe?
The other thing I’d say is: what game are you playing? For me, I was always thinking about what am I actually trying to build long term. I wasn’t trying to be a “thread guy.” That’s not my long-term vision. It vaulted me from being a nobody PE guy to getting a book deal last month — a big book deal. Raising a fund I never would have been able to raise as a VP in private equity. The question is: how are you using that window to vault yourself into the next level where you’re not even in the same class as the other guys doing what you were doing previously?
Sam: Are you worried about Elon screwing it up?
Sahil: Not really. I’ve already benefited from being early to a market. I built a brand that’s extended into things I actually own — the newsletter, the fund, the book. I’d be more worried if I was just starting out. But the reality is, eat or be eaten. If you’re not figuring out the new way to be on the front of something, you’re in for a tough time no matter what.
Idea #2: Newsletter Growth Service [00:44:00]
Sahil: Let’s talk about the newsletter. This is the second idea.
The biggest issue I have with my own newsletter is: I love writing, that’s my number one thing. I freaking hate thinking about or dealing with any of the business or growth side.
The business side is easy to outsource — there are ad agencies, ConvertKit has an ad network where they’ll manage the whole back end, bring in sponsors, send you the money. Nathan crushed it getting that going. But the growth side of newsletters is completely untouched. There is no one out there that I’ve been able to find who offers a full-suite growth service for your newsletter.
By growth suite I mean: someone thinking about my landing pages and optimizing them, thinking about referral networks and newsletter swaps, thinking about paid ads, SEO for my website to drive subs, how to optimize it across my different social channels. Literally just someone sitting around thinking about growth for the newsletter so I can focus on writing. At the size newsletter I’m at now, given what newsletter subs are worth to me, I would easily pay $10,000 a month to someone who could figure that out and do it in one place — on top of whatever I’d spend on paid ads.
Shaan: Do you think Work Week is going to do that?
Sahil: No. From what I can tell Work Week is mostly back-end services. There’s also Smooth Ops that spun out from Morning Brew — my understanding is they’re much more focused on monetization and managing the business side so you can focus on writing. I literally just want someone who wakes up every day and says, how do we get more subscribers. That’s it.
Shaan: My guy Ben at Milk Road was right on that. He woke up every day and said, how do we get more subscribers. That was his mission. But you know, we needed it — it’s like a company setup. Whereas most people’s personal newsletters are not at a size where there’s a market for it.
Sahil: My hypothesis is that there’s a ton of successful founders and entrepreneurs who want to build a newsletter or an owned email list, like what Sam Altman or Paul Graham have — SEO and emails coming to them. And they’re willing to pay a lot because they have money and they don’t need it to be revenue-generating from the outset.
If you developed some core competency and partnered with me to prove it out over two or three months — hey, it drove these results — and were able to use me as a case study, maybe I own a small percentage on the upside and I’m incentivized to bring referrals, I bet you could grow a big business there quickly. You only need 10 clients at $5K to $10K a month and you’ve got an 80-plus percent margin business.
Shaan: But then you have the headache of running a service business.
Sahil: Yeah, definitely not as good as products. I’ve thought about starting an agency maybe 20 times in my life, and literally five minutes later every single time I’m like, don’t go into the service business. But we have friends who’ve done it right — Andrew Wilkinson with Metalab, Greg with Late Checkout, you’re doing it with your thing.
Shaan: What you have to do is hire a great operator. Give them 15 percent of the upside and say, you’re a killer, you’re a hustler, you can go get a ton of this.
Sahil: That’s the no-name PE guy coming out of me right there.
Sam: I thought earlier he was talking about dodgeball and recess. That’s what PE is to me. He was talking about beta and I was like, you’re talking about nerds.
Sahil: You’re kind of a low-beta guy actually, Sam. I feel like I know within a band what I’m going to get out of you any given day.
Sam: I think you’re complimenting me but I don’t understand it.
Sahil: You show up. You tweeted about that recently — you hate when people say they’re going to do something and then don’t do it. You take pride in being low-beta.
Sam: By the way, what a stupid thing to tweet. Yeah, I like long walks on the beach and movies. Who doesn’t like somebody who says they’re going to do something and does it? What an obvious tweet.
Shaan: Give me the clout I deserve. There are a lot of things that annoy Sam that don’t annoy me and vice versa. What’s one thing that annoys you, Shaan, that doesn’t annoy Sam?
Sam: Nothing annoys him. Nothing.
Shaan: I guess what bothers me is usually things about myself. If I find myself in a bad mood or getting annoyed with something or getting impatient — that’s the thing that bothers me. I’m like, oh man, I let this get to me. So it’s not usually something external that frustrates me. It’s either impatience, boredom, or feeling cranky or tired. And I’m like, I don’t want to be that way.
Sam: For years I used to say that Shaan, your likelihood of being a billionaire is actually higher than mine. But your likelihood of being a complete degenerate is also higher. High beta. Six out of ten times if you were reborn you’d be a degenerate gambler or drug addict, four out of ten times you’d be wildly successful.
Sahil: Yeah, that’s the thing with Shaan though — I’ve realized over the past handful of months he is too emotionally healthy to probably be incredibly successful. He has this problem that few people have, which is he’s just happy. That’s a problem in this world.
Shaan: It depends on your definition of success, man. I would argue that makes me the most successful.
Sahil: Yeah, you need to find sex by success by superficial things like happiness and well-being and all that stupid stuff.
Shaan’s Investing Losses and the Tourist vs. Local Framework [00:54:00]
Sahil: Shaan, I will say you’ve had more high highs and low lows this year from my perceived view. But he’s totally unfazed.
Flashback to the crypto crash — I’m texting Sam going, is Shaan okay? Sean’s texting the group chat totally fine. I’m like, is Shaan margin-called right now? And then Shaan’s like, yo, I sold all my stock. I was like, holy crap, Shaan sold the bottom. And then the market crashes again and Shaan’s a genius who sold the top or something.
Does that stuff bother you at all, Shaan?
Shaan: So, setting aside equity in companies, my liquid stuff was probably down 50 percent or something. My investment strategy pre-2022 was “cash is trash.” So I had a huge amount in startups getting marked up like crazy. Then big tech — I thought Amazon, Google, Facebook were the boring safe plays. And then I moved a huge percentage of my net worth into Bitcoin, Ethereum… and then this Luna thing that was popping.
So basically every single thing I had invested in went down.
Sahil: Did it bother you?
Shaan: I don’t like losing money, but did I let it bother me? No. I took steps — I got perspective. Is my family in hardship? No, they’re fine. What should I actually do? Do I need to make adjustments? Was I wrong about certain things, or should I do some things to give myself more comfort?
Why did I sell? I basically margin-called myself emotionally. I was like, things are going to go lower and I don’t want to sweat this all the time. So I’m going to sell this amount so I don’t have to worry about anything, move more into cash, book this loss to offset some gains, and then just not have to think about this stuff while I focus on the things I actually want to be focusing on. I’m not a trader. I’m not an investment genius. So that’s not going to be my goal.
And I never got my happiness from when it was going up. So why would I get my sadness from when it’s going down? Didn’t make sense to me.
Sahil: You must have felt good about Luna at some point. I think you originally mentioned Luna in Milk Road at like $40.
Shaan: I bought a bag. That thing went up to $118. I was like, Shaan is my God. What other ideas do you have?
Then we were supposed to interview Do Kwon on our old pod — I had hit him up on Twitter, he was supposed to come on Thursday. That Sunday, Luna had come down to about $80, and I get an email from his assistant that just says, unfortunately Do will have to reschedule the interview for this Thursday. And I’m in bed getting a little heebie-jeebies about that. So I go downstairs and sell my entire bag at a small gain, not good but I sell the whole thing. Wake up the next morning and that thing’s at five dollars. The whole thing unraveled overnight.
Then I get another email from his assistant saying he’s going to have to cancel the interview. And I’m like, yeah, well, this dude has a red notice out for him. He’s not coming on our podcast at this point.
Sahil: I was on vacation in Hawaii with my family and I’m watching this unfold. Couldn’t even get to my crypto on my laptop. I was like, well, I guess I’ll just lose all this money here and enjoy this vacation. There’s nothing I can do.
Shaan: The framework you’ve talked about that I love is the tourist versus local thing. Tourists freak out when the seasons change and just bounce. Locals are aware that there are seasons, that it comes in swings, so they can stick it out and be fine.
Sahil: I’ve always thought there’s a third one though — the stubborn local. The guy who lives in the coastal village and is like, global warming’s not real, and then he’s drowning and he’s still saying it. So how do you make sure you don’t go from being the good kind of local to the stubborn local who just sits there until you die?
Shaan: That’s the hardest thing. With startups it’s always the question. You’ll hear the story like Pinterest had no traction for over a year and then finally started to work, and you take the lesson as: determination, keep going even when all the data’s telling you it’s not working. And then there’s the exact opposite advice: be super data-driven, feedback-oriented, listen to the market, make something people want, and if you have no users you’ve got to pivot.
The hardest question as a founder is: am I being the right kind of stubborn? Am I being stubborn because I’m right and I just need to make small adjustments and stay at it? Or am I banging my head against the wall and need to change my mind?
Nobody can give generic advice about when to do what. It’s super context-dependent, super circumstance-dependent. Same thing with investing. Should I still believe in something even when it’s getting crushed? For me with Facebook I went and bought more recently. Because I asked myself: do I believe in this company? Has that changed?
Sahil: Has your conviction in crypto changed?
Shaan: My overall conviction in crypto has stayed the same. On specific projects or coins, maybe slightly different. But let me give you an example of something where I updated my thinking.
I had thought: if people start to worry about inflation and realize their $100K in the bank just doesn’t buy the same amount anymore, they’ll look for a monetary system that doesn’t have that problem. Bitcoin should do well in a high-inflation environment. That didn’t happen. Inflation got as bad as it’s ever been and people’s response was more conservative than aggressive. They didn’t move into Bitcoin. The US dollar actually gained strength because other currencies got crushed even worse. So that’s one where I need to reassess — was my logic incorrect?
Sahil: The Bitcoin inflation hedge thing is interesting because I’ve thought about it too. My assumption for why that scenario didn’t play out is that most of the price increase was driven by loose monetary policy and people just pumping into speculative high-risk assets — not by fundamental believers like you who were like, the technology makes sense and the fundamentals are great. It was mostly just random friends who were, haha, Bitcoin number go up. And then they freaked out when it went the other direction and pulled out when interest rates rose.
I wonder if you segmented it somehow — the true underlying technology believers versus the number-go-up crowd — the picture would look different. My guess is that people who are really thinking about the technology and the underlying monetary policy on the network think this is a great time to be accumulating.
Shaan: I think you’re right. But in my mind it was a very simple picture. It was like, you’re playing one game where the bank gives you some money but every year that money becomes worth a little bit less — by design, they’re trying to make it two to three percent worse per year, but sometimes it gets nine percent worse. And hey, there’s this other new edition of Monopoly where that doesn’t happen to your money. My assumption was people would just start moving to the new edition because they don’t like their money becoming less valuable. But that message didn’t get through. Instead the narrative that played out was “Bitcoin is how you get rich” or “Bitcoin is how you lose your money.” It was an easier sell as a get-rich story, and that’s also why people sold when it was crashing — because it was more “Bitcoin will make you rich” than “Bitcoin is a different monetary system.”
Idea #3: Mobile Podcast and Video Studio Van [01:07:00]
Sahil: I’ve got one more non-agency business idea for you. More product, not that much services.
Shaan: What is it?
Sahil: Mobile podcast and video studio van. It’s such a pain in the ass right now to find a good place to record. Buy a few vans, get them out with a pretty fire setup — just in the back of a normal-sized van, doesn’t even have to be an RV, two to three people could fit. Deck it out with a few good DSLR cameras, dual camera setups, a few mics hanging off the sides. Post it up in a couple of major cities, one van in each, with dope backgrounds, cool lighting, neon signs — and rent it out for $500 for two hours to do podcast recordings, or a couple hundred bucks for people filming Instagram Shorts and TikToks. Put one in LA and one in New York City, I bet you could kill it.
Sam: I just joined this gym in Austin called The Collective — it’s this fancy place and everyone there looks like an Instagram model. They have co-working, but they also have three studios for podcasts and photo-taking. And you can tell they just really don’t know their audience. I mean, if you catch these people on bad lighting they don’t even look that good, but in that lighting you’d look incredible. Lighting makes a huge difference.
But I do think a mobile studio could crush it. Let me ask — I’m looking at U-Haul box trucks. How much do these cost? Looks like you could buy a used one for about $25,000. So $25K, put $5K down—
Sahil: You’ll probably need another $5K into the kit to make the thing work. And you probably need an operator on site. That’s the tricky part. But maybe you structure it as a membership — like a gym membership. You could use the studio on demand, just book it when it’s free, but you’ve got to be a monthly member.
Sam: That’s a genius idea — doing it as a membership. In New York there are a couple studios doing in-person podcasts, like What the F Media — they’re solid, not great, but they’re paying New York City rent. I can’t imagine the economics are that great. If you’ve got a truck, you could post it in a parking lot, never pay rent, just carry the cost of the truck and the $5K to $10K kit.
Sahil: We’re gonna call it Mudio. The mobile studio. Mudio.
Sam: We might get a branding agency to work on the name. But wait, let me ask you something else—
The YouTube Look Question and Personal Branding [01:12:00]
Sam: Shaan and I are trying to get more popular on YouTube right now. And the elephant in the room when everyone talks to you is that you are just ridiculously good-looking. Do you think your hair-and-being-handsome shtick is working for you? And what aesthetic shtick should Shaan and I have?
Sahil: Calling it a shtick is hilarious to me. But okay. On the platforms that are visual, it obviously helps — when people are scrolling and see an attractive person, they stop. But for you guys, you’re both good-looking dudes. I’m not going to sell you short. Sam’s got the look with the fake glasses.
Sam: Those definitely don’t have a prescription.
Sahil: And Shaan — my favorite line that Shaan ever had: if you’re not going to be good-looking, be interesting-looking. I tell that to everyone I give advice to. Shaan’s interesting-looking, man. He’s got the salt-and-pepper beard. He looks distinguished.
Sam: That’s a little bit of a vibe, but it’s not interesting.
Sahil: You guys can play up the whole thing of being two guys who look completely different and are somehow friends. Like cat-dog, you know?
Sam: We’re going for “why are these guys famous.” That’s what we need. If we just get over the hump — like there’s nothing special about these guys, and that’s our thing.
Sahil: You don’t have to be that good-looking on YouTube anyway. Look at the people who’ve crushed on YouTube — it’s not hot dudes and hot chicks necessarily. Not that you guys aren’t hot. I don’t want Sam to text me later.
Sam: Wait, you’re wrong. Hot dudes do better on YouTube.
Sahil: I don’t think they do. I’m not on YouTube yet, but I’ll let you know once I get on there whether being good-looking helps.
Sam: So you’re saying you think you’re hot.
Sahil: I’ve got this real burden I’m carrying.
Sam: Alex Hormozi’s got the thing where he wears the cutoff shirts and he’s just yoked — the nose strip, the being incredibly muscular. That’s a perfect example of you don’t have to be great-looking, you’ve got to be interesting-looking.
Sahil: That’s peacocking hardcore, and it’s kind of just a look. Each of you has a look. If you can stick to a consistent look — Chris Sacca with his cowboy shirts — you need your thing.
Sam: I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I need a uniform. I tweeted this out — I’m looking for a uniform, I want to look the same every time I’m on this podcast. Something from here up, signature. I’m in the market. I’m going to put a bounty on it. I’ll give a thousand dollars to anyone who can help me develop my chest-up look.
Sahil: I kind of want to see you do a traditional Indian attire — like a dope kurta. Shaan Puri, it could be part of your whole angle with the name.
Shaan: That’s true. Okay, you’re eligible for the bounty right now.
Sahil: I might match it just because I think it’s going to be funny to see.
Shaan: You heard it here. I’ll throw in a thousand. I’ll throw in a thousand on top of it.
Sam: Issues aside, Sahil’s on the hook for a thousand.
Shaan: I’m not doing peer pressure. This is the stupidest thing ever. They can still just tell Shaan what T-shirt to wear.
Sam: You have a signature look already so it’s easier for you to say. The pretty-boy thing with the non-prescription glasses — kind of the grandfather type.
Sahil: Kind of good, yeah.
Sam: You are going to be the quintessential stern father. I already know it’s coming.
Sahil: I don’t know what to say to this. Thank you.
The Grand Vision: Running for Office? [01:18:00]
Sam: I want to hear this before you go. What is the grand plan? What is the grand vision?
You went from no-name PE guy to legendary thread boy to CNBC contributor, book deal, author. I think you’re going to be president someday. Do you have a grand plan for yourself? What’s the vision?
Sahil: I could see running for public office in the cards long term. I don’t know if president is the role you necessarily want though — it’s probably one of the hardest and worst jobs in the world. Obama went in looking young and came out gray and looking rough. Running for governor, on the other hand — that could be pretty interesting.
Sam: Do you know anything about politics? I’ve never known you to be studied in public policy.
Sahil: I did my Master’s in public policy.
Sam: Oh wow.
Sahil: That was always what I wanted to do. But also, do you think the people serving in public office today know a lot about politics? It’s like the Naval thing — you don’t read a business book to know business. Are you a reasonable thinker? Do you have the ability to change your mind? Can you inspire people? Right now politicians can’t change their minds at all.
Sam: Which party would you be?
Sahil: I’m an independent. I’ve voted Democrat and Republican in prior elections. I’m hoping a third party rises over the next 20 years before I actually go do this. I hate the direction polar politics has gone — it’s just the loudest minority on each side.
Sam: I can see you being a good politician because you pretty much never take a stand on anything. Kind of like what you just did — I always call it the Rock thing. You never say anything inappropriate. You hedge everything.
Sahil: Well, yes. But he never takes a stand on anything.
Sam: Beautiful for a politician.
Sahil: All right, well, I’m counting on your fundraising support, Tim.
Sam: I’ll even introduce you as my hot friend Sahil when you come up to the speech at your future rally.
Sahil: You’re already doing it for me. You’re already lying. We got a good politician.
Wrap-Up [01:21:00]
Sam: Thanks for coming on. Do you want to promote something?
Sahil: People know where to find me. I’m at Sahil Bloom on everything, and my newsletter is at my website, sahlilbloom.com.
Sam: Happy we finally got you on. We’ll have to do it again. I’m gonna get Austin Rief on — that’ll be another group chat guy. We’ve asked Nikita to come on a few times but he’s—
Shaan: He’s just thinks it’s cool to tell me no.
Sam: They’re coming. Nikita right now is like, I hate running this app, this is so tough — and then you see him on Instagram having a photo shoot at his house, posing like it’s an album cover. Nikita’s living his best life. More props to him, because that dude called his shot and actually went and did it. We’ll get him on. We’ll get Austin on. We’ve had Huber on, but dude — thanks for coming and doing this. We appreciate it.
Sahil: Thank you guys.