Sam and Shaan trade business brainstorm ideas in a Labor Day throwback episode, covering a range of opportunities from reviving Klout as an influencer scoring platform to creating Dribbble for video editors, an Ozempic hotline, a Mind Sports recruiting event, and multiple plays around the wave of failing churches. They also riff on private elementary schools, Yelp for investors, AI lesson-plan tools for teachers, and Peter Thiel’s framework for unbundling institutions.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Cold Open: The SF Business Riddle [00:00:00]
Shaan: What if I told you that in San Francisco I discovered a business that does $31 million in revenue — locally, here in San Francisco. On that $31 million in revenue it does about $11 million in profit. It’s brick and mortar. And it has $100 million of assets on the balance sheet. You want to take a guess at what kind of business this is?
Sam: Well, it’s one of the things you’ve had listed. Does it involve religion?
Shaan: It does not.
Sam: Oh. What is it?
Shaan: It is —
Welcome: Labor Day Brainstorm [00:00:20]
Shaan: All right, we’re live. Happy Labor Day. We are celebrating by laboring.
Sam: Yes, right. Join me in this labor.
Shaan: Sam, let’s do a labor of love, because it is a day of labor. Today’s episode is all about ideas — business ideas and opportunities. Did you like preparing for this?
Sam: I love preparing for this.
Shaan: I bet you did not.
Sam: This is not my favorite thing to prepare for. It feels like a book report. Whereas my favorite episodes are when I just find cool stuff throughout the week and I go, “Have you seen this? This is cool.” Versus this one, I was like, I have to go find things. I have to seek them out a little bit more.
To me this is like, you know, in a relationship where it’s like, our relationship is just us doing things together — I’ve gotta go to the grocery store, come with me to the grocery store, that’s our date. But you forget that you’ve gotta do a date night once in a while. You gotta break out the rose petals. You gotta figure out a way to keep it spicy.
To me that’s what these episodes are. When we started this podcast it was very much like, what are ideas, business opportunities for people? That’s how we got that initial momentum, because no one else was doing that. And then over time it’s like, well, we’re doing two episodes a week, we can’t be having 20 good ideas a week — that’s not really how it works. So we started blending in just cool businesses we discovered, interesting things going on in our companies, whatever. That’s like the Costco pizza date night — like, let’s go to Costco, get some toilet paper, we’ll get a pizza. That counts, right?
So this is a throwback. We sprayed some cologne, we got a little hair gel, putting on pants for the first time in a while. This is date night for MFM.
Where do you want to start?
Sam: I’m actually very happy that we have one overlapping thing, which makes me pumped. And also a bunch of our things are big, which also makes me pumped. I do not like the small-time stuff. We’re gonna have a range though — there’s gonna be a couple that are more like simple side hustles, like here’s a way you could replace a job, you could get to $10K or $20K a month doing this. And then we have a bunch of big ideas.
What do you want — can we actually start with one that interests both of us that is a big one, or do you want to start small first?
Shaan: Let’s go. Last episode we gave a preview. There was one company — I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it, but I can just read your mind and know you thought this was cool.
Klout 2.0: Reviving Influencer Scores [00:03:10]
Shaan: So around 2012 — I think it started in 2008, but it got popular around 2012 — there was a company called Klout. K-L-O-U-T. And I remember I was just getting started on the internet. I had like 4,000 Facebook friends, which was considered big. This company called Klout came out and basically what you could do is log in with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and they would give you a Klout score. The score ranged between 1 and 100. I think at one point I had like a 75. Obama was like a 92.
What would happen is it was a platform for companies — like McDonald’s, at least that’s who I dealt with — they would basically find out information about your background, what you’re interested in, what you’re posting, how popular you are, and they would give you free stuff in hopes that you’d share the experience. That company raised like $40 million and was acquired in 2014 for $200 million. But I don’t think that was a very successful exit — I think they basically sold for about the amount they raised.
I’ve been thinking about this idea constantly. The way it got started: in 2017, the founder, a guy named Joe Fernandez, had surgery on his jaw. His jaw was wired shut for three months. He’s lying in a hospital bed and he gets obsessed with the question — can word of mouth be measurable? He created this program where you could pull from Twitter’s API and give a score out of 100 based on how influential the person was. By 2011 it was pretty popular.
One person trying to hate on Klout said something amazing — they said Klout took the entire spectrum of human interaction and condensed it into a two-digit number you could use to bludgeon anyone who failed to adhere to it. Basically they’re saying it’s tacky, it’s basic, it’s cheap. And in my head I’m like, well, that’s actually awesome. That’s a really cool service.
The company got bought in 2014 by Lithium, and it doesn’t exist anymore. I DM’d Joe Fernandez and asked him, do you think this could still exist today? He said, “This is something I’ll never get over. In so many ways we were just way too early. The world still needs something like this more than ever. Unfortunately I’m not sure if it’s possible to pull off and get all the data.” But the idea of Klout — for anyone getting started in the 2010–2014 range, this was awesome. And I think a business like this should still exist, because when you’re sponsoring influencers it’s really hard to know what’s legit and what isn’t. What do you think?
Sam: I remember back then I thought it was such a smart idea. Like, everybody across all social has followers, but we all kind of know followers ain’t exactly it. To layer on another number — even if you thought it was stupid, you didn’t want to be at the bottom. That’s a powerful draw. It doesn’t require people to have ratings and reviews, it just crawls the connected data and gives you a score based on it.
On the other side, it was unclear to me exactly how this was going to be used. You’re saying when we’re figuring out which influencer to sponsor, something like this is useful. But the problem was it was more compelling to the Klout user who wanted their score to go up than it was for the brands who needed to find influencers. It had half the problem.
The second half — it wasn’t a must-have for brands. Because if you’re a brand, you kind of already know who influencers are. You can look at their followers, look at their rough engagement, followers-to-likes ratio, you get a quick proxy. You can use Klout, but I’m not going to pay Klout $30 grand a year for that information. So the question is, what would be the right way to use that score? What could they do with it?
I don’t know what that answer is, but I think that’s where you’d have to start if you wanted to restart this idea. Do you agree with me that it’s hard to charge a brand a lot of money for something that’s somewhat obvious — which influencers have pull?
Shaan: I think you’re thinking like a small or medium-sized business owner and not like McDonald’s, not like a huge company. I think it’s like a $50 million a year business, not a billion.
Sam: Okay, a really funny story. I did an interview with Emmett the other day — Emmett Shear, the CEO and founder of Twitch. Twitch had bought my company. It went well overall, it’s gonna come out in a couple days. But there was one really funny part where he just burned me so bad.
You know what this is — when I was trying to set him up, I was like, “I learned so much from you. One of the things you taught me was this model during our first one-on-one. You were like, here’s a good way to format these conversations. You can come in and say one of three things: ‘FYI, here’s my decision,’ or ‘here’s what I think we should do, do I have your approval?’, or ‘I don’t know what to do, can you help me?’, or ‘last time we talked about this and here’s where I’m at now.’” I was like, that was really useful — where’d you learn that?
And he was like, “Yeah, that’s really good for mid-level managers.”
Shaan: Oh no.
Sam: I was like, oh man. He’s like, if you’re a super seasoned executive you’d do it differently, but that’s really good for someone who’s not junior but not a super seasoned exec. And I was like — it’s absolutely true, I’m not a super seasoned corporate executive — but I was like, I don’t want to be mid-level anything. You could ask me what floor I’m staying on and I’d say the 19th floor. I don’t stay at the mid-level of nothing.
He wasn’t even trying to burn me. He was trying to be totally nice. But in my head I was like, I just got burned. And for the next five minutes I don’t even know what he said.
Shaan: You should have just brought that up. You’re like, look, I can’t get this out of my head.
Sam: I should have. But you know that compounding social awkwardness — like the thing happened, and the thing you should do is just laugh it off right now like a smooth guy. But instead you pause, you eat it, and now it’s been too long, and then you’re in your own head about it. That’s what I did.
Shaan: Like when someone says “have a nice flight” and you say “you too.”
Sam: Exactly.
Shaan: Is Emmett one of those guys who’s like — you can’t even be like, ah, this idiot doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s like, no, this genius knows exactly what he’s talking about.
Sam: Yeah. And he retired from Twitch too.
Shaan: That’s sick. What’s he gonna do now?
Sam: I think he wants to write a lot — like essays. He was in the first YC batch. He looks up to Paul Graham, who’s sort of a mentor for him. He wants to contribute to the intellectual discourse of the world. Not go back and operate another company — he did that for 17 years.
Shaan: Paul Graham lives the ideal life. He’s in England now with his family, just writes an essay once a month, and everyone just does what he says. The whole YC Illuminati just goes “yes sir.”
Sam: Okay, so Klout — I think it’s a cool idea. What do you got?
Dribbble for Video: Niche Portfolio Networks [00:14:20]
Shaan: So restarting Klout is good. I got a different version of a similar idea, more in the Professional Services lane.
We’ve had Andrew Wilkinson on the podcast a bunch. Andrew is a fan favorite. People really respect what he’s done with Tiny — “We buy wonderful businesses.” It’s like a great little schtick. He’s got a portfolio of I don’t know, maybe 30 companies now, worth maybe $600 to $800 million on any given week. Amazing, mostly bootstrapped venture.
He bootstrapped it because two of the businesses out of the 30 are the real crown jewels: Metalab, his design agency, and Dribbble. Dribbble is based on the simple insight that every career needs its online resume. For most jobs we have LinkedIn — put a resume up, say what you’ve done, hopefully that’s good enough. But for some jobs you need something more. If you’re a designer, LinkedIn doesn’t really help you stand out. Dribbble lets you post design shots — screenshots or images of what you’re designing as your portfolio.
Dribbble is probably worth $250 million. In 2022 it did $62 million in revenue with $8 million in earnings. Because it’s a network, it could sell for four or five times revenue depending on growth rate. Another friend of the pod, Scott Belsky, did the same thing with Behance — a place for designers to post work, comment on each other’s stuff, but the business model was if you want to go hire a creative, come to Behance. I think he sold Behance for about $175 million, of which he owned 60 or 70%.
So where can you apply the Dribbble or Behance model today? Zuck said seven years ago that video is a mega trend. And if you look at it, everything has shifted to video — entertainment, obviously. News is highly video. Education has become video-driven. E-commerce is driven by video ads. Communication — this stupid podcast has to go to YouTube now.
Sam: I wet my hair before this. I just, you know, did a quick spruce up.
Shaan: Video is just a mega trend. But where do you hire people that specialize in video? Where do you hire video editors, thumbnail artists, video strategists? Where is their Behance? Where is their Dribbble? Where can I go see portfolios — a feed of people who did really cool animations or edits to a video — and then hire those people?
I think if somebody created Behance for video, that is a big idea. Dribbble for video editors.
Sam: I completely agree. I’ll explain why. I actually had a very similar topic. I was going to call it LinkedIn for X. And the reason being — did you tell me about this? It’s called Doximity. Basically it’s LinkedIn for doctors.
It’s publicly traded, has a $4 to $5 billion valuation. LinkedIn has maybe 300 million users. Doximity has 2 million doctors. Doximity is four times less valuable than LinkedIn with 100x fewer customers — because the value per customer is so much higher.
I was reading about it and they had this term that I loved. They said, “We launched this because we’re always looking for digitally under-indexed industries.” What that means is communities of professionals who aren’t being catered to in a digital format. Lawyers, for example. There’s one for blue-collar workers called JobCase.
What I’ve been noticing at Hampton is we didn’t mean to, but we’re sort of becoming a little bit of a network. If I wanted to — which I don’t really want to — we could do something like Raya, but for business people.
Shaan: Yeah, Raya — the dating app for, you know, elites.
Sam: Right. So I’ve been fascinated by these LinkedIn-style businesses for niche professional communities. The hard part is the chicken-and-egg problem — it’s not good unless you have users, but you don’t have users. But I’ve noticed there are so many young professionals on TikTok who are crushing it — dentists, orthodontists, chiropractors. If I’m in this position, I could totally partner with some of those people and create a Hampton for doctors. But to actually build the social network, that’s not my skill set.
I think you could build a substantial business for niche professional communities — whether they’re paying a small fee to be part of it, or you build an ad network on it.
Shaan: I think these are super hard. Would you do them?
Sam: Obviously very valuable once you create them, but very difficult. It’s really hard to have one idea like this, which is why I think right now there might only be one or two that actually work. That’s why I got excited about the video one — it’s not winner-take-all, it’s clear that there’s an industry that needs this, and showing how good you are as a video editor through a paper resume is bad. You need a lot of people in the industry and a lot of people hiring in that industry. That combo is there for video editors. Dribbble for video editors is a multi-hundred-million-dollar idea if somebody would pull it off.
Shaan: All right, we kind of tag-teamed that one. What do you want to go next?
Private Elementary Schools: A Surprising Brick-and-Mortar Business [00:23:40]
Sam: Here’s an idea that doesn’t require the internet. Not easy, but not really impossible either. On the upside I think at the low end you make millions of dollars a year, at the high end you make tens of millions.
So — what if I told you that in San Francisco I discovered a business that does $31 million in revenue locally, does about $11 million in profit, it’s brick and mortar, and it has $100 million of assets on the balance sheet?
Shaan: You want me to guess?
Sam: Does it involve religion?
Shaan: It does not.
Sam: Oh — what is it?
Shaan: It is a private elementary school.
Sam: No way.
Shaan: So there are private elementary schools in San Francisco. The one I found that does the best is called the Hamlin School, based in San Francisco. It’s a nonprofit, so you can see all the financials online. It’s girls-only, K through 8. Only 450 kids. Parents pay essentially college-level tuition — $40,000 a year to send their kid to kindergarten or first grade.
Sam: Forty grand? I’m out.
Shaan: There’s a waitlist and a hardcore admissions process. You have to dress up, prep your four-year-old, do an interview —
Sam: Your four-year-old does an interview?
Shaan: I know that school — I used to play basketball there. They have a sick basketball court overlooking the city, up in Pac Heights.
Sam: Yeah. And they own the buildings. They own the real estate they operate out of, which is why they have so much on the balance sheet — huge properties in prime spots of San Francisco. I looked at a bunch of these. The other ones do like $15 to $20 million in revenue and $2 million in profit. Not bad at all. $25 million in assets. And you can see who goes there because nonprofits have to list who donates — oh, this Facebook executive, this famous author, this movie producer. Top donations are low seven figures, but they also do building campaigns — they raised $50 million to renovate the school. That’s on top of tuition.
So there’s a huge number of people because the public school system in San Francisco is not considered to be very good. I think there’s an opportunity here. If you’re ambitious enough — and if you care about this topic, you really have to care, because this is going to be debatable —
Shaan: What’s the opportunity?
Sam: Commercial real estate is at an all-time low in San Francisco. Empty buildings everywhere because of remote work. Companies are trying to get out of their leases. So on one hand you have huge office buildings going vacant, and on the other side you can buy one of these commercial or industrial buildings and convert it into a private elementary school.
We’re going to need a couple things. We’re going to need a name and a differentiator. On the name side — would you like your child to attend Windsor Oaks? Would you like your child to attend the prestigious Carrington School? Or — Thatcher Darby? If your daughter gets into Thatcher Darby, you feel pretty good. I just Googled expensive last names and started pairing two together.
Shaan: I love it.
Sam: The other thing we need is a differentiator. I have some friends whose kids go to these schools and I asked them, what would you wish was different? I thought they’d say price or teacher-to-student ratios. And they said, look, these are all going to be expensive. If there was a cheaper school, I don’t think we’d switch — we’d feel like are we really going for a lesser education. Price is not the problem. Six students per one teacher. Not the problem.
They said: there’s like an agenda in these schools. A very heavy political influence. It’s stuff you’d have at a very liberal college, but it’s an elementary school. I just don’t want my first grader to be thinking about certain things. Let kids be kids.
So the differentiator is: what happened to schools teaching math and science? Let’s do that. We’re not going to teach political stuff. We’re going to be a hardcore math, science, STEM school. We keep politics out. You’re here to learn, and we’re going to learn these topics. That’s Thatcher Darby.
Shaan: You have a friend whose teenager said all the girls in his school are non-binary and the one he liked said she can’t be with him because of it.
Sam: Yeah. No advice I could give there. I said, all right, what do you want to have for lunch?
Shaan: And you know, most generations say, “You have it so easy, I had it so much harder when I was your age.” Not true here. I do not envy a 12 or 15 year old right now. But I do think there should be options in the market for what you want. Some people really do want their kid exposed to a wide range of issues to be well-rounded. Other people want a school that will just teach math, science, reading, writing, and let the parents handle the rest of the education.
Sam: Right. So the differentiator: hardcore STEM, no political agenda.
Shaan: What’s your phrase?
Sam: It’ll be like the place where well-roundedness goes to die. Hardcore science machines. Diversity here is JavaScript.
Shaan: All right. Crazy that that school makes that much money. I never thought about it — a school doing those numbers as basically a one-location brick-and-mortar business with 400 customers.
Sam’s Telemarketing Flashback [00:34:10]
Sam: Did I ever tell you about the time I was a telemarketer?
Shaan: No.
Sam: At my high school, if you needed money the best job was to be a telemarketer. We were begging for donations from alumni. You’d get paid $10 an hour plus commission plus pizza. I worked that job for a year, three nights a week. I was 16. We had soda and pizza and you’d sit down at your desk from like 3 PM to 8 PM. You had a phone and a box of note cards. On each note card: how much the person donated previously, their career, their age.
And the trick of the trade — you find the oldest people with the best careers or who previously donated the most money, line those up, and just start calling. “Hey Mr. Smith, this is Sam at your alma mater. I know you graduated in 1956. Look, things are great here but we need some money. Can I count you down for a $5,000 donation? You did $3,000 two years ago, but times have changed, my friend. You want to be a man for others or not?” We had scripts. I would bring in tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations from these alumni. If you brought in five grand, boom — a hundred dollars for you.
Shaan: Was this legal? Was there a janitor overseeing this?
Sam: It was the history teacher. That was his side hustle. Running the boiler room. He was the Jordan Belfort, I was the little scrub just smiling and dialing.
Shaan: Doesn’t Duke call you? What does that look like?
Sam: Yeah, now what they do is get your friends to call you. So if we went to Duke together, I’m gonna call you. My high school does the same thing — I’ll get texts from people I was acquainted with and here’s the kicker, they’ll say like, “Hey, I follow you on social, I know you’re doing real well, got a baby on the way…” So it’s like, do I flex right now? Because I’m entirely driven by making my high school classmates think I’m a big shot. That’s all I care about — I want to bring it back to them. But I gotta give five grand to this school.
Shaan: It’s been working effectively.
Sam: Duke though — I will never give to Duke. Lose my number. Can’t believe I gave them what I gave them in the first place.
Shaan: If your endowment could be confused with a Caribbean country’s GDP, you should not be calling me.
Sam: Is it really $12 billion?
Shaan: Harvard’s at $40 billion, Yale at $30 billion, Texas $30 billion, Stanford $27 billion. At the bottom of the top 20 is Cornell with $7 billion. That is insane. They could basically just run the school off the investment income.
Sam: I don’t understand why anyone gives to these schools.
Alumni Ventures: The School Fund Scheme [00:40:00]
Sam: All right, one of the really smart ideas was this thing called — Shaan, see if you can find it — it’s called TowerView Ventures. TowerView is the name of a magazine or something we remember from Duke campus. Basically: “TowerView Ventures — we’re raising money for a venture fund to invest in Duke alumni companies. Duke has really smart people, there have been winners like Cameo…”
They spin this up for every single top school. I think it’s called Alumni Ventures. Small funds for every single school. They run ads, call alumni, try to get them to invest in the fund. I don’t know how big these funds are, but even if they’re $10 or $20 million each — you take 2% every year in management fees, 20% carry, times 50 other schools. It’s a pretty genius way to pull in a lot of fees.
Shaan: Are they even allowed to use the school name?
Sam: They don’t. They say “TowerView Ventures, investing in Duke alumni.” But the school colors match, everything is based around that. It’s a hardcore scheme.
Shaan: Could you do that for Belmont?
Sam: A $50,000 fund isn’t gonna go far. But do you know who Belmont’s most successful alumni is?
Shaan: Who?
Sam: Florida Georgia Line.
Shaan: What?
Sam: You know that band? If you go to Spotify right now and look at the top 100 songs, most years they have one or two. They helped put Morgan Wallen on the map — Morgan Wallen appeared on one of their songs.
Shaan: They’re more famous than Morgan Wallen?
Sam: Not to you, but within country music, yeah. They might be number one, I might be number two. But you know what? They never call me. I got mad at them because — my mom was going to come watch me graduate but I didn’t finish school on time. I asked the teachers, “Can you just give me a fake diploma, let me come on stage, I’ll finish it later?” And they said no. It’s tradition — we literally have to hand you your diploma. I said, “Just give me an empty folder. Just let me shake that guy’s hand and turn the stupid beret thing to the side.” They wouldn’t do it. So I will always be mad at Belmont for that reason.
Shaan: What an L for them.
Rapid Fire: Yelp for Investors and AI for Teachers [00:43:50]
Sam: All right, I’ve got a couple more. Let me rapid fire some ideas. We don’t even have to discuss them.
You know my import/export framework: if you’re at a company and you’re like, “we would totally pay for this” — that’s a business idea you’d want to import. Or export: we built this for ourselves, it’s so useful, you should leave the company and rebuild it on the outside and sell it to other companies. Slack is a good example of that.
So Paul Graham tweeted the other day that YC has its own internal directory about investors, where any startup founder can look up any investor and read reviews about them — have they done anything shady, are they really helpful, what’s the scoop? And he’s like, this is one of the best products YC has. And I’m like, why is that a product only YC has? This should exist for everyone.
Somebody should export this out. It’s like Yelp for investors, where investors have a reputation in this app, and you can only write about them if you’ve had a verified interaction with them.
Shaan: That’s great. I wish I could have that for a variety of vendors. The things people ask about most at Hampton is, “Who’s a good lawyer? Who’s a good accountant?” It’s incredibly hard to find reviews on vendors including investors. But the startup community is insulated enough that you could overcome the chicken-and-egg problem through brute force — there’s not that many investors, and you could cold email their portfolio companies and be like, give me the scoop. You could manually collect the data to get this going.
Sam: All right, here’s another one. I’m calling it Teacher’s Pet. This is my first AI idea.
You’re aware of Teachers Pay Teachers — it’s like Etsy but instead of handcrafted goods, you buy and sell lesson plans, quizzes, things teachers need. We talked about it a while back. Big business — doing like $80 million a year in revenue. That’s their take, not GMV. Gets like 20 million visits a month during school years. 300 teachers on this network have made $1 million or more by selling lesson plans to other teachers.
Marketplaces are hard to compete with because of network effects. But I think AI is one of the things that can crack some network effects, and I think AI could crack this one.
You could train AI to crawl and learn from all the materials on this network. You could probably buy all the materials on there for less than $500,000. Then train AI to basically become ChatGPT for teachers. Any teacher comes and says, “I need a geography lesson plan for fourth grade, make it fun and interesting” — and it just creates one. A $20/month subscription for teachers to create lesson plans, quizzes, teaching materials using AI. I think that works.
Shaan: Good name too.
Sam: Teachers Ticket? Something like that. Do you have another one?
The Ozempic Hotline [00:50:20]
Shaan: So you want to surf on waves if you’re starting a business. What’s a wave right now? Ozempic. Fat loss. If video is a mega trend, guess what — fat loss is amazing.
Sam: Have you tried it?
Shaan: No. But I know a lot of people who want to be on it or get off it.
Sam: I got a guy.
Shaan: It’s expensive though. So my brain goes to on-ramps and off-ramps. How do you sell something that makes it easier to get on it, or help people get off it?
If you Google “how do I take Ozempic” or “getting Ozempic near me,” you get a bunch of sponsored links for telehealth services trying to sign you up. But I think somebody should go old school with it. Create an Ozempic hotline. Old-school infomercial stuff — run ads on linear TV, Fox News, be the My Pillow guy. Show people’s transformations and be like, “Call in now for a free consultation. Are you eligible? What are the upsides, the downsides, how much does it cost, where can you find it?” It’s so confusing. We’re going to make it easy. Free consult.
You basically just become a lead gen provider for people trying to get Ozempic. I think you’ve gotta do like 1-800-GotAbs or something like that.
Sam: That goes against one of my principles though.
Shaan: Which principles?
Sam: I try not to be dependent on anything. As a general rule — I don’t drink coffee, I don’t do caffeine, I try not to take a lot of stuff. People take nicotine, Diet Coke —
Shaan: I love carbonated waters and Diet Coke.
Sam: But this is a business opportunity. I’m not saying I’m doing this. I’m saying someone could create a phone-based way to educate people and help onboard them. Or on the other side — the off-ramp. A lot of people want to stop Ozempic. It’s too expensive, or they’re having side effects, or they lost the weight they wanted and don’t want to keep taking it forever.
Shaan: Well, what’s the off-ramp? You just stop taking it. Nothing bad happens. You just don’t take it.
Sam: Yeah, but people regain a bunch of weight, right?
Shaan: The study they did was they took a few thousand people, had them do it for six months, then had half the people quit. At the end of the 12-month study, the people who took it the whole time lost about a third of their body weight — a 300-pound person was down to 200 pounds. The people who quit went from 200 back up to about 230. They gained weight back but weren’t nearly as heavy as when they started. You don’t have like withdrawals. You’re just going to be like, oh, I’m hungry, I want to eat again.
Sam: Maybe it’s peer groups, I don’t know. But there’s got to be auxiliary things around this — a large group of people all going through this one new shared experience. That’s a place to look for business ideas.
Mind Sports: Recruiting the World’s Smartest Nerds [00:56:10]
Shaan: I heard something the other day that really caught my attention. I was listening to a podcast and the guy was talking about mind sport and Game Theory and whatever. I looked it up — Mind Sport is essentially the nerd Olympics. A place you go if you’re uber smart and you compete with other people in games. Chess, poker, Settlers of Catan, Go, Rubik’s Cube.
So there’s the Mind Sports Olympiad. And you can be in your individual game, but you can also compete in the Pentamind Championship — where you play five of these games.
I cannot tell you, Sam Parr, how all-in I am on the Mind Sports Olympiad. I want to go. I want to watch it live like I watch the spelling bee live on ESPN. I want to watch the Hard Knocks documentary following five of these people behind the scenes watching them stress out. I want to adopt one of these kids as like my 17-year-old protege.
But most of all — I want to hire all these kids.
Sam: This is the wrong business model. This is not a tournament with prize money and thanks to our sponsors Wendy’s.
Shaan: No, no — you’ve got this all wrong. This is a recruiting event for elite minds under 25 years old. This is bait to bring together the smartest nerds. In five years, these kids are not going to be playing professional Settlers of Catan. They’re going to be starting companies or working inside companies. And I want them working at my companies.
You should take this idea and create a version of it, but it needs to be an elite recruiting service slash job fair slash demo day for nerds. When they attend, they basically sign over the rights for you to send them job offers for the next five years, or you get to invest in them. I can’t think of a more valuable talent pool.
One of my secrets of investing is I invest in former competitive gamers — people who were elite level at Starcraft, things like that. Those people just tend to do really well at whatever next game you throw in front of them. Once you throw the money game in front of them? They figure it out.
And there’s the World Memory Championships. Been doing this since 1990, 1991. One of the games: they give you thousands of numbers, you have five minutes, and you have to recall them in order. The record is 600 numbers in five minutes. The one-hour number — the guy who won that did 4,600 numbers in order.
And the guy who won the overall championship, Alex Mullen — you know what he does for work now?
Sam: What?
Shaan: He’s an X-ray tech at a hospital. Why is this guy not working at BlackRock or Blackstone, just like Rain Man finding corporate arbitrage?
Sam: Undervalued assets. Hidden gems. I’m not as bullish on pure memory though — I think memory is the pleb version of the Olympiad. These other guys are like strategists. Memory is just… any rube can do memory. Well, I can’t even remember seven numbers, let alone 600.
Shaan: I can remember two-thirds of any phone number.
Sam: That’s the same way the UFC used to be just a bunch of people fighting like barbarians. Now it’s like half WWE and half a legit movement. You need a Dana White to come in and buy the World Memory Championships and make it great.
Failed Churches: The Business Opportunity [01:04:30]
Shaan: Okay, I’ve got a couple more. Let me hit you with one more around churches. Something you know a lot about — another area I’m completely unversed in.
Michael Girdley tweeted: 3,500 churches are closing every year.
Sam: What is that number? What’s going on?
Shaan: It’s not exactly right — what happens is about 4,000 churches closed last year, but like 2,000 or 3,000 opened, so it’s like a net negative of 1,500. But there are a bunch of stats around this. In traditional Christian churches, attendance is down 65% in the last 20 years. When the pews are empty, there are fewer donations, and these churches end up having to close. There’s a group called “the nones” — n-o-n-e-s — people who identify as having no religion. For Gen Z, about 45% identify as “none of the above” on religion.
A guy who studies churches said that of the 350,000 Christian congregations in the United States, one-third are vulnerable — basically in the red zone and will likely close in the next 10 years. That’s a huge number.
Sam: And what are the opportunities?
Shaan: I think you can approach this from multiple angles. When Jeff Bezos heard the stat that the internet is growing at 12,000% a year, he’s like, I better go start Amazon. You could do that with stats like this.
The vulture business — how are these churches going to close? The funeral business for churches. Help them die with grace. In your neighborhood, one block from your house in St. Louis, they turned a church into a condo.
Sam: Yeah. I found a group called Niagara Consulting Group. They’re basically like, “We help you restructure your church.” They try to help you succeed, but if you don’t, they’ll get you an offer from a developer to turn it into luxury condos. But in a lot of places it’s low-income areas, there’s no real estate demand. They just sit there empty.
Shaan: I think there’s a lot of opportunity to figure out how to deal with this. If I’m a company like Calm, could I take $50 million and just buy physical locations across the country through these searches in one year? Have a weekly service for meditation, local chapters, basically franchisees running them.
Whether you’re trying to save them, help them fail gracefully, or figuring out a pivot — there’s something to be done here.
Sam: I just put a little link in here. That’s 10 doors down from my childhood home in St. Louis — my mom and dad still live there. Beautiful. It’s a church they turned into a 7,000 to 8,000 square foot house. As a house it doesn’t look that cool, but as a meditation area it does. As an Airbnb, it’s fantastic. It’s $1.2 million for 8,000 square feet in St. Louis.
I also met these guys who turned one into a skate park.
Shaan: The Church of Calm — that’s kind of dope. And then if you want to help them, there’s a side hustle: churches near me have awesome events all the time — I love taking my kids because they put on great, wholesome events. But it’s so hard to know about them. The only way I find out is if I drive by and they have a sign out front. Like a for-sale sign but it says, “We’re doing something this Saturday, there’ll be popcorn and bouncy houses.” I’m in, but I only catch it by driving past. These guys just don’t know social media.
I had to call them and be like, hey, if I’m an Indian dude who’s not a member of the church, can I still come get the free popcorn? What’s the deal? Are your doors open? And I couldn’t even get a hold of them because they have like one old Facebook page with an event from 2014.
Churches need better social media. You could create done-for-you social media services for churches. If you wanted a $10,000 to $20,000 a month side hustle, just walk into every single church, say, “Your social media is not very good, I can make it look like this.” Go on Upwork or wherever, hire someone for $800 a month, that person manages 20 churches’ social media for you. All churches have the same schedule — every Sunday, same templates. You just need their colors, their name, and what’s going on. Manage all their Instagram and social accounts. $300 to $400 a month per church.
Sam: Do you remember Hillsong? When I was living in Tennessee, I was an atheist, but a lot of cute girls were going to this thing so I went.
Shaan: I had a similar experience.
Sam: There was this guy who somehow infiltrated Justin Bieber’s camp and became Justin Bieber’s mentor — Carl Lentz. There’s a new Netflix show about him. He’s basically a smoking-hot guy. Like Justin Bieber in his 40s. Objectively a babe.
Shaan: You sent me a message once like, “Dude, he’s got the thing” — those diagonal abdominal lines pointing down. He’s got those.
Sam: What kind of pastor has a V? If you’re a pastor and you have that V, it’s bad news. And as you could just look at him and guess, he did some — I don’t think it was anything illegal. I think he just cheated on his wife. A lot.
Shaan: Super charismatic, super good looking, huge following from being on stage in front of 10,000 people every week. And he made Hillsong cool — I even went to one of those things.
Sam: Where I’m from in St. Louis, all the Catholic churches are dying. All the Catholic schools are going by the wayside.
The Church Bundle: Unbundling Institutions [01:16:00]
Shaan: One of the most useful things I learned when I moved to Silicon Valley was a new way of looking at businesses I hadn’t heard before outside the Valley. Most products are actually a bundle. Once you can identify what’s in the bundle, you can figure out how to unbundle it and make something better.
Peter Thiel went on a spree where he was talking about how universities are a bubble, the system is overrated. He launched the Thiel Fellowship — pay you $200,000 to drop out of school and do something useful. That’s where Figma came from, Vitalik — the creator of Ethereum — was a Thiel Fellow, I think. There’ve been 10 billion-dollar companies so far from that program. Actually very impressive track record.
The taboo thing at the time was to say anything against school. Everyone’s message is stay in school. And he’s saying drop out and we’ll give you money. They said, “How dare you.” And he said: the university is a bundle. It’s partly education. It’s partly socialization — you learn to party, date, be with other people. It’s partly babysitting — my kid’s not mature enough for the real world yet, let them simmer here for four years. It’s partly insurance — just get a degree, that stamp is going to protect you whatever you do. And it’s partly accreditation — I don’t care if you’re the top student at Harvard, but if you got into Harvard, that’s a signal strong enough for me as an employer to know you’re smart.
He said: you’re buying all of these things when you pay for university. We have to ask ourselves which part of the bundle is actually important, which part is failing and could be unbundled. What he did was switch the accreditation piece — I have the Peter Thiel brand, I handpick 40 of the most promising college kids, I pay them $200,000 to leave school. Now instead of the school badge, you have the Thiel hand-picked badge, which is more elite. He got rid of the rest. He’s 10x better on the badge piece.
So the question is: what is the church bundle?
Sam: The church bundle is a combination of things. It’s a lecture for learning. It’s community — a place to gather and congregate every week. It’s a peaceful place. I used to go to church not for the religion but I just love the feeling of being inside a church, the aura — it was very peaceful and grounding. It’s therapy and confession — a place to get things off your chest, to be absolved, to get a clean slate. It’s music. For Indian temples it’s also food — a lot of people I know go because they love the meal, plus it’s a good thing. And it’s dating — a lot of people kind of want to meet someone who shares their values, and church is a better scene than a bar where it’s noisy and you’re getting rejected.
So the small version of this idea: social media for churches. The medium version: restructure these churches into condos, or figure out some lead gen to help them wind down and sell off assets. The big version: figure out how to replace the value that churches gave people, but do it in a new way.
Could you create a new brand in these same venues — around manifestation, or meditation, or yoga? Could you create a yoga franchise that only operates out of churches, blending wellness and spirituality and community, using the physical locations of churches to build a new franchise?
The play is to be 10x better on one of those bundles. 10x better on food, or music, or the sermon, or absolving sins. Use the physical locations of churches to build that new franchise.
Shaan: That was a really good speech.
Sam: Thank you.
Shaan: You sort of ventured into drunk ideas territory there, but yeah, that was a good one.
Sam: We’re gonna have a bunch of Soul Cycles on the altar. That’s cooler than what’s there now.
Shaan: All right, so Dribbble for video editors is the winner, or the church bundle?
Sam: Dribbble is the winner.
Shaan: All right, there we go. That’s the ideas episode. You know what to do — go to YouTube, go to your podcast app, search My First Million, click subscribe. That’s the gentleman’s agreement. We did our part, now you do yours.
Sam: Honor Code. That’s all. Thank you.