Sam recaps a billionaire’s dinner in San Francisco, sharing three observations: psychedelics dominate SF tech conversation, the dinner menu was AI-generated, and an internet OG told the origin story of the founding dinner group that spawned Zynga, LinkedIn, YouTube, and PayPal. The episode covers Jensen Huang and Nvidia’s unlikely rise, the Panda Express family empire, Naval Ravikant’s AirChat app, and several notable people making moves — including a skeptical look at tradie.com and a breakdown of Pomp’s Bay Area Times newsletter.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Three Things Learned at a Billionaire’s Dinner [00:00:00]
Sam: I went to a billionaire’s dinner last week in San Francisco — one of those fancy things where the whole menu is printed out. And the menu was created by ChatGPT. Which is insane. I don’t know if that’s like the way the future is or just like a weird novelty.
Shaan: That’s a flex move. Like, I’m so comfortable with AI that my dinner menu’s AI-generated.
Sam: I have three takeaways from this dinner. The first one: the number one topic of conversation in San Francisco right now is psychedelics. Every person there had a psychedelics story — their own personal experience, or someone they knew. It’s everywhere. Which is interesting to me. It wasn’t like that five years ago. It’s just becoming a mainstream topic in that tech world.
Shaan: I believe it.
Sam: Second takeaway: the menu was AI-generated. Which is insane when you think about it. A year ago that would have been a joke. Now people are just doing it.
Sam: Third takeaway — and this is the best one. There was this guy at the dinner, an internet OG. He’s been in Silicon Valley since the very early days. And he told the story of the original SF founder dinner group. Here’s how it started: there was a small group that would get together for dinner every month or so. And the people in that group ended up founding Nextdoor, Zynga, LinkedIn, YouTube, PayPal. They were all in the same dinner group.
Shaan: What?
Sam: And he said — here’s the key part — when they were all in that dinner group, none of them were famous. None of their ideas sounded important. He said, “Social networking? That sounds frivolous. I didn’t think that was going to be a hundred-billion-dollar business.” The big things didn’t look like big things upfront.
Shaan: That’s the Peter Thiel line. The best startup ideas are the ones that sound bad but are actually good. The least competition, the most green field.
Sam: Exactly.
The AI Window — 36 Months [00:10:00]
Sam: I saw a TikTok from James Currier at NFX — the VC — and he was saying the AI wave is a 36-month window. He’s like: the window is open right now, and at some point it closes, and whoever built things in that window will own the market. He’s very bullish on the people who are going all-in right now.
Shaan: I think that’s right. The question is what you do in the window.
Sam: And his other point — and I agree with this — is San Francisco is back. He was saying co-located teams are going to beat remote teams, full stop. I would rather have three people who are willing to commit and go all-in together over a distributed remote team where you’re spending half your day walking your dog and taking care of kids. They’re just going to outperform. And San Francisco is where those people are concentrating.
Shaan: You don’t even live in San Francisco.
Sam: Stone’s throw away — I’m across the bridge. One catapult away.
Jensen Huang and Nvidia’s Unlikely Rise [00:18:00]
Sam: Okay, this week I paid attention to my portfolio. There was a nice little bump. I texted my banker — “Griffin, what’s going on? Why do I have so much more money than I did yesterday?” He said Nvidia just crushed their earnings.
Shaan: Like a lot of people, I know the name Nvidia. I know it’s a company. But I don’t really know what they do.
Sam: They make chips. GPU chips. The graphics card in your gaming PC — that’s Nvidia. Along with Intel and AMD, they’re one of like three companies that make chips. But their particular genius is the GPU — the graphics processing unit — which they invented. Prior to Nvidia, chips were more general-purpose. Jensen Huang, the founder, made the bet in 1993 that 3D graphics processing was going to be the next thing. He raised a two-million-dollar round at a six-million-dollar valuation. Normal startup.
Sam: The first major users were gamers. Gaming PCs needed it. Then Apple, Microsoft. Then Tesla — when you do self-driving and the car needs to see pedestrians, it’s using a GPU chip. And now the biggest use is AI. Anyone running OpenAI, Amazon Web Services — they’re all using Nvidia’s GPUs.
Sam: Nvidia is now either the seventh or eighth largest company in the world. And their stock just shot up because they gave revenue guidance and then essentially said, “Actually we think we’re going to crush that number by 30 percent.” On a number that’s already in the multi-billions.
Shaan: The Acquired guys came on our pod and I asked them — you’ve studied all these Titans, who would you least want to compete against? They said Jensen Huang. Not Zuckerberg. Not Bezos. Jensen. Leather jacket, Nvidia tattoo on his shoulder, been quietly killing it for 30 years.
Sam: I saw his commencement speech at a Taiwanese university. Three lessons:
Sam: One: humility. Confront failure head-on and ask for help. He told the story of their first big chip contract — with Sega. They spent a year on it and realized they had picked the wrong technical architecture. He called the Sega CEO and said, “I think you need to find another partner. But I also need you to keep paying out the contract. I’m embarrassed to ask — but if we don’t have this money, we’re going out of business.” Sega agreed. He said: “The smart, successful type tries to avoid failure or hide from it. That’s the wrong move.”
Sam: Two: endure the pain. In 2007 they announced CUDA — their programming framework for GPUs. They spent years developing it, profits took a huge hit, shareholders were skeptical: “Why are you spending all this money on this thing?” But they stuck to it. By the time the market developed, they were years ahead of everyone else.
Sam: Three: be willing to exit a market. They were the leader in mobile chips. And they just left that market — sacrificed the mobile opportunity — to go all-in on the AI/machine learning bet. Everyone said it was a terrible strategic decision. And now that bet is the biggest market anyone is talking about. That’s why the stock is where it is.
Shaan: He’s the Gary Oldman of the tech world. You see him around, you know he always has a great performance, everything he’s in is pretty good — but you can’t always name him. He’s never the guy. And now he might become the guy.
Panda Express — The $10 Billion Mom and Pop [00:35:00]
Sam: Real estate guy I know told me this week that there’s one investor he’d take money from. I said, “You never take anyone’s money — who is it?” He said: the guy who started Panda Express. Has more money than he knows what to do with.
Sam: I looked into it. Panda Express does 5.3 billion dollars a year in sales. No franchises — they own almost everything directly. Third biggest fast food chain in America, right up behind McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. And it’s a husband and wife company.
Shaan: The American dream.
Sam: Andrew Cherng. His father was a chef, opened the original Panda Inn as a sit-down restaurant. Andrew saw fast food taking off and launched the first Panda Express — the counter-service version — in a California mall. A few smart strategic moves early on:
Sam: First: airports and military bases. Not the most profitable locations, but massive hubs for brand awareness. If you’re in the airport, you’re “normal cuisine” to people who’d never otherwise try it. They did it for the brand, not the margin.
Sam: Second: Andrew’s wife Peggy was a food engineer. She was one of the first people in Chinese restaurants to use technology to run operations — inventory tracking, speed monitoring. They called themselves the McDonald’s of the East because they were that efficient, while every other Chinese restaurant was writing orders by hand.
Sam: Third: they invented orange chicken. A chef in Hawaii had an idea — take the orange-peel beef dish that was an appetizer and apply that flavoring to the general-style fried chicken. They now sell 100 million pounds of orange chicken a year.
Shaan: That’s an insane number.
Sam: They’re approaching a billion in EBITDA. Never going public. When people ask, the CFO says: “This is going to be a multi-generational family business. We will pass it down.” They don’t need the liquidity — they’re rolling in profits, they own most of the equity, and they don’t have investors to answer to.
Sam: He also gives How to Win Friends and Influence People to every new employee, sponsors them to go to Tony Robbins seminars, and they apparently start some days with affirmations. He’s all about people development. Which makes sense — at 100 million pounds of orange chicken, you’re not a restaurant company anymore. You’re a people company and a logistics company.
Shaan: He also moved to Nevada. Optimizing taxes.
Sam: Once you’re slinging 100 million pounds of orange chicken, you live wherever you want. That’s the rule.
Naval Ravikant’s AirChat [00:50:00]
Sam: Naval is launching something called AirChat. Have you seen it?
Shaan: A bit.
Sam: So it’s kind of like a social media app. You open it up and there are rooms. Audio rooms — but recorded and transcribed. So you go into a room, you hear people talking about AI or whatever, and you can reply with your voice. It’s like a podcast where anyone can hop in.
Sam: And the interesting thing is: Naval’s co-founder Nivi was on there telling the origin story of AngelList. Which I’d never heard in full. Basically — they had Venture Hacks, the blog. And Nivi was trying to figure out how to monetize. He was going to sell a PDF. Naval had 10 percent ownership and said, “Go ahead, keep my ten percent, you need it more.” But then on the drive home Naval had a different idea: “I just want a list of investors — who they are, what check size they write, what they invest in — so when people ask me for intros I can look it up.”
Sam: Nivi went home that night, made a Google Form, emailed every investor he knew asking for their info, and had it filled in by the next morning. Didn’t even pay for the premium version. Put it on the website. That was V1 of AngelList — just a list of angel investors. Now it’s worth multiple billions.
Sam: The lesson he kept coming back to: if I can’t launch some version of something in the first 24 hours, I start to lose interest. Just get it out there.
Shaan: I think AirChat is good right now because it’s all curated smart people — the who’s who of tech. Early Clubhouse was the same way. You go into any room and it’s interesting. But I don’t think it’ll go mainstream. Audio is too slow. People read three to five times faster than they listen. You’re competing with TikTok, Twitter, Instagram for attention per second. Audio doesn’t win that fight.
Sam: So: great network play right now, won’t become a mainstream platform.
Shaan: That’s my bet.
Notable People Making Moves [01:00:00]
Sam: Three people doing interesting things. First: Dom — the fast.com guy. You know the story?
Shaan: Fast.com raised a ton of money at a massive valuation for a one-click checkout product. Basically no traction. Burning something like three to ten million a month. Collapsed. Then it came out he’d previously run a towing startup in Australia called tow.com, racked up a 13-million-dollar bill he couldn’t pay, got sued by the government, left Australia, rebranded as Dom, and started fast.com.
Sam: Now he’s got tradie.com. “The fastest way to grow your trade business.” Websites, booking, invoicing for tradespeople. Not a bad idea on the surface.
Shaan: Someone on Twitter dug into it. They said 80 percent of the businesses listed on the site as testimonials don’t appear to be real — shell companies with fake Yelp and Google listings. 90 percent didn’t pick up the phone. One company said tradie made a landing page with their name on it without their permission. Two businesses seemed to actually be using the product — but tradie’s giving it to them for free and sponsoring them.
Sam: Instant reaction: not touching it.
Sam: Second: Anthony Pompliano — Pomp. He’s been known as the Bitcoin bull for years, built a huge audience around crypto. Now he’s quietly pivoting — removed the red laser eyes from his profile, removed Bitcoin mentions from his bio, hosting real estate conferences and startup events. His content has moved away from crypto entirely.
Shaan: I think it’s a hard pivot to make. I would not bet against Pomp. He’s smart and formidable.
Sam: He’s also just launched something called Bay Area Times. It’s a newsletter that uses data and visuals instead of narrative. Each morning: five stories, each with a chart or graph and a few bullet points. No bias narrative — just cold data. He’s been testing with 20,000 readers. Worst case this makes him two or three million a year, very profitably. Best case it becomes morning Brew-sized.
Shaan: I actually want this to be a physical print. I’d love if this came in one of those tan envelopes — like a presidential daily briefing just handed to you on paper.
Sam: That’s a good idea. Someone’s doing that — Agora’s financial newsletter does it. They mail it to you on printer paper, charge two thousand a year for it.
Sam: Third: jumbo mail marketing. There’s this company called Mail Jumbo — tagline is “Have you ever received a package in the mail and thrown it away without opening it? Neither have we.” The idea is simple: send direct mail in oversized chunky packages. 90-plus percent of people open an oversized stuffed envelope. Your response rate shoots up. You pay more per piece but actually reach people.
Shaan: Brilliant simple business. Probably gets to solid seven figures and runs profitably forever.
Sam: The guy behind it runs the mobile home park account on Twitter. He basically listens to the podcast and then goes builds all the ideas. Nine businesses at once. Complete madman. But this is a good one.
Shaan: It’s not you it’s me, in that I think you’re the worst.
Sam: Best joke of the pod. All right — that’s it.