Sam and Shaan dig into the Harvard Business Review’s publishing empire — $262M in revenue from 18 million case studies a year — and brainstorm how to build a competing research publication. They discuss Sam’s experience running Trends and what he’d do differently on pricing and niche selection. The episode also covers Shaan’s NFT auction (sold for ~$35K), a string of fake-it-till-you-make-it fraud stories (Theranos, Nikola, HeadSpin), and the full founding story of Canva — Melanie Perkins, Fusion Books, investor rejections, and the engineer she finally landed after a year of searching.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host), Shaan Puri (co-host)
Longevity and Grip Strength [00:00:00]
Sam: I was reading about examine.com. I enjoy reading about things that are correlated to longevity. There are two findings I’ve discovered. First: grip strength is highly correlated with longevity. Second: quad strength — how strong your thighs are. However, there’s not a correlation between muscle size and longevity. Just because you have big muscles doesn’t mean you’re going to live longer. But grip strength and quad strength are the most imperfect-but-useful tests of upper and lower body strength. If you’re strong, it correlates with living longer.
Shaan: I’ve been going down a longevity rabbit hole. Not as a project, not as work — I just keep watching videos and reading and talking to people. I’ve been watching a lot of interviews and reading about what’s latest in anti-aging.
There’s a woman named Laura Deming — she’s a Thiel Fellow, dropped out of college to take the $100K grant. She ended up creating the Longevity Fund, one of the first major VC funds only investing in anti-aging companies. She’s probably still under 25 and is already a veteran in the space. She worked under Aubrey de Grey.
Sam: One of my favorite books on this is Blue Zones. Have you read it?
Shaan: No.
Sam: It studies five different cultures that have an incredibly high number of centenarians — people over 100. I think the five are the Seventh-day Adventists in central California, a group in Japan, an area in Greece, an area in Korea, and maybe Costa Rica. It narrows down to a handful of things they all do: eating large amounts of vegetables, drinking moderately, not exercising vigorously but moving throughout the day, not overeating, and staying at home rather than going to nursing homes. A strong sense of community. Most have some form of religion or spiritual practice.
Shaan: Some people make the case that what Buffett does right — despite his terrible diet — is he’s extremely low stress. I would bet that stress ages you more than any dietary input. Not as a scientist — just as an observer of the people around me who are glowing, high energy, staying healthy.
The NFT Five Minutes of Fame Auction [00:05:00]
Shaan: You want to talk about the results of the NFT thing?
Sam: Yeah, it’s kind of insane. So I did this crypto week thing where I went deep on actually using Web3 tools — bought some NFTs, played with the valuation tools, and then minted one. I wanted to do something that we’d actually done well, so I thought: what if the NFT was five minutes of air time on the pod? You own this token like a Willy Wonka golden ticket — if you have it, you get five minutes on the pod. You can talk about whatever you want, bring your ideas, promote your company, ask questions. Whatever you want to do with those five minutes is yours.
I texted you, you said “cool go for it,” I minted it on OpenSea, started the auction at 0.25 ETH — about $700 or $800 at the time — and ran it for seven days. It closed last night at 11.55 ETH, which is about $35,000.
Shaan: I thought it would go for around $25,000 to $30,000. That was my guess based on what an ad slot would cost on the podcast.
Sam: The winner has the username d2d628. They can hold it — we’re growing 20% month over month — or they can burn it by sending it to our wallet, which takes it out of circulation and that’s how we know they were the owner when they cash it in.
Harvard Business Review: A Publishing Empire [00:07:30]
Shaan: I did a bunch of research on this. I want to kick it off and explain to you what caught your eye initially.
Sam: I’ve known about this for a while. When I launched Trends, one of the ideas I had was: could I compete with Harvard Business School’s publishing arm? I was actually going to start a company making case studies focused on technology, selling to schools or to companies training their managers. I backed away when I realized Harvard had a monopoly. At the time, 80% of all business school case studies were Harvard Business School case studies. And when I talked to two professors, they both said: “Nobody gets fired for buying the Harvard case study. If I buy the Sean case study and something’s off, even if it’s good, it has lower perceived value.”
Shaan: Let me set the stage with numbers. Every number I’m about to tell you is from 2019, and it’s all public. Harvard Business School made $925 million in 2019.
Revenue breakdown: about $250 million from endowment and gifts; about $240 million from executive education tuition — that’s where Tyra Banks’s famous Harvard degree came from, she attended executive education; about $150 million from MBA tuition (only 15% of revenue); Harvard Business School Online at 5%; housing and other at 3%.
The biggest category — their publishing arm — is around $280 million. Almost twice what tuition brings in.
How that breaks down: they have 400,000 subscribers paying $10 to $50 a month. But the bulk of their revenue comes from 15 to 18 million case studies sold to around 4,000 universities at $10 to $20 a case study. So probably $200 million from case studies alone.
Compare that to: the New York Times at $1.8 billion, The Economist at $429 million, Harvard Business Review at $262 million, Forbes at $180 million, Fortune at $100 million, and Axios at $58 million. But amongst all of those, HBR has the highest revenue per employee — $582,000 per employee. The most efficient publishing operation.
Sam: That’s shockingly big. And the way it works is professors at any of the 4,000 universities just log in, scroll through the catalog, click what they want — 120 students times $20 a case study — and bill it to the university. Recurring revenue, basically.
Shaan: MIT Technology Review is doing north of $20 million in revenue. Columbia has a popular one. University of Virginia is the second-largest seller of case studies. Oxford University Press does close to a billion a year from book publishing and case studies.
How to Compete With HBR [00:12:30]
Sam: Let’s brainstorm. Suppose you wanted to get some of this. What would you do if you were starting fresh?
Shaan: I actually did a version of this with Trends, and Trends in this year will potentially be a $10 million-plus recurring revenue business. If I owned it and was trying to maximize revenue, I would charge 10 times the price — $20,000 to $30,000 a year. And I would start in specific niches and slowly check them off.
I would build this scary, elite brand — something that sounds like Gartner, Viacom, Blackstone. Something with weight to it. And I’d start in the spaces I know. I think I could have done media really well. Or DTC.
Here’s what I would have done for DTC: charge Nike or similar companies $20,000 to $50,000 a year. They get two things. One: I publish four or five case studies a month on the latest and greatest in DTC — who’s crushing it and why. And two: every month I host a digital or in-person panel where I bring in three or four young companies who are crushing it, and all these gray-haired Nike executives get to come in and learn. Young companies get in free. Established companies pay.
And then I’d create a proprietary ranking — a power ranking of DTC brands under eight years old. The best up-and-comers, the incumbents, updated constantly. Something proprietary and defensible.
Sam: And I think you could do this right now in crypto. There’s a whole bunch of big financial players who would happily pay $25,000, $50,000, even $100,000 a year just to have someone explain this world to them. And crypto is fear-based. You know which tokens are crushing it, which are failing, and you can actually make money off the data. The incumbents with huge wallets are afraid of missing it. Way easier to sell than DTC.
And there’s this guy who reached out — he said, “You guys mentioned doing Barstool for tech a while back. I actually want to do it. I’m uniquely qualified.” He explained why and it was actually believable. I’m going to help him think it through.
Shaan: I love when ideas come to life with a legit operator. The opposite of “Hey I love that idea, would love to talk” — zero appeal. A far more appealing message is: “I’ve been working on this for three months and I’ve made $15,000 so far.” My rule now is: if you show me you’re actually building something — getting users, making money — hit me up. That’ll get my attention. But I can’t help everybody who just says “that’s cool.”
Sam: If someone comes to me saying they’re considering working on something, and then a month later they’re considering a totally different thing, they’re disqualified. You have no grit. I do not want to talk to you.
Fake It Till You Make It: The Fraud Edition [00:17:00]
Sam: The topic here is: there’s been a bunch of these fake-it-till-you-make-it stories that have gone wrong. Theranos. Nikola Motors — literally named after Nikola Tesla’s first name, took the company public via SPAC, ran up to a $40 billion valuation, and the one famous video of their truck was basically just the truck rolling downhill in neutral. The CEO Trevor Milton had to resign, got charged with securities fraud by the DOJ.
HeadSpin was another one. A buddy worked there. What HeadSpin does is actually a great idea — if you have a mobile app and you want to test it on a shitty Android phone in Thailand on low network conditions, they had phones all over the world in data rooms that would run your app and report back. They claimed $100 million in recurring revenue. The CEO had made it up. Charged with fraud.
And there’s this guy Gurbaksh Chahal — he started a company in ad tech, sold it for $200 million. Made a bunch of money, went on Oprah, she called him a bachelor that any woman would want to be with. Then he started another ad tech company. And there’s footage — it was collected improperly so it wasn’t usable — of him kicking his girlfriend 127 times. He was charged with kidnapping. Got off on a technicality due to how the evidence was collected.
Then he came back with a new company called Gravity Four, rolled up ad tech companies. My sister worked at a startup that got acquired — kind of forcibly — by his company. He tanks their prospects in the market, spreads fear and doubt to other bidders, somehow gets Facebook to pull their preferred partner status, then swoops in and gets the company for pennies on the dollar. They needed money, so they sold against their will.
He’s now back with something called Vendor Cloud. He says on his Twitter profile: three exits for $400 million plus. Philanthropist.
Shaan: The takeaway from all of these is: you can have a horrible reputation, but if you make money, you will always be able to get more money. That’s not an endorsement — it’s just what it is.
On due diligence: most investors including us do close to zero. We meet the founder, we play with the product, we see if there are good Twitter reviews. We don’t audit their financials. We don’t even look at their data room most of the time. And even if we did, revenue numbers are self-reported — sometimes literally a screenshot of a Quickbooks page that could be photoshopped.
One company we looked at, we actually went into their Google Analytics ourselves — not screenshots, live access. Looked great. Later it came out they’d had the analytics pixel fire twice on every event. Doubled every number. I don’t know how to audit a smart contract. A handful of people on earth know how to do that.
There’s a lot of trust involved. The good thing about Silicon Valley versus crypto or some other industries is it’s a long-term players’ game. Repeat players care about reputation — to a point. Adam Neumann walked away with over a billion dollars from WeWork. The size of the prize makes it worth it to flush your reputation for some people. But at the early stage with early-stage startups, reputation matters more than what you can walk away with.
The Canva Founding Story [00:23:00]
Shaan: Someone sent me this LinkedIn post — the Canva founder Melanie Perkins wrote this incredible detailed post about their whole journey. Not a “here’s our quick origin story” — actually the full thing, including the ugly years. You should search “Canva journey LinkedIn” to find it. It’s amazing.
So Canva just raised at a $40 billion valuation — one of the most valuable companies to come out of Australia. But the story starts way before Canva.
She was teaching part-time, maybe at a design school. And they started with a company called Fusion Books — software that made it easy to lay out photo books and yearbooks. The most non-impressive startup you can imagine. She and her boyfriend built it with part-time work and tax return savings.
She posts a picture of herself at a trade show booth with her yearbook product. Smiling behind the table, no one at her booth. “This was a huge waste of money. There were more exhibitors than attendees.”
At some point they enter a Western Australia inventor-of-the-year competition and come in runner-up. At that event she meets a VC named Bill Tai — he was speaking there. They talk for five minutes and he says, “If you ever come to Silicon Valley, let’s meet.” So she does the move: rather than say “I’m flying from Australia to meet you,” she emails him and says, “I happen to be there this month — would you be free?” If he says yes, she books the flight.
He says yes. She books the flight. He also says she should meet a Google engineer named Lars.
Sam: Now that’s fake-it-till-you-make-it that actually works.
Shaan: Exactly. She goes to meet with Bill, dressed up — she’d Googled “how to dress for a Silicon Valley investor meeting” and thought business casual was dressing down. He says, “You didn’t need to dress up.” She’s mortified from the first minute.
She shows him her pitch deck. He asks, “Do you have an iPhone or iPad?” She says no. He goes, “You’re telling me the future of publishing and you don’t own an iPad?” She’s dying inside.
But she shows this one slide with a cartoon character — clipart of “Fusion Books” right by the finish line, with a trophy at the end that says “the dominant online publishing system.” Behind her are Google Docs and Microsoft Office falling over and fighting each other. Basically: we’re going to beat Google Docs.
Even with terrible product, terrible name, no engineer, no iPhone — she had the ambition to say “we’re going to beat Google Docs.” And that’s porn for investors. If you’re crazy enough to say it, they’ll listen to the next three sentences to decide if you’re delusional or if you might pull it off.
Finding the Engineer [00:28:00]
Shaan: Bill tells her: “I’ll invest if you bring on an engineer that Lars approves.” Lars is a former Google and Facebook engineer. So she goes to Lars for introductions, he says “I’ll screen them for you.” She finds 20 engineers. He rejects every single one. This goes on for a year. She’s demoralized.
So she learns Bill Tai is famous for kite surfing. She takes up kite surfing. Emails him: “I was just kite surfing — want to come?” Gets back in his orbit.
She posts a note she wrote to herself during this dark period. “Mel — you’re extremely tired. You’re in a challenging situation, though you could pull through. Nothing bad is really happening but you’re feeling depressed because you’re used to achieving things quickly. This is a hard environment. There’s no doubt you will succeed. You will find the team that you need, get the investment that you need, and build the company you always wanted. You have chosen to put yourself in a challenging situation — if it wasn’t challenging, you wouldn’t feel satisfied when you get to the end goal.”
She posted that. Pretty vulnerable.
Finally, Lars says, “Hey, this guy right here is the best engineer I’ve ever met. You should hire him.” She talks to him. He says he has his own startup with a team of six — can’t do it. So she checks in three months later. Checks in again three months after that. One of those times he says yes.
She recruits a Google guy out of Google by building this whole little flip book presentation: “This is Greg. He had a great life at Google. But he started to wonder — is there more? What if he could bring the power of design to a billion people? Google’s going to keep Googling whether he leaves or not. But Canva might not if he doesn’t join.”
He joins. They launch. It takes off. Now it’s worth $40 billion. She and her co-founder are married. Two times the wealth.
Sam: I love this woman. How did you find this?
Shaan: Someone in a Slack channel posted it — Ishan, who’s Australian and who used to listen to my original podcast before this one. He posted it and I thought, “This is actually really good.” Also — shoutout to Mario Gabriel from The Generalist newsletter, who I stole a ton of information from for the HBR segment.
Sam: Good episode. The Harvard business stuff was really well-researched.
Shaan: We’ll see. All right, we’re out.