Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en they average 62 million queries per day I have no idea I mean what do you think Google’s queries per day probably like like 5 million okay let’s start with go okay I’ve I was on the James Altucher podcast James was here with us a few weeks ago James is like a like a dork nerdy guy I say this would love I like him a lot he’s like a nerdy guy libertarian guy libertarian audience and I can’t decide if this whole privacy stuff that we’re talking about so hey calm female service launched a few days ago a few weeks ago a week ago yeah its premise is like we’re gonna one of its many promises is its on privacy okay and so I’m really into this privacy thing the founder of Pandora told me that he is seeing his customers who are Middle American people actually care about privacy and when I was on my trip I saw DuckDuckGo billboards everywhere for those who don’t know duck taco it’s a google competitor it’s a search engine and they it’s all based on they don’t track you which like [ ] ruins the business model have no idea how they make money but no no it doesn’t so their thing was like it’s not no ads so they still do search ads but they’re like look when you search for you said you’re gonna go buy a new car when you go search for you know Mercedes versus BMW or whatever you’re gonna search for they’ll serve you an ad they just don’t need to know that you’re sampar that you live in this place that you have life you know they don’t need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intent they know what you’re looking for so they can serve you of relevant ad and their insight was the slight drop off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition that hey we’re not using personal information to serve these ads okay so I just sent you their traffic go to DuckDuckGo comm slash traffic so here’s my question to you first of all we’re looking at a hockey stick we’re looking at anomalous and 10 2010 they’re at you know this is this is queries per day or this is average yeah so they average 62 million queries per day I have no idea I mean what do you think Google’s queries per day probably like like five billion I mean a braid see if you can find let’s see if you can find Google’s careers today so we can put this so 3.5 billion off ok ok yes go ahead Google or duck duck goes that fifty fifty sixty million a day so there I don’t even know what’s that like three percent the size anyway DuckDuckGo what do you think about that I I personally love this and what I want to know from you is do you like duck oh and do you also think this privacy thing like building products were the main feature or values in like or like the main thing the brain stands for is privacy do you think that’s gonna be it I think it’s a hit I used to think the opposite I used to be of the camp that was like look people don’t give a [ ] like if you just say yeah sure in theory people want privacy if you offer no privacy or privacy but when it comes down to products they’re like oh this is a free good thing and I have to give up all my data alright here you go and so I used to think that people in practice who are willing to easily trade privacy and I think that’s still true on the whole but if you said yes where is the pendulum swinging and so I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy because every these things stack up right so as you you know the more paranoid you get the less lack of trust you have in the system and of the of the big companies it doesn’t matter you don’t have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel’s back maybe it’s the fake new stuff on Facebook maybe it’s when your information gets breached for the 35th time and you get an email saying hey sorry your personal if I might have been leaked like you don’t know where it is but these things just keep happening and to the point where I believe people care more than they did before and they’ll continue to care more that’s that’s number one number two you have to do it on a global product like a product everybody uses cuz it’s still a niche audience alright like you said Google is about 50 times the search query size then in DuckDuckGo up so like 50 to 1 and so you need a product that’s used by pretty much everybody for that those ones to add up and be a big enough market for you so I wouldn’t do it on some niche products like oh you do you know some niche mailing you know hmm MailChimp software thing cool I’m gonna make a privacy focus version it’s like no that’s that’s a nisha of a niche well if it’s about ego stream it works like hey calm I caught hey calm global write emails everybody yes it is global but like you don’t need that many users to build a billion-dollar company totally what I’m - that’s was saying though you need but you’re only gonna get the sort of 2% let’s say that value privacy enough to make a change and so you know like superhuman did the same thing email such a huge market cool we’ll go get the 1% 2% who are willing to pay 30 bucks a month for a free instead of free email I think this is anything happening here I pray you how old are you 27 you’re a little old for this question the zoom ray just five years ago no it’s a generational thing I want to know do the 22 year olds give a [ ] about this because the way that the Zoomers the way that they live and think is really [ ] about getting coronaviruses the privacy of their data they don’t care about their body they’re a pretty conscientious group of people I think I don’t know I would I want to know how they think but that was my question okay so here’s another private here’s another opportunity for privacy that I’m interested in do you know that when you go to Safeway so in California we have Safeway in the South you’ve got Kroger and the other South you’ve got Publix what else is there Albertsons Albertsons okay so when you go to your grocery store like your major grocery store you enter in your phone number to get a discount right what they do with that is they understand your buying behavior and they’ll show you they’ll send you stuff in the mail or they will just learn about inventory whatever and this is incredibly effective so effective at there’s a famous story about a woman being a sixteen year old get a woman getting mailed stuff to her dad’s home saying like baby supplies and the dad was like right my daughter 16 she’s not pregnant what he talked about turns out she was pregnant and they knew it because in your party yeah yeah month you know what to buy anyway when you go and buy that ship did you know that you can submit like a request and they’ll send you all of your do-not-track requests well that you could do it do not track and they can send you everything you’ve ever bought oh that’s pretty cool okay alike so what what would you do with that data yeah I think that’s just an interesting thing you could do in general like a mint calm style I think you could say hey what’s your phone number okay then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like but I don’t what do you what I want to do with that data if I was the company or if I was myself what do you think if you’re trying to build a business I would go figure out other areas where this sort of like linking and tracking will work and so so a lot of people have already done this right like the ad market it’s kind of like porn where porn innovates first okay a close second or third might be the ad market so you know FERC on who was kind of my co-founder CTO of my previous company his previous company was an ad tech company and they one of the versions of their app that they made so the companies called app lovin and so initially the premise was what apps are your friends loving we will recommend those apps to you and so it was like if I know what apps you have and I know that you’re my friend cuz you’re in my address book then it can tell me that sampar loves this app I thought it was a play on McLovin no it was I don’t know maybe that was a side benefit cuz every love super bad but won it but then all kinds of little edge cases started [ ] them up so they would you know record they would tell me that you love Grindr right like so so first it’s like not everybody’s app behavior they want to be transparent to their friends or their contacts and I think there was one really horrible case where this so then they switched us trying to do this for app installs so they’re like okay if I’m playing a game and it’s awesome I’m sorry forget about it’s awesome I’m playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid nine bucks if you download the game they would show my face from your address book as hey Shaun’s playing candy crush right now tap here to play candy crush to and that was like a super effective ad unit like there were like printing money and I think something really bad happened where like the CEO of Expedia or something like that got an ad that like his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that like someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him and he’s like what the hell is this and so he got back to them and they had turn it off and they would they did a similar experiment around location-tracking like have a life 360 thing so yeah you’re really careful with these like data oh let’s use data to give you information about either yourself or others you can get the situation like the dad who finds out a 16 year olds pregnant yeah I long story short privacy okay I have a privacy idea for you I love a privacy idea for you so I just because I’ve become like I like the older I’ve gotten I’ve gotten like more libertarian and like [ ] the government like mentality well there’s two things are happening there’s people who bring on a libertarian which is like eff the government and if the man in general and then there’s people are becoming more nationalistic which is like it’s us first them and us first them mean sort of keep them out and raise us up and I think in both cases you see this sort of like retreat in both cases it’s sort of it’s not like a shelter in place physically but it’s a shelter in place sort of psychologically behaviorally where you reduce your like openness and your spread you know in your behaviors and your data in another way so I think people in general when times get a little crazy people there’s a flight to safety and I see I think you see this with investing I think you see this with the way people act to behave so I think that more people do it when they’re when times get turbulent now a privacy focused idea that I had the other day so moved into this new house need to get internet set up oh [ ] gotta play the Comcast game Comcast comes over and of course you know Wi-Fi doesn’t really work great in my house so I was like okay I need to invest in good Wi-Fi because not having good Wi-Fi is like not having water to drink and so I’m like looking for these like euro these kind of mesh networks that you use in your house I just thought one give you more coverage so I just bought euro but I was talking to FERC on and I was like I think euro sucks well I hope it doesn’t sock cuz I just bought it but but the idea that I was thinking about was you know how when you what typically happens you have your Wi-Fi router and then on your laptop you’ll have like a VPN so a lot of people have VPNs VPNs are more and more popular some people have it for work some people have it to hide their traffic as they go bootleg movies on the internet and they don’t want it to be sort of traced to them and so VPNs are kind of complicated like to set up like you got to download one you don’t know if it’s malware you’re setting it up average person doesn’t know what the hell VPN is I was asking done a ton of research on this market well the idea was actually why don’t you build VPN into the router so you never need to download anything it’s just VPN by default and it’ll thing into the hardware itself and so you actually the the value prop of the router is this is secure internet and and so there so he so forgot of course like you know there’s people doing this and so I can’t say I’m the first to have this idea but he was telling me about a couple companies to check out if you’re interested in this so next DNS is one of them ubiquity is another one and so he was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like you kind of need to be a developer to know about these or be like know how to configure them to set them up and so I think if somebody takes the euro level of simplicity and design but they make the value prop hey your your internet search traffic your whatever you’re doing on the Internet is private if you buy this box instead of that box I think hard thing behind that the hard thing about these comfort of all the VPN businesses I did a wrote about them because I think that it’s gonna explode and they already are exploding but a lot of them are based in Panama because of the privacy laws there and a lot of them are notoriously scammy and weird they’re also ridiculously profitable like I talked to the one guy he had one it made twin a million dollars a year in revenue and like a hundred million in profit like right stupid but euro do you remember you know euro got bought by Google I think Amazon I think Amazon it like got acquired for nothing these companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money right yeah I think hardware is hard everybody knows that like ring doorbell you know it gets a billion dollar outcome but like I don’t think it was like ultra profitable at the time I think it was strategic the reason it got bought but the reason I think Wi-Fi router is interesting because Wi-Fi is like email it’s like Google search it’s a thing that everybody has every every physical place has a router and so though 2% of that market that cares about privacy I think it’s still a big market and I think I don’t I don’t believe that it’s so hard to make money because again you like with this Comcast box that I have here I gotta pay these guys 14 bucks a month just for this router to sit here it’s no way this router is worth more than like 50 dollars but they’re gonna make money on me you know they’ll break even in five months and they know I’m never gonna like get rid of my router and so so yeah I think that there’s something interesting there yeah also [ ] those guys [Music]