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 what happened you’ve lost five million dollars back another episode of the greatest podcast ever created my first million oh what’s going on how are you I’m thriving I’m actually really hot in this room but I’m thriving you want to talk about Andrew will consider I’ve been thinking about him a lot he’s on your mind got a crush let’s see on your mind yeah I mean we did an episode with him I thought was great I think he’s great and the reaction was great so that’s triple great for Maya and what’s on your mind I just think he’s great in say think it’s you I just think that he was smart good attitude I think that the reason I like talking to him is because as I’m in San Francisco there’s this constant mindset that I’m so thankful that I’ve surrounded myself with which is all these people who like have these ideas and someone were really dumb ideas and they raise a lot of money for them and they become huge and some of the dumb ideas become awesome and that’s fantastic and a lot of the dumb ideas remain dumb and just a lot of money was wasted and there’s just a lot of mentality things that are in San Francisco that I love but a lot of it has downsides it’s nice to hear something from Andrew who just totally does not do anything that I’m used to and I love it yeah I also like how he’s kind of a one-man crew like I know he obviously has CEOs for companies and it sounds like he has a partner but like I read his blog that Tim writing when we were you know when we’re talking on the phone the strategy is like he thought it was he’s an original thinker so he basically decided how he wanted to live his life and then lived his life that way and his decision was his it was not like oh I just chose of these five popular paths I picked path for it’s like now he picked path 7 which was just a path they you know him and few other people have made for themselves yeah I just always think it’s great to hear from people who do things totally different than what you think you should be doing and it’s just nice to hear there’s a fresh perspective and for those who don’t know didn’t listen didn’t care the things in my opinion that he did differently sort of like okay where did he say who andrew is oh yeah so Andrew he owns his company called tiny if you go to tiny capital calm you could see it and he’s trying to do this sort of Warren Buffett model where he buys what he thinks are wonderful businesses he plans to hold them for a long time he has operators who run them and he has a holding company that owns all of them and sort of the net value is you know over a hundred million dollars for these companies down he’s he basically had nobody in the way that he financed it was he started an agency when he was nineteen he’s probably thirty-three thirty-four now right and so that like a little cash cow exactly so started that agency kind of in his parents basement type of thing did that for many years like I don’t know a decade or so and then got it to the point where he had a bunch of free cash flows like okay what do I do with this money and decided to invest it buying business so well the way I think he zigged what everyone else sagged was the Canada decision so contrary you know so what conventional wisdom is you gotta be in Silicon Valley you got to be New York LA wherever wherever the hubs are and he was like no I’m gonna live where I want to live and I’m gonna take advantage of some of the arbitrage opportunities of you know he charged San Francisco rates to his companies he was doing designs for but he paid his people you know local rates for doing the work that they were doing and so his agency was wildly profitable and that compounded over like a decade which is great so Canada was one contrary decision the other one was buying businesses for just building them so building businesses very sexy heroic you’re a genius you’re Steve Jobs by business buying you know a business that does two million dollars in revenue and 1 million dollars or even uh you don’t get that same sort of props but his take was like I think that a building is sort of fun and he still does it but overrated and over indexed on versus buying where there’s way more opportunities so I thought that was another one and I went to Canada I went and hung out with him for a couple days we almost did business together and I was like I can’t find a flight to directly to Victoria so Andrew lives in Victoria which is like a it feels like a small European town I don’t know how many to live there maybe 300 thousand maybe less maybe maybe less actually maybe 200,000 and I was like I can’t find a direct flight it’s okay we’ll get you up here and he chartered a jet for me it was awesome it was great so I’m happy I’m friends with him yeah he was a good guy I think we should have on the punch yeah it’s like once a month at the minimum and it should just be a friend friend of the show do you want to talk about something that is that I found on the Internet I think is I don’t know if it’s real or not tell me more okay so there’s this guy named Sam Evans have you heard of this person you know you had mentioned his name and I was like Sam instead of heard of it sounds like a fake name and then I googled him and I saw his face I was like oh I’ve seen this guy on my Facebook feed this guy advertises a lot so tell me about I don’t know much about tell me yeah so the way it started was he’s a New Zealand guy he’s maybe 30 years old and he started what he claims is a consultant consulting business which basically he would talk to small barbers or I don’t know what type of small companies small local things that wanted more leads and he would help them like optimize Yelp or something like that and I think that was mildly successful and from there if he goes well I’m just gonna teach other companies how to do this and so he created a course and he named it consulting.com and at this point now there’s three courses so the first course is creating a consulting business which is like you do stuff for local companies like to be a consultant yeah this course teaches you how to be a consultant obviously that’s like the model lets you make more money teaching people and then actually doing the thing and so he it’s cost two grand and they started making money off that and then that teaches you how to go from zero to some sustainable business and then from there there’s a 700 an hour and I was first getting going I was like I have no idea is that normal right and on the other side it’s also how much companies make right like you love it when you hear that a company’s public or it’s a non-profit cuz you’re like yes I’m gonna get to their financials is they have to report yeah well and they do in a really interesting way and they’re owned by a publicly traded company they do about a hundred twenty million dollars a year in revenue but they do like 25 grand for a pitchbook subscription right really expensive and they do about 120 they’re owned by mmm is it called Morningstar or it’s a company right SR I think at this morning star or morning stores like the mutual fund thing it’s yeah it’s owned by one of those things and I just read their their earnings thing morning’s target is morning server and they are the mutual fund thing too and what they do is they do two different things the first thing they do is they crawl the web and they find SEC documents and they find like all type they just crawl and find data and they have a team of like 300 people who just hit the phones all day and call people and get the information okay and then the other one that’s like that is you know even for podcast when we look at the top charts and we’re like alright how do we become the number one business podcast we don’t know how much we want my downloads they get right there’s this idea of how much something is how much is being earned how much is something making and how much does something cost I think that just generally would apply to a whole bunch of different spaces that you could you can use for this yeah that’s why I use a similar web cuz they show me how much like traffic guess traffic one of the dope ones of this do you use second measure yeah they’re great they’re great I think a little bit expensive they are yeah if you don’t know the arts the second measure takes credit card spending data and can tell you essentially like how much money something is making just by analyzing how many people are charging Spotify per month and then they’re like oh cool imagine spot if I was not public company you’d be able to see here’s how much revenue that they’re making they do this with like the delivery companies which delivery companies winning well they can just check this huge data set of credit card spending and say okay it looks like grub hubs in the lead and then second is door - or whatever and so second measure is super powerful using a source of truth which just credit card data how they get out we talk about this stuff all I want to do is those like and the podcast and make my days 50 hours long and just start a search everything this whole this whole data or make information or finding information wants to be free that whole concept that’s amazing that’s the test I want people to listen this podcast and be so excited and then I want you to feel anxious I want you to feel stress that you don’t have 50 hours in your day to go do this and that’s that’s how this should feel I’ve heard a bunch people say like yeah I have to keep pausing the podcast to like a write [ ] down B take a breath C think of it think about what’s going on and then I resume it and yeah that’s what we want it’s that that high value you don’t think about one more thing yeah which one you see you you look at the list tell them which one you want to do what happened you’ve lost five million dollars all right I didn’t exactly lose five letters but I did not make the five million dollars that I could have made all right so this is called Shawn’s shitty investments this is a new segment we created just now and I’ll tell you about two bad investments in one good investment I made so I was talking to a friend of mine a guy had been aided in advising this guy about his startup this is maybe four or five years ago I’ve been advising him he didn’t live in America he was building a product for international his product was around international students applying to US universities and making it easy if you don’t know if you live overseas like I finished high school in China so I saw this firsthand if you’re in China you’re in India you’re in Malaysia the goal like your life goal is to go to a u.s. University don’t even matter if it’s a good one but it’s to go to a u.s. University and even if US universities overcharge for for that and and they get in trouble about - sometimes yeah actually right now there’s bunch stuff in the news because they charge like three times more for the state is in trouble because they have like 60% Chinese nationals there and they’re like right what the [ ] you guys are charging 60 grand for these kids exactly so so anyways I was helping this guy great founder really like the company was really interested but I was at a point at that time financially where I was like okay if I’m investing in startups it’s pretty irresponsible investment because you know when you invest in startups high likelihood of failure so you need to place like 25-30 bets and so if you say okay I’m gonna place yeah 25 30 bits and each bets gonna be 25 grand like I’m basically I need to have five hundred thousand I don’t have 25,000 check which I was very very close to writing would have become five million dollars this guy’s business by now wait what’s the name of the company say the name and how big is it now I’ll just tell you the name we’ll bleep it out so it’s called and so he told me that they just crossed it you know the billion dollar valuation and and so I don’t know if they’re exactly at that onething a little over a little under but the point is they’re they’re doing well and and so yeah I was kicking myself because that would have been a big investment he’s happened to me this has happened to me now two different times where I could have I could have been one of the angel checks into a business I thought it was a good business I didn’t pull the trigger and those two would have combined to be worth you know ten million dollars plus by now what was the only one calm yeah so this company this studying abroad company they’re do they make a lot of revenue or is it just yeah revenue and even then like this was they were preview at the time but I was doing the math and I was like wait like they had an LOI signed by a bunch of universities and I was like wait so if they just matched the supply and demand like this things there make money do them enough conviction and it’s just a bleach insight no no it’s a full software tool that let that actually does the application for the student the University of was a SAS company it’s a free SAS tool for the user and then it’s a lead gen on the other side when a kid gets accepted they get paid that way got it and they charge to universities money yeah like thousands of dollars per student yeah so okay so they don’t charge the money for the software no this offers used by the actual student and customer so anyways it was a it’s a great business big mess on my part happy for the guy though he is an awesome guy and I really I like this guy’s energy a lot kind of sometimes you meet people who got I just have good energy I don’t know how to describe it he was one of those people’s and you know MGM so not again so basically I haven’t talked about this on the podcast but I during co vid I decided to mess around with option trading which you know famous last words and so I was literally this is how dumb I am right so so I don’t play in the finite that public markets that launch I just do very simple things I just buy companies I think are good for the next 10 years or i buy index funds I don’t do a whole I don’t do like day trading I don’t do their leverage buying or I don’t do shorts but I was like you know what I don’t see any way that MGM which is MGM Resorts I was like I don’t see any way that their business doesn’t go down with this coded thing and so I was thinking about it and it got cut by like 75 percent so the stock price dropped from I don’t know it was like 25 dropped from 30 down to like 12 and and I was like yeah I still think that this thing is gonna go down and so I’m literally on one tab I have like a Khan Academy video of like what the hell is a put and on the other hand I’ve got my Robin Hood account and I’m like just pushing buttons and so I pushed a bunch of buttons and I placed this trade which basically said okay I think I’m James gonna go down and yeah about $2,000 with options and like let’s see what happens and it turns out MGM didn’t go down but I needed it once I understood my own trade which was like after I placed it cuz I was again just put your buttons what I was looking at the like confirmation I was like should this a horrible trade like I I just basically said that this is gonna go down 40% in the next seven days didn’t you lose stupid so that’s my bad the two bad investments I want to share on the other side other side I’ve been really big into Bitcoin and when it dropped to like 4,500 recently and now it’s back up so that one made back money from for the buy shitty option trading in Spain I I completely stay away from stocks I only buy S&P 500 or Facebook stock and about two weeks ago when it was at the bottom I was like I was like well no when the whole market was real low like the lowest point maybe ten or two weeks ago I sold most everything and I was like I was like I think it’s just gonna get worse and worse and worse because unemployment and unemployment comes out and it’s the highest it’s ever been and or the unemployment where claims and then the stock market goes up 20% I like I just don’t understand how this I know I don’t understand how this works at all because and then I applied for the loan for for that Trump enacted and I’m like so you telling me we get free money that sounds great but you start thinking about it you’re like I’m gonna pay for this eventually like somehow I’m there’s no such thing as free or we’re gonna pay for it eventually and so this money it’s just this whole situation it doesn’t make sense to me because the stock market should be going down yes this is a dead cat bounce or like sort of a false rally but forgetting forgetting the market right now because I don’t know [ ] about it and who also who cares not that interesting it’s a speculators game though there’s a phrase I learned that I thought was pretty cool it’s called a Kings EMU he contests you know two kings in beauty contest is okay so have you ever heard of this sort of economists full names like Maynard John Maynard Keynes or whatever anyways he’s famous guy in the world of economics Keynesian economics and a Keynesian beauty contest describes this phenomenon where let’s say there’s a what you think the stock market should be is here’s the asset here’s a company you can buy some of their stock and you buy it if you think that the companies cannot become more valuable than it’s priced at today that’s what we think should be happening but what’s actually happening is this as a speculator market right it’s a speculation driven market and so you don’t in a short time horizon you don’t you’re not betting that the company is going to improve and actually generate more revenue and what not you’re just betting that other people are going to think this is more attractive but they’re also bidding that other people are going to think more attractive so it’s qingzi beauty contest is where you’re not actually judging the beauty of it you are thinking what the other judges would think about this thing and they’re thinking about what the other jesters think about this thing and it becomes this sort of speculative loop and that’s my sort of Wikipedia page of the week that’s exactly how things working and it just annoys me so much you have so much more control over your life when you actually run the business right and there’s also a great phrase which is sort of in the short term the stock market is a popularity contest and in the long term it’s a weighing machine and I think that really describes it well right so like is this also for private companies as well and when you’re you’re raising a Series A in your hyped company it’s a popularity contest and what how did this valuation that doesn’t make any sense like yeah it makes sense if you if you understand that this is currently a popularity contest but over the long haul it does not remain a popularity contest it becomes a weighing machine and if you’re a full of air and there’s nothing there like your value will go down and so for all those people who don’t understand those valuations that’s why it’s frustrating I’m just so I don’t I don’t do anything in that world because I just nothing I I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to know like it makes me too angry okay cool do you want to squeeze anything else in or you want to we could wrap it tell people about the other podcast you guys are doing yeah we just launched one with Moyes Ali which you should go on it Sean I had a I went on it to help Moyes interview better but it’s called exit strategy so Moyes started this company called native and he started it me and Moyes started our companies in the same name office and so I saw him started from nothing so I’m get the idea and start this thing and he started this deodorant company called native in 20 months after starting it he sold it for a hundred million dollars in cash I’ve been 28 months months and so he decided to launch a podcast because he is looking for a new project where he’s interviewing other DDC founders and it was talked about scaling and selling their companies it’s called exit strategy the Google the hustle exit strategy or just look it up in on the Spotfire podcast or you’ll see it yeah I started listening to it I’m like five minutes in but so far so good we’ll see you crazy I told my feedback to him was for the next episodes Beacon to lean into being crazy don’t hold back yeah that would be my advice as well which is don’t I think when you’re when you’re a really interesting person and actually your opinions are more interesting than your questions in many ways you need to make it a conversation a debate more than a interview because I think what’s gonna end up happening is that Moyes is gonna be end up being more interesting than most of his guests and so what he should do to raise both people’s levels is for him to just act out we would normally act in a conversation with that there’s anyone would rather he like he says the craziest stuff ever and he’s a great guy but he’s a loose cannon and I love that about him so I need him to remain as a loose cannon right so check it out exit strategy we want the gasps family to get bigger stronger better every badass entrepreneur who wants a podcast needs to go to the hustle and push a button and start their podcast with the hustle but like it should be badass interesting entrepreneurs not you know sort of judgment I want to start a podcast yeah but that should be the least interesting thing you’ve ever done in your career yeah we want experts we want experts who are charismatic not charismatic people who hope to be experts right and also not experts were not kids Matt because nobody wants that either yeah but yeah that’s out and yeah and people even reviews I read all the reviews everyone could see yelling at me because they say my mic sucks I so I ordered a new one but everything’s back ordered you might have a new mic coming doesn’t know essential the essentials are micro sorry let’s read one review let’s do it a reviewer of the week let’s give somebody a shout here so I scan these for one second okay so three stars Sam can learn how to talk into a mic but both these guys are very knowledgeable and give infesting a fresh young spin I’ve been listening just since it was just Sean spelled my name wrong and loved it but when Sam came on it became different Sam gets excited his voice pops into the mic yeah but come on that’s the excitement Sam she loses the podcast not gonna do it you’ve got to listen to yourself you can tell Sean speak softer Sean misspelled again and tries to get Sam to quiet down but it’s not working that’s not true okay let’s look at another below these are interesting that the hybrid Hughes although I want the high reviews but well we have like 800 reviews and almost all are 5 stars the only ones that are 5 stars are the people who cost unethical which is [ ] there are people who say that my mic sucks which is [ ] and the people who just call us bros also [ ] well no mess I’m [ __ ] I am a bro means a man yes that’s that’s me all right see s value says very smart guys would not recommend hello the title for a review these guys are very smart and you’ll certainly learn the finger to about making money by listen to this podcast that said it’s not worth the subtle recalibration of your moral compass I don’t know that’s a decision for each listener to decide ok so then they say these are not high integrity people here’s their examples of why were not high integrity we asked people to sub an unsub to game the podcast algorithm give me a break yeah a joke laughing about lying on a job application and getting caught I didn’t laugh because I thought it was good I laughed because that’s the way you deal with heartache I laugh to cover the pain don’t you understand yeah like I said how I said how that was a horrible move and I got what I deserved right casually dismissing a host criminal record a host yeah no one dismissed my criminal record they said it’s stupid I shouldn’t have done it and that’s why I changed my lifestyle gotcha these guys are sharp guy is a good at hustling hacking and scheming but this is not content I would recommend anyone put into their brain you know what welcome if that doesn’t make people want to listen to this more I don’t know what will that’s there’s our clip for Instagram like are you looking around like are we still in the studio and we have our staff to like whip it it’s just your wife behind you okay cool let’s get out of here we’ll be back at Tuesday and yeah see ya enjoy share the pod [Music]