Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
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Kind: captions Language: en what a baller I was gonna save this guy for next week but we’re gonna do a double billionaire of the week so we’re doing a double Billy special get your get your Billy’s right now Richard Burton okay say have you heard of this guy Richard Burton is it Burton Snowboards no so this guy I started a couple of different companies so it’s just if you’re just Google Richard Burton I did earlier and nothing came up did I saying his name wrong I think you got it wrong cuz I did okay he Barton sorry Barton not Burton okay so Richard Barton so this guy started Zillow he also started one of your favorite sites class door also started he has three so he has Zillow he has glass door and what’s his other one I was just research this for next week so we’re just gonna do this live here and he did Expedia he did Expedia order directors on Netflix but you did Expedia Zillow and Glassdoor what a baller like okay yeah yeah so okay so how did this happen so I’ve listened this interview with this guy like five years ago before this podcast even started before this podcast was even a little you know sperm in my balls and when I when I looked at this guy the one thing that stood out to me was he had a very simple thesis that he used to start all these companies which was information wants to be free so okay what does information wants to be free man so he was basically like I’m gonna bring transparency to industries that are better not transparent and so he said you know let’s take Zillow for example before Zillow when they sort of online house property and house search companies existed like Trulia and all this red fan stuff like that the MLS listings were something that only the agents and brokers had access to and so this is they were gatekeepers they were like oh you want to know what’s on the market let me literally print out the MLS papers and I’ll show you they show you these and all all tore you through these companies that’s so great line dude information that was an information once you got information wants to be free and so so then he did the same thing in travel right we had travel agents who were the brokers who you had to call and be like hey I’d like to get a flight I don’t want to mention that you just trusted hopefully this agent is gonna do we were gonna do their job they’re gonna know all the different options different times different airports and they’re gonna find me something that fits my needs and Expedia was just a search bar that would just tell you here’s all the flights you decide here’s the information you don’t need to go to a travel agent anymore and Glassdoor is the same thing you wanted to know what’s it really like to work there and employers have no desire to put that out there they don’t want anybody to know any of the bad things that happen you know the working environment of their company and employees were often scared to do it because they would sign things so it’d be like you know non-disclosure whatever non slander if you’re the term for it is non-disparagement and so Glassdoor was unleashing the information about what’s it like to work at X company and so I love how this guy literally on one thesis has started three multi-billion dollar companies off that one premise and so that was when I when I did what you’re talking about I reverse engineering how did this guy do it it wasn’t oh how did he build Expedia how did he build illah it was how did you even get this idea okay what other industries today lack transparency where I can open them what are they do well if now that’s a billion-dollar idea I need to have let’s think of some one of them is pricing for enterprise software right what is find out how much money your company makes and then they go okay we’re gonna charge you this right like that like like I hate that call for pricing model I mean I I hate it but it works we do it so AngelList did this in a way as well when you were able to figure out who’s invested in what that used to be like sort of not easy to find information it wasn’t sort of like totally guarded but I crunch mice as well I’m literally just looking at the tabs that I have open right like Yelp yeah I’ll put something like that to you know how was it what is like to eat there the review system it organized and made public information that people wanted that was not super transparent before this yeah I mean housing he did that there’s a lot there’s so many good ones um salaries he did that with class door those last reduce salaries yeah so there’s there’s one that I use that’s in the tech world called levels I think we talked about it what’s before but they do it where with just the like kind of tech companies it’s like what do people had tech companies make and a lot of people have been doing this on inside companies so inside Microsoft for example they created an anonymous Google Doc where you could just put your level your job category like engineer or design or product person whatever and your salary your pay and then people that’s yeah you can figure out am i underpaid but this was even in like more specific it was like in a company these are people now like and it’s not just classed over it’s like just a few who kind of go and poke the stuff but there get like these these companies are having all these like really rich documents with thousands of people contributing in and right now those are just Excel Docs I wonder if you could take the just a salary component of maybe what’s in glass door and do it in a better way inside company so people make sure they’re not getting the short end of stick within their own company right now that’s interesting another one is freelancers so the answer is what freelancers and agents these so the problem with a lot of the stuff is when we’re trying to hire some agencies to WordPress to bail on it I have to back-channel and go find out from people who worked with them what they were like once I sign up to and agree with them I can’t I won’t find out unless I’m on a weekend if they suck or not right I can’t believe I’m in and that’s the same thing with like payroll software to like gussto looks good but when you sign up to it you don’t realize like what you like and what about it so we have a couple friends who are doing things that are trying to put out you know they’re trying to make information will come free of what software do companies use so like a lot of people would want to know what does the hustle use what do you guys use to send email what do you guys use for analytics what do you guys use for your payment paywall what are use for trends and like I know Ryan at producthunt they’re doing this with something called stacks or your stacks and they want to know what’s your software stack that your company runs on and it’s an interesting idea he’s designing it kind of like a social network but the value in the air and if you did if you get there is oh cool I can now go see okay if I’m building an Airbnb type of company what do they use to run their company what do they usually do you think that that is not working well it’s really tough to build right it is one of those things where really valuable if you get they’re really tough to get the information in because you have to get the incentives right later on you have the incentive to come to the site because you want to see what other people use but what’s the incentive to post and so he’s trying to make it fun and interesting and cool to post by making it like very visual like sort of a get it doing that a profile for your company right like like yeah we use this stuff and so I don’t know the numbers on how it’s doing but I do think it’s an interesting experiment and I think if they did it it would be the most valuable thing that producthunt has built because it’s a it’s just inherently surely there’s a great business model on top of that if you can show what software people will use that’s cool I agree that’s interesting I love this idea of information needs or information wants to be free yeah let’s think more about that so I think we’ll come back with an example of information today that is either behind a walled garden or it’s incomplete and if you set it free it would make people make better choices or save them money or whatever it is like maybe it’s something in the insurance space maybe I don’t I don’t know exactly what but I’m gonna think about this because I think this is a formula for building really big companies yeah for me it’s how much things cost like like freelancers and lawyers and things like that that’s it’s always bothered me I don’t like I like my lawyer could be like yeah we charge $700 an hour and when I was first getting going I was like 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 because they have to report you know 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 what they see is like 25 grand for a pitchbook subscription right really expensive and they do about 120 they’re owned by is it called Morningstar or engine right SR I think it this morning star or morning source like the mutual fund thing it’s yeah it’s all about one of those things and I just rather their earnings thing morning’s target is morning soccer and they are the mutual fun thing to and what they do is they do a bunch of different things the first thing they do is they crawl the web and they find SEC documents and they find like all time 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 you know how many 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 because they show me how much like traffic they 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 extension oh they are yes if you don’t know what they are so 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 I got really cool right imagine spot if I was not public company you’d be able to see here’s how much revenue that they’re making or 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 all I want to do is 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 about people say like yeah I have to keep pausing the podcast to like a write down B take a breath C think about what’s going on and then I was and yeah that’s what one set that high value [Music] you