My First Million - #140 - How Much Do VCs Make?, A Booming Startup Replacing Fridges, and A Board Game Making $5m A Month

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - 06:05 A booming grocery delivery startup, Fridge No More - 12:00 The "Ukranian Tik-Tok", Coub - 13:01 The $4b startup you haven't heard of: GoPuff - 21:09 A board game doing $5m a month: Hunt A Killer - 23:20 The booming audience for “true crime” content - 25:48 Shaan went on Wheel of Fortune? - 30:08 Converting old shows into podcasts - 30:30 Multi-platform shows - 31:11 Shaan’s most interesting angel investments - 32:40 “The JIO effect” - 44:15 How much angels and VCs make Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. Oh, yeah. We're live.

Sam, it's almost Christmas. Are you a big gifter? I do everything last minute, as expected. And I overspend on my close family. so kind of are you I'm a gift I'm also a last minute

in fact usually so last minute that they get a photo of something that's same and I'm famous in my family for like oh remember that time I got a photo from Sean of a stroller but the stroller never came or like I get this photo of a bag that I never got I'm the famous kind of like photo only gifter

it's just like it's not you know your love language you know what I'm talking about? It's like touch, service, words of affirmation, yeah. Yeah, gifting. And gifting is not mine. So I just like forget that a lot of people really care about it.

I'm like, when I actually get gifts, it's like, you know, I'm doing Christmas in Austin. My mother sent me a book. And it was a lovely book and I like it. And then someone else, but someone else sent me something else. I'm like, oh, more packages.

I don't want to get rid of all this cardboard. It's like stressful more than it is good. That's good. And one of my goals this year was to become a good person like Ramon, who's our good friend, who is the best guy now, I would say. He's like the best gift giver too. And he's the best gift giver and super thoughtful. So I was like, I'm going to outgift Ramon this year. And so I have created a system where I'm giving gifts like at scale. I'm gifting like to 30, 40 people who I think are amazing and I care about. Even if we don't like talk all the time or whatever, I've made a list of the 30, 40 people who I think are awesome and I want to invest in. I want to give them gifts. I just been too busy

slash lazy slash not thoughtful to do it. And then you gave me the great idea for the perfect gift for this month. So I sent out a high quality pair of Christmas socks from Stance to everybody on that list. And Stance was like, oh, this is great. Cool. We'll take care. You know, just upload a CSV of their addresses and we'll send it all out and we'll get you a bunch of credits and all the stuff. And I was like, this is amazing. This is how like you. That's awesome. You emailed them? So Ben actually took care of this whole thing for me. So I was like, I told Ben, here's what I'm trying to do.

He's like, I got you. Just get the addresses for me. I put all the address in a spreadsheet. He's like, all right, I talked to Stance. And they said they're going to do this. And I was like, Ben, I love you. I love Stance. I love that this is actually happening now.

And so what I'm going to try to do is every month I'm going to try to send them a little something. Maybe it's just socks that I think cool. Or a little, just something small that I think is cool. And Ramon had this thing he said once, which was like from now on, I buy two. I buy anything I like. I buy one for me.

I buy one for you. And I was like, he wouldn't even say this to me, but I heard it. I was like, wow, that is like the ultimate Ramon friend philosophy. Because he means it.

He's not like a bullshitter and he's not schmoozing anybody. He just does it because he does it. He's bought me. So Ramon is our mutual friend. He was the first or top five or one of the first episodes Sean did. He sold this.

Number two, I think. Sopub website for 10 million bucks almost. He's given me, a $500 helicopter ride like me and Sarah went on a helicopter ride he's given me an Apple watch

he's given me a sauna for my wedding he's amazing what else did he give me I was in Las Vegas and I just told him hey I'm in Las Vegas and he goes

oh that's great have a good time blah blah the next day he's like hey at 6 p.m. today you need to go to T-Mobile arena you and your friends and he hooked us up

with like a VIP pass to the UFC event like we got to meet some UFC. for UFC fighters to come find us. Like Forrest Griffin came and like, he came to our seat and was like, hey, are you Sean? And I was like, oh my God, Ramon, dude, he, Romone gives you to the point where you feel uncomfortable. You're like, I'll live up to this.

He does that to me all the time. And to the point where I actually had to tell him, I go, dude, you're making me feel, you're making me feel bad. Like, please, like, if you're going to give me something, keep it under 50 bucks. Like, you go too hard. He's so generous. It's like M&M's like there's a point where too much of good equals bad at some point. And so he is that that much of a giver that you'll feel guilty and bad about yourself by the end of being his friend. He's coming over to my house for Christmas tomorrow. Dude, you better have a gift ready. I bet you he's coming with the heat.

No, we do. So this is the second Christmas. So he spent together. We hooked him up last year and we're going to get off some good stuff this year. He doesn't listen to this. So I can tell you, we got him some clothes because Ramon is from East. He's got this Eastern European vibe. And so he's sometimes he hasn't fully acclimate.

And he's a single dad. So he hasn't fully acclimated to like American like hip fashion even though he like wants to go out and date. And so sometimes he'll wear like two religion jeans. And so last year we bought him Lue the Lemon because he had never, he didn't know what Lue the Lemon was. I was like Ramon, this is like what like yuppie fancy people wear like instead of like affliction hoodies. So we got him that. And then this year we're getting him a fancy cashmere sweater so he could wear on date. So we're trying to step up his fashion a little bit.

I like it. He's going to wear the cashmere sweater with a flicketts. hoodie on top. That's what he does. He has like an affliction hoodie. He wears like, just stuff that like was cool like 10 years ago. And we should say so the next episode we're going to do is our big bang end of year, end of 2020 finale. It's going to be fun. We're going to prep for it. It's got a bunch of kind of like year end type of thing. So I think that one's going to be good. For today, we have a bunch of little things. Where do you want to start? I have a cool idea I want to tell you about that's this company I saw that is in Brooklyn. So,

it's a company called Fridge No More. Have you ever heard of this company? No, but I'm going to Google it. Go to Frignomore.com. Okay. And it's called Fridge No More because their idea is like, if you use our service, you don't even need to have a fridge. So what they do is they take grocery delivery that's like Instacart or whatever that have gotten super popular during COVID. And they actually just shrink it down into the most sort of simple delivery service that you can get. It's 15-minute delivery. It's like a corner store. It's a,

like a cloud corner store. And so they have a one mile radius that they operate these out of. They have these like electric bike messengers. Yeah, I'm looking at it. As soon as you place the order, they're gone. And 15 minutes, you have your thing. And you could just order like a pint of Ben and Jerry's and that's it. You can order like, you know, six bottles of water. You can order fruits and vegetables. You can order whatever the hell you want. It's a really cool concept. And the guys who started so I get on this call because I'm thinking about investing, right? I love the idea. It's like postmates, but even simpler and more lightweight because you get it even faster. And the, The trick is they're not going to.

So unlike Postmates, unlike DoorDash, unlike Instacart, it's not like a shopper goes to a normal shop and buys it at the retail price and then kind of upsells it to you and they charge a delivery fee and it gets really expensive. Fridge No More themselves is the grocery store. So they go buy wholesale snacks and all the shit. They create a small tiny cloud in a corner store and then they sell it to you at the normal retail price. That's how they make their markup is just because they buy. buy wholesale, they sell retail. So unlike Instacart, Instacart goes to a normal grocery store, they buy a retail and sell at double retail, right? So that's the kind of business model here is to be an actual grocery store. And I don't know the answer to this, but have you asked

yourself why Instacart doesn't do that? So it's a different model. This requires like CapEx. So basically they have to open, they have to open up locations, right? So they have to like get a space, buy the inventory, hold the inventory, and then like do the delivery themselves. Whereas Instagram was like, cool, we'll just get a network of delivery. people and they'll just go to the existing grocery stores. It'll be fine. It does work. Instacart clearly works, right? It's a multi-billion dollar company, but this is a little bit different because if you either are more price sensitive or time sensitive, you want it faster, this is the way to go because Instacart and stuff, they deliver everywhere. They deliver

to the suburbs, all this stuff. So they'll take, like, at the minimum, two hours to deliver your stuff. These guys are 15 minutes. I'm looking up the founders. They seem very accomplished. They've got some hardcore Russian names, it looks like, right? So that's what I was going to tell you. I get on this call, and I'm a little bit skeptical because I'm like, man, I don't know. I feel like Instacard already won. There's Farmstead, which is a great company that my friend started that is this model, but a little bit different. And I said, I don't know, I feel like these guys are five years late to this party.

But I get on the call, first thing I see is these two hardcore Russian dudes. I'm like, all right, already I sit up straight in my chair because I've learned one thing in business is that the Russians, when they get into business, they win. these guys are an incredible class of entrepreneurs. It's like Anton and what's the other guy's name? Pavel. Anton and Pavel. Yeah, I mean, they sound like their last names.

They're like 007 Golden Eye villains. Right. If you ever are competing, you know, you're doing a startup and people are like, oh, don't worry about competition. Unless your competition is named Anton and Pavel, then you better fucking watch your back. Yeah, or like Suri from Israel. Right.

Yeah, exactly. You just don't want to mess with like Israelis or Russians and business. Yeah, you know, they've all served like three years. in the military and they're here to kick ass and yeah. So I start talking to these guys and I'm like, okay, tell me about your background first because I'm intrigued by the Russian thing first. So the first guy's like, you know, I'm Pavel. I spent the last 10 years actually in finance, working for a Russian billionaire.

And I was like, which one? His name's Mikhail Brokharov. And I don't know if you've heard of this guy, but he was the owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Yeah, the tall guy. Yeah, super cool. Mining. He did mining. Now, those guys are all rich because when the Soviet Union,

collapsed. They gave, they like allocated parts of the government. Billionaires basically. Yeah. Yeah. To like young people. And they're like, hey man, here's your cut. You got to give it to us. And it goes, yes, yes, sir. I'll do it. And then now they all made billions. And so I'm talking to him. He's like, he's like, yeah, that was a funny time. Like, because he doesn't own the Nets now, but he owned it then. He's like, you know, what a business to own. Like, you look at the fixed cost. The salary commitment was like $100 million a year for the players. He's like, that's just your salary commitment. And he's like, that was a crazy business. So he's telling me about that business. And the other

I'm like, what about you? What's your story? And I thought, okay, maybe this guy has a lame background. And he goes, oh, you know, I started this company called Coob. And I was like, Coop, that sounds Coop. Coop, holy shit. Do you remember this company called Coop, C-O-U-B? I don't know if you ever heard of this. No. This was basically TikTok before TikTok. And it's still the TikTok of Russia. So I remember once upon a time, I used to do these things where every Friday, once a month, I would have a random day. I would invite random people, either speakers or just guests to come over to the office and I just want to expose my worldview to new things. One of those random days, I invited a group of students who was entrepreneurs traveling around from the Ukraine, I think. And they came and they talked and

they're like, oh, tell us about Silicon Valley. If you remember, I always felt weird because I was like, I really haven't done shit. I don't really want to tell you anything. But my office was so legit back then, like our office looked like I was a billionaire myself. And so it was always this weird thing where they would come and they would come and ask me to speak. And I would be like, I don't really know anything. I can tell you what we're doing. But like, and I used to ask them, tell me what you know? What do you know that I don't know? And I said, what's the hottest shit in Ukraine?

I asked it kind of as a joke. And they go, oh, Coob. And everyone's like, Coop, Coop. And I was like, what the fuck is Coob? And I go to the website and it's basically TikTok. It's these short videos with audio that's like mashed together that doesn't fit the video. And they were funny as hell. And I was like, oh, my God, this is great?

I was like, is this like a startup? They're like, yeah, it's new, but it has like 10 million users already. And I was like, what? And they're like, yeah, 10 million. I was like registered users. Like, no, daily users. And I was like, whoa. So they ended up getting recruited into Wycombinator.

They just didn't make it into America. Like they didn't make the crossover. The content didn't have the same humor that like would have fit America. And then like, you know, five, seven years later, TikTok comes out, does the same concept, but better and wins, you know, like in America. So that was Kube. So this guy's like, I invented Kube. And I was like, holy shit, you're amazing. You guys are both amazing.

Tell me more about this concept. So they're telling me about this concept. And they're basically like, look, look. look, we're going to open up a hundred of these in New York. And each one's just going to deliver in a one-mile radius. This only works in dense areas like cities or college campuses, which is where another concept that's like this called GoPuff is like a massive winner. GoPuff is a company that was started by guys outside of Silicon Valley.

They basically did this for college campuses where it's like, it's kind of like the vibe is like, you know, like a stoner, just pushes a button and wants his Cheetos delivered. That's what they did. They basically just created like, They've already raised 380 million out of $4 billion valuation. So it's a huge thing. And I think they're cash flow positive.

Exactly. Our friend Sieva told me about this because he had a college-based startup years ago. He goes, you've got to check out this thing called GoPuff. At that time, I think they were raising it like, I don't know what they're raising up. I think he said, he told me, I was like, oh, it's a cool concept. I just thought it was like an idea. He's like, yeah, they're going to do like $100 million in revenue this year. I was like, what?

And I had never heard anybody in Silicon Valley talking about this thing. And still, I feel like nobody in Silicon Valley really talking. Talks about GoPuff. I think this was started. These guys sound Russian too. Are they, no. Yes, they are Russian. Are they Russian?

I believe so. Yeah, Eastern European or Russian. And they must be Penn folks. Exactly. And so they do it on college campuses. They're on like 500 campuses or something. They're doing hundreds of millions a year. They were profitable.

Then SoftBank backed up the truck and invested like 200 or 300 million into the company. So I don't know if they're still profitable because usually when that happens, it's like here's the truckload of money. Go grow like crazy. Burn this money to get all. the market share. Dude, this is so funny. I'm looking up this go puffing. They're Israeli. We called it. We've called it entirely.

And this type of company is like heavy on logistics and you could pull it off, but it's a really hard business. You probably have to be incredibly aggressive and very precise. This is a very, like I think these, if they're from, if they're Israel, they definitely have a military

background. This is totally like what you need for this type of company. It's funny because one co-founder has on his LinkedIn Hebrew as language and the other has Russian. That's so funny. I love when we get this stuff right. I love when our

things that are like, you know, you say, it'll probably get you fired if you say it like, you know, in a normal context and sounds like a total like bro assumption. But there are these patterns you notice that like, you know, you can't help but notice the more companies you see like this.

And so, you know, I'm sorry. Well, have you ever? My bias. I'm in the advertising world and a handful of my buddies who run these huge companies, like how many people you think live in Israel with 10 million or 20 million? Dude, it's tiny.

It's like 6 million people or something tiny. It's something small. A Brady, check it out. It's nothing. And yet the amount of successful people in ad tech who are Israeli, it's astronomical. It's like Samoans who play football. Yes, it's like you were saying.

It's basically like if you see a Samoan, they're strong. If you see a Mormon, it's like the Mormon religion, small number of people growing like crazy. Israelis like tiny population, 8.8 million people. They probably own like in half the world's net worth. It's crazy. They're so successful with this. Yes, and particularly in ad tech. So like Tabula, Outbrain, everything like that. I've got a friend

Nadav who has a, he changed the name of his company. I forget what it's called now, actually, but a huge ad tech. It says ad tech. And then my friend Joe Spizer, have you met Joe Spizer? Yes, he's an investor in my fund. Yeah, he, oh yeah, he told me he did that. He's a great friend of mine. All of his friends are Israeli, all in ad tech. It's crazy. I think this is a cool concept. I'm curious to see if it can work. So I'll tell you why I think it can work. I'll tell you why I think it can. So why I think it can work is it's pretty clear at this point that like the phone is a magic wand and you just say the magic word and then shit magically appears at your house, right? Like e-commerce, you know, buy an item. You just buy it on your phone, push a button, it arrives.

Food delivery, same thing. Push a button. Food derives from DoorDash or whoever. Grocery delivery, same thing. I think this is a subset of grocery delivery. For people who care about speed and convenience, it's the equivalent of the convenience store instead of the grocery store. but it's in the cloud. So I do think inevitably this is going to exist.

And I have some numbers behind it if you're curious about anything. So like just for example, they need 100. So basically they're going to do 200 stores just for two cities. So that's how many locations they need. That's a lot of like locations you've got to pop up and you've got to be very efficient. What's a rent on a store at $3,000 a month? Very low. Yeah, it's going to be like $3,000 a month.

And the footprint's also very small. So it's not like a huge warehouse they need because they're just storing small like kind of package goods and things like that. How many 100 or 200 or $200? They're going to do 100 per city. So you're talking close to half a million a month, maybe half a million a month in rent in one city. I mean, I guess that's not like the end of the world. What's it called? So basically they're doing like one store per zip code.

They guarantee the 15 minute delivery. It's all through bike messengers. The average order is like 35 bucks. So it's not like a grocery delivery where you're like $200 for groceries or whatever. It's $35. So it's small things, but they buy really frequently. So what they're seeing, they're showing me some of the data is like somebody buys once on the first day. they have a super high repeat rate the second day, like kind of shockingly high, almost like a social

network app, which is not normally like for e-commerce or buying something. You usually don't buy the second day. And then they have this set of users where once you buy a certain number of times, it's like, they basically buy like three or four times a week. And they just like, they just like to click the button and get their stuff. Are they raising an eight-figure valuation or a typical seed round of like three or five million? Yeah, more like a seed round. Wow.

If they're listening, I want to join. That sounds cool. I'll email it for you. Yeah, I think these guys are cool. Okay, so here's why I think it might fail. And I told them this, you know, customer acquisition is really hard in general. It gets way harder for things that have a specific geographic, like, restriction. Because to make the one store work, they need like 2,000 households in that zip code.

Right? So the zip code will have 20,000. They need like 2,000 of those households to be using them for them to be, like, profitable on that location. Let's put our optimistic hat on, which is it's probably not. that hard in a city like New York. I mean, you probably could just pay hourly workers to hand out. So I was like, what are you doing now? They're like, I don't know. We try a bunch of shit. We try some ads. We do direct mail. Direct mail seems to work really well. But like, you can't do it that often. You know, can't keep sending letters to me. Yeah, I wouldn't do any online ads. I would just have young men and went to hand enough shit. Yeah, I was like, yeah, hand it out at the church. Like whatever. He's like, yeah, we're basically doing all that shit right now. We don't really know, like, what's the scalable thing. But right now we got two locations in New York. We're just going to keep filling them up and we'll figure it out. Which I like that answer. But like GoPuff, for example, I think they had one advantage, which is on campus, shit spreads like, like, literally like herpes.

You know, like there's, if you get something on campus, it's going to spread throughout that dorm. That's going to spread to the next dorm. Whereas in New York, people are in apartment complexes. Yeah, but can't it do that with apartments? Like, if you leave someone outside of it, like, I had never heard of good egg until walking around my neighborhood and I see good eight boxes. Right. So I think it does work, but less so than a college campus, right? Because you, I mean, I don't know my neighbor.

I didn't know my neighbors really when I lived in my apartment. I knew like, let's say one out of five. And we didn't talk that much, whereas on a campus, you just see way more and you talk way more. So I think campus is easier. And I think that's the one variable would, which is like, this is GoPuff in cities. Is either A, GoPuff just going to beat them or B, is campus is just a magical thing that works way better than cities. And so that's the big bet. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't really care if GoPuff could beat them or not because it's like, it has to be one of the biggest markets out there.

Yeah, it's like a trillion dollar plus market. And so I wouldn't frankly worry too much about competition, would you? I wouldn't worry about competition. It's really that customer acquisition thing I was talking about. Like, is it going to be really hard and expensive for them to acquire customers in that little one mile radius? Or are they going to figure out some really simple tactics that, like, let them scale up and do it? If they do it, it's going to be a big winner, you know?

They got a cute little landing page. Is the app good? I haven't used it because it's not in my area. I'm in California. There's only has 26 ratings, four and a half out of five stars. It's small, yeah. The reviews are great. People are saying it works. Seems good. One of the first one, it seems too good to be true, but it's true.

It's reviews also, which also, who knows if they're ever true? Right. They probably aren't. But it looks great. So cool. Okay, cool. So that's Friginal Moore. I kind of went along on that one, but I like that concept. Okay, I'll bring up one. I was fooling around. I go to this website called Starter Story. You know what that is? Yeah, what is that? That's like a startup, kind of like how they made it? It's this guy named Pat, and I think what he does is he just has a form and he emails. people form questions, like how did you get started, what your revenue, things like that, and they answer, and then it auto-populates to his website. It's pretty neat. And I found a game

called Hunt a Killer. So it's a game called Hunt a Killer, and it's 25, it ranges from 25 to add-ons of maybe $30 a month. You can go to the landing page and see. It's a board game. And you sign up and you get your first pack, and then they send you new, and you're like, I think you're trying to find a killer. And they send you new clues every month. So somehow, like, ongoing. This game does $5 million a month in recurring revenue. Wow. And it's just a game.

It's crazy. I started fooling around on this, or looking around on it, and I was like, is this real? It's only five years old. It was in the Inc. 5,000. It was the sixth fastest growing private company in America, or at least who submitted themselves to Inc. And I think it's bootstrapped. I imagine the margins, I have to,

if they weren't making 30% profit on this, I would be a little bit surprised. It's pretty wild. Have you, I guess you've never heard of this. I've never heard of this game. Actually, I think I've literally just in passing had heard of it once, but I didn't know about this business. And the $5 million a month is honestly very impressive.

Incredibly impressive. What's $5 million divided by $25? If that's their average subscription, I'll do it. $200,000. It's a huge market. It's 200,000 customers is a lot, but it's not like, I mean, it's a big market. And here's, let me tell you why this is interesting to me.

I listen to probably two to three hours a day of crime podcasts. That's such an insane amount of time. So it's usually three episodes. If Sam ever tells him, if Sam ever tells anyone he's busy, now you could be like bullshit. You listen to fucking three hours of true crime a day. Well, I do it while exercising or I do it while I'm just sitting working

or I just like while I'm cooking. I just, I love it. There's a few that I really like. I love anything mob related. And there's a- What is the best, One. Like if somebody doesn't listen to any, what's the best one they should just go listen to? Dateline. So I like Dateline and I like serial killers. Serial killers is produced, oddly, by this company called Parcast. And they have all types of stuff on crime. And I like serial killers is what it's called. But Dateline. Do you know about date? You know what Dateline is?

The TV show. Yeah. It came out in 1980 something. It's 30 plus years old. They launched a podcast a year ago. And it's already gotten like 150 million downloads. It's all, if you look, if you go to podcast top charts, Dateline is always in the top. And it's a 30 year old program. And I listen to so many episodes. It is so awesome. And just the appetite for anything crime or mystery related is just massive, massive, massive, massive. So it is the number 21 podcast in America of all podcasts right now.

It is and is always in the top. It goes between 15 to 20. And they produce, they might do one every day. Are they just taking the TV show and then just like being like, that's just taking the audio and that's the podcast? I don't watch the show anymore, but I think so. It seems like it. Maybe they do a little special stuff, but yeah, it's nothing.

And they have a 30-year library. So like I'll listen, like an episode came out yesterday and it was from 2014. And all they're doing is repurposing this, which I actually think that every TV show should do this. Like even a family guy or Jeopardy. I don't know why every Jeopardy is not a pod, yeah. Because I do that all the time. I turned Jeopardy on my YouTube and I put the phone in my pocket and I just listen and play in my head. I have this question.

I have this get-to-know-you question that I use that you have like 10 of the best answers for, which is like the first one. The question is, what's something if people knew that you do, they'd laugh. And I feel like you just spout out like 10 of these per episode. Wait, you think that's weird? Listen to Jeopardy episodes? Yeah. Dude, they're on YouTube.

Like, they're great. I listen to them all the time. Ken Jennings is the new Jeopardy host starting tomorrow. I'm very, is that weird or is that normal? Do you do that at Brayu? Have you ever thought about it? I've never heard of anyone. Dude, I'm telling you, these episodes get tens of thousands of views. More people are doing it.

I like listen to them all the time. Or if I'm on a long drive, me and sir, that's what we do. We'll play Jeopardy. I love it. Are you good at Jeopardy? I'm awful. I can't watch the show because I'm just like, dude, I didn't know any of these. Like, if it's College Jeopardy, I would win.

If it's normal Jeopardy, I'm hit or miss. But, like, college Jeopardy, I crush. So I always watch the university ones because I know I'll kick those Cornell kids asses. Kids Jeopardy, you crush. Yeah, Fifth Grand Jeopardy, I'm a winner. Do I ever tell you when I audition for Wheel of Fortune and I got on? No, you really got on? All right, so story time.

It's kind of a lame story because I didn't end up going on the show, but I got cast, which is I was doing my first startup, which was like I've talked about a little bit before, it's a sushi restaurant chain, a cloud kitchen for sushi, basically that we started. And me and my buddy Dan are in the kitchen. And Dan is the type of guy that always applied for any contest. and we always used to call him like the sucker at first until we realized he wins a lot of these because nobody actually applies. He would open up a pack of gum and they would be like, oh, create a 30 second jingle for our

gum and you could win a lifetime supply of gum. So he won a lifetime supply of stride gum. That's hilarious. Then there's this sandwich chain called like something like pickle, some pickle sandwich chain or whatever. He named their mascot. He won that contest and he got taken into the headquarters and like they gave him a big, like round of applause awkwardly in front of the whole company was very weird.

I was like, is this a penalty or a victory? And so the last thing he did was he was like, yo, I'm going to try out. He's like, I got to go for like an hour. Can you cover me? I was like, where the fuck are you going? And at this point, I'm like beaten down from the startup. I hate the restaurant. I hate the kitchen.

I hate the food industry. And so I'm like, no, you're not leaving. Don't leave. I don't want to do this shit. You don't want to do this shit. That doesn't mean you could just make some lame excuse to leave. He's like, no, no, it's not a lame excuse. Like, I got to go do something.

I'm like, if it was something legit, you'd tell me what it was. He goes, all right, I'm auditioning for Wheel of Fortune. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, they're in town. It's 10 minutes away. I'm auditioning for Wheel of Fortune, and I want to go do it. And I was like, okay, well, shit, I'm coming with you then. So we both just left the kitchen, closed down the, you know, you can just take a cloud

kitchen offline, just push a button. We're not taking orders. And it's so weird how they do these things. So I'll tell you what happens in a TV show audition for a game show. I didn't know this. By the way, I didn't actually plan to audition. wanted to go see it, but they said, if you're in this room, you have to audition. So I said, okay, sure, I'll audition them. So there's probably like 80 people in the room.

And there's a woman up front. She's the casting director. And she goes, okay, and by the way, am I saying, Wheel Fortune is the one where you spin the wheel and you guess the letters? Spend the wheel gets a letter. Exactly. That's the show. So she's like, you know, at the beginning, what's his name? I don't know what his name is like Pat or whatever his name is. He's going to ask you, or no, sorry, before that was round two. Round one was, we're just going to have you stand up and say a letter. Because if you ever watch the show, they don't just say like, I think maybe like a D. They go, R. Yeah, like, give me a D. So they're like, stand up and say a letter. And you're like, well, what's the puzzle? They're like, no, there's no puzzle. Just say a letter with energy.

And so there was, let's say, 80 people in this room that go through, everybody stands up, says their letter. And then they immediately dismissed half of the room. So they were just like, you guys didn't have the energy. Right. Second thing was a written quiz, like puzzles. And then the third one was, and so that eliminated another half. So now we're down to like 20 people left. And they're like, okay, you got to have a story. You've got to be a character. Like, this is not really about like how good you're at this game, but like Pat's going to interview at the beginning. And you need to either be like a stay at home mom who watches every episode or like a businessman who like, you know, owns this company or you need to be like whatever. You need to have

your stik. So we were like, whatever, we're starting a sushi restaurant. And so they have everybody, you know, you say your name and you say your one line kind of thing about you. And then they call you back a week later or two weeks later and tell you if you got it or not. And so both me and Dan got casted on it. He actually went on. I had moved to Australia in that three weeks later or whatever. Yeah. And so I was like, I was in Australia when they called me. I was like, I'm not going to fly back for Wheel of Fortune. But Dan went on and had an epic joke on the show. That's crazy. Well, too bad you didn't make it. A friend of mine was on it actually very coincidentally, Facebook friend of mine who I went to school with was on it. And he won 50 grand last night.

Last night? Or two nights ago or yeah, this week. That's amazing. Well, he was on it, I guess, weeks ago. But he posted that he's like, yeah, I won 50. Like, he posted the photo of him winning 50 grand. I've also auditioned for Survivor twice and not gone on, but I will keep trying. Anyways, I don't know why I went on this huge tangent.

But you were saying TV shows, you were saying they should turn them into this podcast. And I think, like, you know how we had Tai Lopez on? And he was telling us like, oh, I'm buying up the e-commerce rights of these brick and mortar brands like Dress Barn and whatever. I wonder if an entrepreneur could basically go by the podcast rights to certain shows, game shows or whatever that's out of date. Like, Hey Arnold or something. Right.

And just convert it into a pod. Or like, would you listen to that? I would listen to like some of these TV shows. I like, I used to listen to family guy when I was like, I don't even remember what I was doing, but like I would put it in my ears. It was just funny background noise. And the other one that's, the other idea that's sort of like this, my friend Jason was bringing this up the other day, he goes, you know, TV shows, what they should do is they need to

go like multi-platforms. So basically, let's say you have friends. You have this hit TV show friends. People get invested in the characters, right? It's like, would you listen to a podcast of Chandler and Joey doing like sports betting or like talking about dating? If they stayed in character, but they off the show, they could probably make a fuck ton of money just being the character in more places now, in more mediums. And podcasting, I think, is a really good one for that, where you could take these characters and you can take them off platform if people really love these characters. I'm down. I think that's a fantastic idea. I think that there'd be a lot of, a lot of contracts around syndication, which would be a pain in the ass. Can we talk about

this thing you tweeted about Angel investing? Sure. So you wrote, I doubled down Angel investing over the past six months. I've invested $600,000 into eight startups, a few standouts. And do you want to talk about the standouts? Yeah. So I was just kind of doing an end of your review seeing, you know, okay, I ramped up my investing. Let's see kind of like what I'm excited about, what I think I could be doing better next year, et cetera. Okay, so standouts, I said there's some themes here. So first is like India. I think I've talked about this before, but I invested two Indian companies, which is always hard to do if you're not on the ground. It's hard to you're not meeting the people face to face and stuff like that. You don't know the market as well. But these

companies were just great ideas that were growing really fat, that I could just see like already had great adoption. And what I'm seeing is that in India, There's this thing happened called, have you ever heard of Jio? JIO? He's a billionaire guy in India who people kind of hate because he owns a skyscraper. Well, it's not his name, but yeah, the Ambani family, basically, they owned a company called Reliance. Reliance is like, I don't know, like Exxon Mobile of India. They have like a big energy company, but they're not just Exxon.

They're also like AT&T and they're also like Verizon and everybody else. It's like Berkshire Hathaway or something. Exactly. So India was kind of behind infrastructure-wise, internet infrastructure-wise. So they released Jaya, which is basically like a cell search. service like AT&T or T-Mobile or whatever. But it brought people up to kind of like 4G connection for really cheap. They like subsidize it and just kind of gave it away at cost or below cost. And they call this the Jaya effect in India because so many hundreds of millions of people now

are online that just weren't online before this. And this one company kind of like took the whole country and moved them forward seven years by doing this. And because of that, there's this crazy opportunity for tech startups right now in India where like if you have product market fit, If you have a good product, you're going to grow at this insane pace. So I was just talking about two of the companies. One company invested in called Dukan. The con means store in Hindi. And it's basically Shopify for shopkeepers of India.

So if you owned a little shop that like sold scarves or shoes or food or, you know, sweets or whatever, COVID killed your business, killed foot traffic, killed brick and mortar stores. And so DuCon basically is this little Android app that's kind of like Shopify that just lets that shopkeeper put their whole store online. and anybody can order from their phone, and then it gets delivered locally, like, to wherever, based on wherever you're on. Who found this?

I found this one. How? I was just lurking on Twitter, and I had been following this guy. I think I've talked about it once before, so I won't go in too much in debt, but I found the founder, named Smeet, and he had built something called Ranks,

which is an SEO tool. And so I wanted an SEO tool to grow my websites. I was looking at them, I saw Ranks. I was like, oh, that's actually a well-made site. Anytime I see something well-made, I go find out who made it, and I want to be friends with them.

That's, like, how I've been. built my network. And so I go and I find this guy and I'm like, yo, you built this thing. This thing's fucking cool. Like, let's talk. He's like, okay. And I called him and literally on the, and I just did a Zoom call with him right there on the spot, no scheduling. I was like, are you free right now to talk? He's like, yeah, sure. It's like 8 a.m. in India, but all right, no problem. And I call him and I'm just zooming from my backyard. And he's like, and I'm like, what's your story? And he's like, I've been running growth for all these startups. He's like, I ring growth. And, you know, for all the startups they wanted to grow through SEO.

So I just made my own SEO tool. And then I said, and I said, I was, and I said, thought, why am I growing all these other guys startups? Like, I'm the one creating all the value for them. They're raising at these huge valuations. They pay me like dirt. You know, they get famous, but I'm the one driving the growth. So screw this. I'm going to do my own startup. I was like, what are your ideas? He told me about this idea. And I was like, that's awesome. And I just gave him kind of my usual spiel. Like, I'd love to help you, advise, invest at some point. And then the next day, he's like, yo, I got 300 stores on. I was like, what? And he's like, you know, and he just kept going. And so he's had three million merchants joined the platform in under five months, which is just an absurd

number is growing like crazy. This seems like it might be a hit. And so you were the first money in? Yeah, we're the first round in the company. And so, and there's only like three or four of us from the US who invested in this thing. So it's me, it's Ryan Hoover and my friend Kumar, who also knew also is an internet lurker and had found this guy in the same way I did and was like, yeah, sure, I'm in. And so, and then the rest are the big VCs of India, like whoever light speed or Matrix or

whoever they have. So this company, I mean, it's either going to explode, like it's going to go. grows so fast that it kills the company or like expectations get too high, they get taken too much money. It's like, it's going to die of excess or it's going to be like a multi-billion dollar company. It's going to be crazy. So this fund that you have, it's going to be, it seems like, because every company you're naming, I'm like, you know, who knows if it's going to work, but they all seem legitimate and like promising. They're definitely promising. So this one, by the way, Dukon, I did before I started my angel funds. This is my personal money before that, but all the

others in the thread are from the rolling fund itself. And yeah, I think, they're all promising. I obviously feel good about them, but I'm sure every investor feels fucking good about their companies. Maybe I just sell them better than other people. Like, I don't know. Definitely probably. But you sell them better, but maybe they are better. Yeah, like, I mean, I wouldn't have invested, like, I wouldn't have invested in them if I didn't. But these ones I'm talking about right now, like, I legit think are going to win. Of course, that the giant caveat is, you know, almost all startups fail and blah, blah, blah, normal disclaimers, but like, what I mean is within the basket of startups, these are relatively

at the top. These, I think, are very, very good startups amongst startups. Now, of course, all startups could fail and blah, blah, blah. So let's talk about, you did fitness AI. I was a customer there. You said was. Past tense. You turned out? I turned out. I signed up right when they launched, and it was clear that they were just getting started. So, but I can see, I can see why it's great. Yeah. So there's two fitness companies that I invested in. One, they're both like, of the kind of core mindset, which is... No, sorry. Is this fitness AI? Is this the one where they send you an Apple Watch?

No. Oh, never mind. I didn't use this one. You told me about this one, though, and I would love to use this. I'm almost about to buy... What's that thing called? Tonal. You know, tonal? Yeah. I wanted to buy one, but this company Fitness AI might...

I may not even need it because of this. Yeah, so this guy, basically, his dad was a bodybuilder. And he also, like, lifts weights, but his dad was kind of like a... did competitions and shit like that. And so he was like, oh, I'm doing this fitness app. And I was like, aren't there kind of... of a lot of these, like, personal trainer in your pocket. He's like, yeah, I'm being the best one for building muscle.

He's like, if you break it down, he's like, there's one for cardio. It's called sweat. And it's all about like kind of like high intensity interval training. There's some for running. And that's like my runkeeper. It's hold the underarmor for 500 million. And then there's things like Peloton. That's for biking.

And he's like, the way that digital fitness is playing out is like, people don't just like work out generically. They do a specific type of workout with a specific kind of like body they want to do. They either want to lose fat. They want to build muscle. They want to like be active or whatever it is. So I invested in two. I did my yoga teacher, which is yoga-based one. And so what they're doing is they have yogis in India who are, you know, yoga is invented in India. So they have like experts in India that teach you over Zoom a one-on-one yoga instruction where they're like, oh, move your foot to the right and like do this, do that. And so it's a Zoom yoga class that can be one-on-one or group. And it's great because it's way cheaper than a traditional yoga class in the States. So for in the States, if you go to a yoga studio here, you're going to pay 30 bucks. for that class. This you'll pay 30 bucks like for the month. You know what I mean? You know, you can get one-on-one

training for $19 on this app versus like a group class of 40 people where you don't get any attention. You know what I would do? I think this, my yoga teacher is interesting. Indian company as well, it looks like, yeah, you said that. They're based in the U.S. but they just leverage the like labor arbitrage. So there's a lot of businesses that make money like design pickle, for example. They make money because it's a U.S. company paying U.S. dollar rates and the designers are in the Philippines. Right. But for most things, it's like a worse quality. experience when you get somebody overseas for the service. With yoga, these yogis in India are actually like expert yoga teachers.

And so you don't have that same drop off you normally get without sourcing. So they get the cost savings without the quality drop off. The following that a lot of these yoga folks have, because I follow a lot of them on Instagram and on YouTube. And like there's this one called Yoga with Adrian. Do you know her? I've seen it. Oh, I love yoga with Adrian.

This woman, she's got like this girl next door look. She's very endearing, very cute. She has, let's see how many followers she has. She lives in a lot of, I think it's, she's big, right? Like 10 million maybe, 8.8 million. She's huge. And so I used to during COVID when I, I don't even know. I mean, I still do it all the time.

It wasn't just COVID, but I was using her like crazy. And she has like a 30-day thing. And it's awesome. It is so cool. She's so just got a good brand, good personality. She's a soothing. And those are recorded, right? It's YouTube, yeah.

So I think that there's, again, if you segment these more, kits. It's like some people want the recorded, but it's a better experience when it's a live instructor. Peloton is that way. Well, I agree, but here's what I would do is I wouldn't, I would do what these makeup guys like Ipsi did with that Michelle fan or what was her name? Or what Brian Lee at Honest did with Jessica Alba to get distribution and get users like overnight, I would call Adrian or the 150 people very similar to her that are slightly smaller and being like, hey, I'm going to give you equity in the business and you're going to be a brand partner. You win? And it would crush. I think it's a great idea. But getting customers for this yoga thing would be very, very hard, I think. Yeah. And so I remember

when I was kind of researching the deal, I was like, okay, so you have this subscription. So I was like, so what's the churn like? All your numbers sound good, but like churn is always the scary thing with any subscription business. And he's like, well, our quarterly churn is negative 3%. I was like, you have negative net churn? He's like, yeah, we have negative net churn. Like more people increase their membership value, then we lose in dollars every quarter. And he's like, that's been the case for the last three quarters. We hope it continues. But like three quarters, it's kind of like almost the whole year.

And I was like, okay, I'm in. Like, you know, like, because it's a marketplace, right? On one side he's got instructors and the other side he's got students. And the more instructors and students he gets, it's more valuable is marketplace going to be. It's a paid marketplace around subscription. And the subscription to the churn is negative churn every quarter. I was like, okay, those are enough.

At the seed stage, you really can't get more signals than that. You know, you can't be asking for more validation than that. And how'd you find a yoga one? Dude, this one is funny. Some famous person, either Gary V. or Jason Calacanis had tweeted out, like, what's the, you know, what's a cool startup I should be featuring or what's a fast-growing startup? And this founder had reached, had tweeted back at him and said, you know, we're my yoga teacher, we're a marketplace for yoga and we're doing seven figures in revenue already and we're

growing, you know, this percent per month. And I was like, normally those threads are like trash. It's just like, yo, I got this idea. Like, you know, you go to their landing page and it's awful. And I was like, that tweet alone, I was like, this is good. I looked into his background. He had built a startup already. His previous startup is currently worth about $300,400 million as a private startup.

And so I was like, okay, it's like a credible guy who's had success before. What's his previous one? It's called Punch. Punch with, I think, two H's at the end. What do they do? I don't remember. It's like some marketing thing or like, I don't know what it is. It's like seven, eight years old as the company is done well, but I don't think it's like one of the super

break companies that's like going to go public. So it's like somewhere in between, which who knows what that means. So I was like, this guy's credible, that tweet, those metrics sounded promising. I like the concept in general. Let me take a punt. So that's how I found him. I'm, uh, and then you have this other one called Bubbles, which I just installed. I installed I installed while I was talking to you. Bubbles is a Chrome extension that helps you capture screenshots and videos and you could collo, right? Yeah, exactly. So you take a screenshot or a screen like a video screenshot is either a photo or a video screenshot. So you could just say, okay, here's what I'm seeing.

And then on top of it, bubbles is kind of like a chat bubble. Like you can annotate it so you can type. Like, for example, you could go to the Hustles website or Trends website. Let's say you want to tell your team how it can be better. So you go to the Hustle website, you screenshot it. You didn't just click and you like sort of add little annotations or comments about stuff that you think could be improved. And you just share that link with your team.

And then they can comment back and be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to fix this one now. Or like, let me, do you have any suggestions on what we could change it to? And like they can just, you collaborate on top of a screenshot or on top of a screencast. So for more and more companies working remote, you need a way to collaborate. I do this all the time. I take like a thousand screenshots a day, and it's so janky. I like annotate it with a big red arrow.

They're not let me capture part of a screen. You can. There you get. Maybe it's not fully a solid or, I don't know, it's not as obvious. But you can do a video, you can just full screen. One other thing I like is you could do a long screenshot. So you know, it sucks when you're trying to screenshot a long page. This lets you just grab the full page instead of 10 screenshots that you then have to

like paste together. And this is to me a makeup of a company I should have invested in. I was friends with the founders of Loom early on, which has turned out to be a $300 million valued company now and growing. And, you know, I could have invested that at probably like $5 million, $6 million. And so that would have been a pretty big, you know, 60, 70X return before dilution. Loom did the same thing. They were like, oh, quickly record a screen cast and share it with your coworkers. What did you learn doing this? I mean, it seems like a pretty fun job. is it going to be lucrative? I think so.

The thing with startup investing, though, is it's more like, what I'll call it is it's a fun retirement account. Why do I say that? Because, like, you know when you put your money in your 401K? It's like, cool, I'm investing. It's compounding, but it's like I can't touch it until I'm 65. That's the thing with startups, right? It's illiquid for a long time.

And you don't get answers about whether these are going to be the big winners that they could be for a long time. It takes time for these things to grow. And even when they succeed, like right now Airbnb went public, DoorDash, in public, all these companies are going public, but they are like 10 plus years into their lifespan oftentimes. I think Airbnb is what, 11, 12 years into its lifespan, something like that, maybe about that. And so it takes a long time. So it's like a mini retirement account, but that's like fun. And so it's like, this is something where you invest in it when you're 30, you get paid out

when you're 40. And your money has been compounding at this very fast rate, but like you don't get to touch it until you're 40, 40 or 42, you know? So it's like, you have to think about it that way. It seems way easier. It seems way easier than starting a company. It's easier, but it's also less lucrative, I think, overall, right? Like, you start a company, you could become worth tens of millions or $100 million. To do that with angel investing, you have to hit one of the giant winners, right? Like, so, for example, I was doing some calculations of the returns of these companies. So, for example, DoorDash, one of the early investors of DoorDash put in $200,000 into the early

round, and that appreciated, like, 700X. So they put in 200 grand, and that stake is worth like $150 million right now in the public markets. And so, you know, a 700x return is so crazy. But doesn't the individual or the company only gets 30% of that then, right? Or 20. The investor, yeah. So basically, okay, so I was doing the math on, for example, Sequoia. Sequoia released, Sequoia is one of the big brand funds.

And they released their, what's it called, like their earnings. And so, or their returns of the previous five. And so one of their funds, they said return to investors and 11x, 11x returns. Let me pull up my spreadsheet because I was doing some math. And I was like, okay, how much do the individual partners at Sequoia make? How much do they make it off this thing? So let me just give you some numbers. So their fund was a $1.3 billion fund. And it returned 11x, which is crazy. But it returned that because it had like WhatsApp and several other big winners in it. The total return on that was about $18 billion. The amount they did.

gave to investors of $14 billion. So for the fund managers themselves, the GPs. Is the GP the boss? GP is general partner. That's the top level at an investment fund. There might be like a managing director, but they don't get paid more. So GP is like the guys who actually get a share of the profits. And they're putting up a little bit of their own money, but they're not always putting up their own money. They're putting up their share. Yeah, basically, that's their, that's their, so they get paid in two ways. They take a 2% per year management fee. So just on the 1.3 billion. That's 260 million of just what's it called? No.

No, that's 20. It's 20 million. No, no, because 1.3 billion. 2% of 1.3. Oh, sorry, but it's 10-year fund. So over the 10 years, they get $260 million. Now, let's assume, I don't know exactly how many GPs, Sequoia has. Let's say they have eight.

So those guys, they made about, let's say they had eight GPs. That's $32 million over the 10 years. So it's $3 million a year of just their salary from the management fees. Now, of course, some of it's going to go to the office and other things. Let's just round down aggressively and say they're each pulling home two and a half million dollars a year just to write the checks, just to meet founders. Do you really think so? Do you think that's the number? That seems awfully high. For Sequoia, because they're raising mega, mega funds, right? This is a billion dollar plus fund. Yes, I do think it's that high. And so that's the first thing. So they're pulling out. Let's call it two to three million dollars a year salaries if there was eight partners.

Then you had the carry on this fund, which their share of the carry was about $3.3 billion. And again, they had multiple winners in this thing. So I think this was an extremely high performing fund, but whatever. That's $400 million each that they get as their carry after the kind of 12-year-fusson. Who is one of the current part? Roll off both is one of them. I can't saw that. Tell me one more.

Alfred Lynn. So Alfred Lynn, he started the company with, he started Zappos with Tony Shea. So then this guy's got to be close to a billionaire, no? I believe so. And roll off the same thing. He was CFO, I think, of PayPal with Peter Thiel and them. And so he was, I believe, the CFO during that time. So he obviously has done well before this, right? They didn't like make it rich with this. But I just wanted to know how much did the top GPs that the top funds make? And I'm pretty sure that if you annualize it out, these guys are bringing home somewhere between $30 and $40 million a year. Do you really think that that is wild, wild, wild? Somebody can correct me. We have a bunch of people who are VCs who listen to this. You can correct me if I'm wrong. I'm doing my bank. of the napkin math. I'm not, I'm not from this job. I mean, Sequoia has the is the best, top of the top. The best ever, maybe. I think that the partners at smaller kind of still reputable known funds, but they're not billion dollar funds and they're not getting this type of crazy 11x on a 1.3 billion dollar fund.

I think they're bringing in a tenth of that. So I think where the top guys and the top years are bringing in 30 to 50 million dollars each, I think that three to five million is what the VC, you know, normal successful GPVCs are making. I'm on. Koya's website. They don't tell you how many GPs they have. Their website is slick. Yeah. Wow. It makes me want to like them. I mean, it makes me want to be part of whatever they're part of. Wow. Oh, wow. And Michael Morowitz, okay. Yeah, he was the guy in charge. He's worth multiple of billions. So should we wrap up there and next week we'll get to. Yeah, we should wrap up. The last thing I would say on the investing front for me, what I've kind of like my takeaway at the end of this was like, this is cool. The financial way to think about this is like a mini-retirement fund, meaning it's awesome that it's going to grow.

And I think it's going to do wealth. I think it's going to compound at a fast rate. But it's illiquid for some period of time. Normal 401k is like 40 years. This is going to be illiquid for like 10 years. The other side of the way I think about it is this is basically like getting paid to go to business school. It's like I get to sit front row, learn about new businesses, learn about new technology, meet cool people. But instead of paying for it, you get to get paid by investing in startups.

So that's why I think. Would you do this full time or would you start something? I wouldn't do it full time. I love it in the capacity that it is right now, which is I just keep doing my thing, you know, building cool shit, making content like this. And in doing so, I run into cool people. And when I run into cool people doing cool things, I say, can I invest? And then I put this at the bottom of the thread, which I think is really important,

which is in most investments, right, if you're a real estate investor or you're a hedge fund guy, it's all about, you know, the investor picks the asset. That's it. investor picks which asset to invest in. Startups are the only asset class where the investor picks the asset, but the asset also has to pick the investor. Most of these deals, it's not just me saying, here's a check. It's can I invest?

And then they say yes or no and for how much. And so this is the only industry, there's the only asset class where that happens, that match happens. And so the game theory of that means you have to be a desirable person for them to want on their cap table. In the meeting, you have to behave well. So that's good. That game theory helps everybody behave better.

you have to be helpful and have a reputation for being helpful. You also have to build your brand as somebody who, if your name is on this company, it helps that company like legitimize itself for the next investor or the next customer that comes by. And so it's cool because the more successful you get, the better investment returns you get also. Does having like a podcast help significantly?

For sure. Yeah, there's several of these like Bubbles is a great example. Their round is over subscribed. They don't need me. I think a bunch of your audience would use a product like this. And I think you guys are, you guys have a good platform. So, like, I want you in because you have a name.

Or, like, I invest in Guggan's, like, new ed tech thing, which is, like, a way for influencers to launch courses. And I was like, hey, I want to teach anyways. I'm going to launch my own course. He's like, perfect. Like, again, that guy's built two, like, kind of rocket ship companies already. One that's worth multiple billions of dollars in the ed tech space already. So he had every investor he wanted to invest, he could have had in.

The only way I got access to that round was because I said, not only am I going to invest, I'll be a teacher on your platform, and I have an audience that will come. And so I'll make your platform more valuable. I'll give you feedback as a user. Yeah, I missed out on that one just because that was when I had Lyme and I just wasn't take, I wasn't talking to anyone. I don't, I won't regret it because. By the way, I think you still can because he's doing something cool,

which is he carved out a very small part of the round. I think like quarter million dollars, $500,000, something like that, to let any accredited investor from the public invest in it. I know, but the valuation is way higher than when you, It's not the way higher. It's only $5 million. So I invested at $20 million. This is at $25 million. So it's not that much higher. That sounds, $5 million sounds like a big number. But in valuation terms, it's just like, I put this in my mistakes part of the Twitter thread, which was there was a bunch of companies where I was like, I was like, oh, this is interesting, but I'm not sure. Let's just wait and see. And like four months later, I wait and saw. And sure enough, they proved it out more. And all of a sudden, the price was three times higher. Yeah, that happened with aura ring, I think. Were you part of that? I wasn't a part of that one now. A couple of our friends were. And they were like, or a ring, oh, $100 million. That's a lot of money for evaluation.

And now it's 10 times that. Right. Exactly. And that happened to be with several of these. But the company we were talking about right before they launched was Pipe. And I was like, oh, this is a genius idea. You were like, this is a genius idea. We could have put some money in at that time at a lower valuation.

And now I'm talking to them now. And, you know, the valuation is much higher because he's proved it out a lot more. That's that David Sachs business. He's one of the investors. I wouldn't give him the credit. Harry Hurst is the founder. Yeah. He's pimped it out all the time.

Yes. Yeah. And he was the lead of their kind of like first round or whatever. Right. We did miss that or I missed that one too. Okay. So I feel like I take this episode a bunch of different tangents. Abrae, what do you think?

It was pretty good. Better than the last couple for sure. I believe we do zero minutes of prep. We did like 10 here. I want people to let me know like, because there's some stuff like this, like Angel investing. I don't know if that's interesting to people or if it's not. I think it will be. You think so?

I do. Yeah. I think we should do like, I don't know, because people are kind of sensitive of salaries and stuff, but I find that stuff super interesting. And nobody talks about it, like how much these guys actually make. We should have one of these folks on it. Only if they're just going to say how much they make. Let's have Jason Calcanus come on because he's kind of a loose canon.

He'll talk. Yeah, we should. I was on his thing. He owes us. We'll get him one. Yeah, get him on. That'd be great. I'm looking at the download numbers.

People seem to be liking what we're doing. It's going up? Yeah, slowly but surely. We are in the top 50 of all business podcast today. Hell yeah. Ahead of who are we head of Abrae? That's what I care about. Top 50, all right. That sounds good.

Who are we ahead of? Next to Motley Fool. Okay. Crush Morning Brew. Who else? We're beating all the big names. We're reading Pomp, Navaul, Morning Brew's podcast.

We're beating all the big guys. Yeah, those chumps. Well, those aren't big guys, but that Pomp is, I guess. I mean, Naval's, yeah, like a million plus followers on Twitter. He's pretty good. Yeah, but he doesn't actually do that podcast, does he? Yeah, it's him. The Naval podcast isn't Naval, is it?

No, it's him. Yeah, it's him. Oh, for real? Where does that guy even do that? Do? Does he do anything? Like, is he just like a personality? Is he like Tim Ferriss now? Well, he hired a CEO for Angelus. So he's not the CEO anymore. So yeah, he just thinks about shit and meditates and invests. Where does he live? Does he live in San Francisco? Who do you think? I have no idea where he lives.

That guy's weird to me. I mean, in a good way. Someone sent me a shirt. They sent me a very, very kind letter I should find out what the person. Oh, and Bray, you sent you a Naval book. Yeah, that's right. So I got the book here that my friend Eric wrote. This is actually a really smart tactic, by the way. This guy, Eric Jorgensen. He, he, was like, it's like the fastest way to build your following and build a mailing list is to just capture all the philosophies of a famous person like Naval or Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett or whoever. He just wrote the almanac of Naval. He just took all the shit Naval had said in his different podcasts and blogs and stuff like that. Jack Butcher did it with him. Yeah, exactly. Jack

Butcher got famous too with visualized value. He just took Naval's philosophy and created dope visuals around it and tweeted it out every day until those caught on. And so like instead of I'm going the long, hard, slow, shitty way of trying to, like, come up with my own ideas and make those famous. I should just be hijacking these other people's fame and building content about them and then slowly slip myself in. Whatever. It works. Yeah. At this point, now, people are doing that with Jack Butcher.

He has like a, he's like a Jack Butcher. Someone made like a fan page for him. I might have made it. I love that guy. He's great. Is that what they're called? No, I don't get that joke. What's that mean?

I don't get the joke. That was a lame joke. Okay, I'm out of here. I talk to you guys soon. Later.