The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026

The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026 Speaker 1: We have this podcast called My First Million where we're coming with all these complicated schemes of how somebody can make their first million. Meanwhile, in their relationship, Sarah made her first million before Sam with the simplest scheme of all. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. Speaker 1: Okay, so we invited our buddies from TBPN, John and Jordi, here to do one of our favorite episodes that we do every year called Sarah's List. And it's called Sarah's List in honor of the queen herself, Sam's wife, Sarah. You know, it's a classic story, really. She just joined a great company that was clearly already great as like employee 3,000 and the math was like this. She got a job at Airbnb and I think it was, you know, her numbers aside, the general math is you get a job and they'll offer you maybe like a 40 or 50K a year stock package in addition to your salary. So you get your salary. You get your health care. They got a kitchen where they're serving you lunch. They got oat milk in the fridge. So you're not sacrificing anything. She didn't have to come up with the idea of Airbnb. She joined it. She wasn't the first employee grinding like crazy. She was employee 3000. But that stock package, which over a four year period is, you know, you're granted about $200,000 worth of stock. 5X'd and she made a million bucks before either me or Sam. And so we kind of wanted to honor the brilliance that is joining companies that are already clear winners, especially in tech, because the winners can run so far. And so every few years, me and Sam have done this, where we come up with our list. We call it Sarah's List, which is the 10 companies you would join right now. Because as a person, your time is essentially your investment, right? When you join a company, that's an act of an investment. Speaker 2: It's funny, because I know some investors who made an investment in that unicorn round, and they had the exact same logic. They were like, complete parlor market fit, obvious runner, just pile money into this easy investment, and then it worked. Speaker 3: She joined, I think, at the $18 million valuation, something like that. And then COVID happened and we were like, well, shit, that was a good idea. Sucks it didn't work. And then obviously everything changed in six months. And then I think it IPO'd around $100 billion. And you guys remember that famous interview with Brian Chesky where he's told on air, he's like, the share price is this and it's worth $100 billion. He's like, I I didn't know that until just now because back then in 2019 or 18, when it was $18 million, we were like, this could be worth like $30 billion. Like, you know, like if everything works. And so anyway, that was her story. And it worked out great because she worked a normal amount, had great maternity, paternity package, had great benefits, all that stuff. We've done this for a few years, but you know something? We haven't actually done this in like 18 months because it's been so hard these last 20 or 24 months with everything going on with AI. And so you guys are pretty cool to have because I think you'll know a lot more about some of the latest and greatest. Speaker 1: Yeah, we wanted you guys on because not only do you guys Are you guys super smart? But you guys, part of your show is you're talking to the CEOs of these companies in these like 15 minute interviews every single day. And so you're getting a good sense for kind of like, who's doing well? Who do you believe? What companies excite you? So we wanted to hear what you guys have. By the way, last time, Sam, I went back and checked. I think of the 10 companies that we did in our last round, which was something like 18 months ago, 18 months, two years ago, something like that. I think we got six out of 10 that are already either there or pacing to be there. So for example, when we did OpenAI and we were laughing, we were like, hey, here's a shocker. OpenAI, it was $100 billion valuation at the time. It's now close to $800 billion now. And we even said, look, there's no bonus points for difficulty in life, in the game of business. Sometimes the best companies are just hidden in plain sight. They're right in front of you. And so I think we've done pretty well. Speaker 3: The biggest one was Andral. We did Andral in 21, I think, and that was $4 billion at the time, and I think it's $90 or $50. I don't remember. Speaker 2: And a lot of those companies should stay on the list, honestly. I think, you know, even even if you just done Anduril last year, like the valuation has increased so much that it still makes sense to include. Speaker 4: Yeah. The biggest mistake that people make is not going with an obvious winner because it's already in the multiple billions and it just looks like, OK, what's the potential upside from here? And that's just been wrong so many times in the last 10 years. Speaker 3: Do you guys ever take shares or equity instead of Dollars for advertising? Speaker 4: We have, but it's more just over the last year. We're a super young business, and it's made sense to optimize more for like actual real revenue. John and I. Speaker 1: The suits don't buy themselves. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a fact. Landlord, don't take Monopoly money. Wait, let me tell you one quick story, Shaan. I was at Ramp's office. And I saw the pitch that Jordi or I think both of you guys sent. And I saw one line, and Eric said that Jordi wrote it or something like that, where he was like, the beginning of the pitch, it said, if you advertise with us, you'll get so big that you are going to be dragged in front of Congress because they're going to accuse you of having a monopoly. Speaker 4: I think this was John's line. This was yours, right? Speaker 1: That's so good. I don't know if you guys are fans of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but the Dennis system. Dennis has this thing where he basically talks about the implication. It's not that they're in danger, but it's the implication of danger. There's this famous line in advertising that Craig Clemens told us when he was on the podcast. He talked about how there's this one I don't know if it was a supplement or like a perfume or something like that that was having trouble selling and then they switched the copywriting to say, you know, the founder swears. She swears that this does not contain any illegal stimulants. And it's like she swears. There's nothing illegal in this. It's just that damn good. And it's the implication that works. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so funny because, yeah, we want to win super hard with our sponsors. And, like, the hardest you can win in tech is, like, you know, that Mark Zuckerberg moment when he goes on Capitol Hill and it's like, OK, wow, he's actually at that level. Speaker 1: Thank you, Senator. Speaker 2: We run ads. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: That's like with my fitness campaign. No one's accusing me of taking anything yet, which means it's not working. Why does everybody think I'm all natty? I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet. On my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, give a quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth. Things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. All right, so let's jump in. We each have roughly three each. We're going to try to get 12, maybe some bonus, some honorable mentions. Speaker 2: Cool. Speaker 1: My first pick. This is a company you guys might not even know about, which I like. I like to surprise you, but I'm coming in strong here. Zuru Tech. Okay, Zuru Tech is a company that's based out of New Zealand. And they're the third biggest toy company in the world. So they make, if you've ever seen mini brands, Sam's a big mini food collector. He likes the little mini toys. They make some of the most popular toys in the world. The bunch of balloons where you can fill up 30 water balloons at once. You know, that type of stuff. So the founder, Nick, came on the podcast. He's the wealthiest man in New Zealand. And his story is insane, like probably the craziest grind story I've ever heard. By the end of the episode, I told him, I go, I think you're the closest thing to Elon Musk that I've ever seen. People just don't know about you because you live on the other side of the world and you were in the toy industry. So kind of people overlook you. So he's got a new company and his new company or it's actually based in there. It's they're building homes. Basically, here's what you do. It's like ChatGPT. You just describe, you drop a pin where you're going to put the home. It automatically, no matter where in the world, any country in the world, any city in the world, any neighborhood in the world, you put it, it automatically downloads all. It has all of the building codes and the permitting and the terrain so it knows if you're on an incline or if there's a hill there or whatever. It has all of that already built in. And it's called Dreamcatcher. So you basically describe the home you want. You're like, oh, I want this like kind of minimalist, blah, blah, blah, 5,000 square feet, make it cool, blah, blah, blah. So you basically describe like ChatGPT the home you want and it renders it all using like Unreal Engine. So it renders the whole thing in front of you. It creates like an AI video of like a home walkthrough for you using kind of like a mid-journey type of thing. And then you literally like build the home. You click it and he's got a factory in China. That's like the iPhone building factory, but it actually builds all of the subcomponents for this home. And it's insane. Like they went and bought like when the Palisades fire happened and people needed to sell their lots, they bought like $80 million worth of lots in L.A. and he's building, he's basically going to print these I say print, it's building with a robot. Like $50 million homes in LA. It was the most impressive demo I've ever seen, seeing the homes that they're building. And it's real. This guy, he's basically a manufacturing genius, him and his brother. They have huge factories in China to be able to do this stuff. And the crazy thing about homes is homes is a space that's really never been touched by, definitely not AI, but really even most technology doesn't really go into construction and home construction. And when you're selling homes that are multi-million dollar homes, you don't have to sell that many of them to be doing billions in revenue. And so, if there was one company that I could kind of empty the tank of my life savings into, I would be pouring it into this, which means it's a contender for Sarah's List for me. Speaker 2: Love it. Speaker 4: Great case. Did he talk at all about why previous attempts in this category haven't worked? Because there's been a number, there's kind of like a, I like this bet because There's actually like a graveyard of Silicon Valley companies that have like made efforts. Speaker 1: Yeah, because he's not a Silicon Valley company. He's a guy, him and his brother have basically been building factories in China for like the last 20 years. So they're a manufacturing powerhouse. So, for example, they were in the toy space and they became the third largest toy company in the world. They do, like, over a billion dollars of pure profit a year just into the two brothers' pockets. Like, it's crazy. Then they went into the diaper space. They're like, oh, you know what? Let's go compete in one of the most, like, difficult to compete with things against Procter & Gamble. And he built the fastest growing, and now I think it's, if it's not the number one, it's basically right up there with Huggies and Pampers now, even though it's brand new, diapers company. You know, they're selling in Target, Walmart like crazy, and they manufacture their own diapers. And the reason why was he found that in China there was like a different style of diaper manufacturing, different materials, and he basically brought that to market in the US. And so he built the largest set. Then they did the same thing in haircare. They have the fastest growing brand on TikTok for haircare. And now they're doing it for homes. And so I think the big difference is, like Elon, hardware is hard and most software founders You know, go in for a rude awakening when they go into hardware, whereas these guys have been doing literally like not just hardware, but like the building of the factory is the hard part. The factory that makes the product is sort of secondary to it. But building a highly automated factory is the number one, one thing. And they've been building factories for a very, very long time. It's actually hilarious. When they went to China to start their toy company, they built like he went there because he heard, oh, all the manufacturing happens in China. But what that usually means is you go find a manufacturer, you tell you tell them what you want to make and they make it. He went to China, didn't realize that, like a naive mistake, and built his own factory there, like on the side of a river. Like did it all from scratch because he didn't understand like, oh, when people say they manufacture in China, it doesn't mean they go manufacture in China. They find an existing manufacturer. He missed that part and just went the hard way from the beginning. Speaker 4: That's great. Speaker 3: Shaan, sounds like you don't like this guy at all. Speaker 1: Did I say I'm a fan? I'm a fan of this guy. Speaker 3: What do you guys think? Speaker 2: Will this actually work as the bear case? Unpack that a little bit. Speaker 1: Well, the demo is so insane that You just have to ask the question, like, is this like many AI products that demo well, but production sucks? Speaker 2: Sure, sure, sure. Speaker 1: And so basically the demo was so good that, you know, you just kind of got to see a home first before you, you know, you fully believe. Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I would put tariffs as more of the bear case. Like if China-America relations degrade further, then It's going to be harder to get stuff across the border. It's going to get harder. Speaker 1: Here's the craziest part of the whole thing. You try to find cost savings when you do stuff, whether you do it in China or you're using new technology. And so the question was, is it 10%? Is it 20%? How much is it? It's basically like More than an order of magnitudes. It's more than 10 times cheaper to build the homes this way, which I think is kind of the exciting part. Because if you can bring the cost of building down, that's actually very, very meaningful for progress in the world. Speaker 3: But this breaks the whole point of the list. I don't want to work with a person that sounds like Elon. Speaker 1: There was no caveat that said the founder is completely sane. We didn't add that. We just said, you join a company that's already got an existing, these guys have a hugely successful business already, but it has a chance to 5X because there's a pathway there. That was my first company. Let's switch to somebody else. Speaker 3: Yeah, let our guests go first. Speaker 1: Let the guests go first. Speaker 4: Okay, quick caveat. So we were under the impression that we had to be picking companies under a billion dollar valuation. It's a good kind of exercise and actually like understand that early stage today still means sub 1 billion basically. Speaker 3: Jordi, are you carrying like a $5,000 handbag in that photo? Speaker 4: It's a duffel bag. Speaker 1: Can we do the origin of this? Speaker 4: Well, so the origin of TBPN is, other people have described it as ESPN for tech and business. What's funny is that John and I do not watch any of the traditional American sports, football, basketball, baseball, etc. Speaker 2: Anyway, first one, Varda Space Industries. Helmed by none other than Deleon Asperov and Will Bury, former SpaceX. Valuation $726 million, but like one of those multi-decade projects that could have really, really large TAM, really, really large expectations. So they manufacture things in space. So they do not build the rockets. They partner with SpaceX to launch a capsule and then inside that capsule, They effectively have created a manufacturing environment where gravity is an off switch. And so for certain things, imagine you're trying to grow a crystal or you're trying to grow a drug or the heart tissue or there's applications for certain types of fiber. They're doing a lot of biomedical work right now. And then there's also defense applications. If you can get things up into space and get them down, there's a whole bunch of interesting things you can do there. And so the company is maybe four or five years old at this point. 150 employees based in Los Angeles. Obviously, you know, very hardworking environment, but especially with the new NASA administration, things are moving much faster. SpaceX, there was a lot of uncertainty last year. They started landing the Starships and launch costs are starting to tick down again. And so it gets easier and easier. And when they first put up their first capsule in space, this is the real question with a space company is like, how long will it take them to actually do something in space? It used to be five, 10 years. They got their first capsule up in just a few years. They're already on their fifth or sixth capsule. People stopped selling. Speaker 4: Also important, they got it back. Speaker 2: They got it back, yes. Speaker 4: A lot of space companies put stuff up into space, but that's kind of the end of the story. I think our kind of framework for Varda is like if you get a group of ultra-talented people together, ultra-hardworking people together, that can develop the capability of simply putting stuff up in space and bringing it back down, it's going to have a really wide range of applications over the long run. Speaker 3: What's the founder like? Speaker 2: Will Brewer is like completely like super sharp by the book SpaceX engineer background who has been able to talk to big pharma CEOs and get them to sign up and then Deleon's, you know, Deleon. Speaker 4: Deleon, who's obviously quite a character, very, very loud, but the company in general has been very anti-hype. So there's a lot of companies in space that are just hype businesses. They will get all the way to the public markets without having accomplished much, if anything at all. And Varda doesn't chase the hype. They weren't coming out this last year Having like a new pitch around data centers just because that would have gotten them. And so for being a space company, they're extremely, I would say, grounded, focused on developing capabilities that are going to be, like John said, very valuable in a wide variety of applications. Speaker 2: There's like one, it's a very difficult space, capital intensive. There are not a lot of, there are some, there are a decent amount of companies that are sending stuff up to space. There are many fewer that are bringing stuff back down. And it hasn't been a hugely competitive space where there's like 10 players. Speaker 3: We had someone, Shaan, on the pod, I think like last year, explain this company. And they went through this huge thing about why it was cool and we were like, Why do pharmaceutical companies need to make drugs in space? Like, they forgot to explain. Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't explain that part. They were like, oh, it's great because you can, like, you know. Speaker 2: No, no. Like a thousand times more expensive than doing it on Earth. But there's just specific chemicals, like very rare things. But again, you have to view this as You guys, you know, multi-decade thing. If you believe in space, if you believe that, you know, launch costs are going to continue to fall, it's going to get cheaper and cheaper, then there's like this interesting trend that you're on the frontier of. And the company's been very good at weathering storms, whether there's like some slight, you know, sell-off in the market or the narrative changes, like the company's well-managed. And so if you can just keep getting through those and just always be the best space, the It's a company that does stuff in space, basically. That's good. Speaker 1: I do like that you're riding the wave of basically... Is Elon going to get better at doing rockets? Yep. And if he does, the cost per whatever, cost per gram to take something up into space is going to keep falling. And you just keep, you get to keep, your business keeps getting better the more hard work Elon does. I kind of like that in general as a thesis. Speaker 2: So last year, Blue Origin landed their heavy rocket. And so now there's actual, there's actually two of their companies. And so that means real pricing pressure, which is like very, very good. Speaker 1: By the way, I have two tangents. I was reading the Elon biography, which I'm late to, but I kind of like it because everybody's done with it and I'm the only guy still in there poking around. There's an amazing section, I don't know if you guys have read this, but it's about the tweets back and forth between Elon and Bezos, the passive-aggressive rivalry around the launch thing. Sam, have you seen this? Speaker 2: Well, there's more recent ones. Bezos just posted the tortoise. He said, I'm the tortoise. He's going tortoise mode, slow and steady. Speaker 3: Who's the passive aggressive one? Speaker 1: Both of them. So first, so Blue Origin was like the first to do a reusable launch, which Elon wanted badly, right? But Blue Origin, but he was basically like, they didn't go up very high. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: And so he was just like, he's like, Bezos post a picture be like, Oh my god, we did it. I'm standing next to one of the perhaps the rarest item on earth. A reusable rocket. Or a reused rocket. A reused rocket. And he's saying, basically, that's so rare. You never see a reused rocket. And then Elon goes, congratulations, but perhaps not the rarest. Because SpaceX has done that six times, if we're counting suborbital hops. And then it was just like, kind of like, your rocket doesn't go high enough. And then when Elon did it like a month later, Basil's like, congratulations to Elon. A really excellent suborbital launch. One of the best suborbital launches. And Elon was like, fuck you, dude. It was so high, but technically, yes, was still suborbital. And they've been basically going back and forth with these like, congratulations, but, and I just kind of love it. I love it. I love the pettiness. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. All right, let's move on to the next one. What do we got? Speaker 2: Back to you, I think. Speaker 1: Okay, I'll do one. Okay, my next one is Suno. Okay, I've talked about Suno before. If you don't know, Suno is basically a app or a website you go to and you can make music even if you've got no musical talent, right? So you can just go on there, describe the type of song you want. Maybe you bring your lyrics. Maybe you don't. Maybe you just give it a vibe and you basically are vibe coding music. It's amazing. I'm addicted to the app. I use it all the time. I've probably made, I don't know, 40 or 50 songs. I've burned tens of thousands of credits on this thing. It's crazy how addictive it is, how fun it is to do. And I just think this company has a long way to run. So right now, valued at $2.5 billion, something like that. They have $200M in ARR. So it's not like an AI app that's like... Speaker 2: $300M in ARR now. Speaker 1: $300M. All right. Speaker 2: Crazy. Speaker 1: Breaking news. We got $300M now already. And so I met the founder. I really like kind of what they're all about. And they also just struck a deal with a licensing company with a music label, which is important. Basically, here's the upside. Because I was like, okay, this is already at $2.5B. Does this have that 5X potential? And I was doing some math and it basically SoundCloud has 40 million music creators. Okay, so that's 40 million people around the world who actually have musical talent that are publishing on the platform. Suno's only at 2 million users on their platform. That's people who don't have to have the musical talent part, the skill. And so the market for a number of people who will make music that don't know how to make music is gonna be something like 10, 20, possibly more than that, possibly 50x the number of actual musicians who create music. So I just think, I think this thing has an incredible long way to run. I would not be surprised if there were hundreds of millions of weekly active users of people who are making music on this thing. And when you do the math of what that turns into, because people are willing to pay, right? Imagine not having to practice or do music lessons or any of that shit. You just pay $15 and boom, you're a musician. It's kind of an amazing trade to make. So I think this thing has a long way to run. I think Suno becomes a $50 billion plus company. It'd be also a really fun company to join if you joined right now, because you'd be doing something that's both on the frontier, but it's not like manufacturing in space. It's not like actual rocket science. And you're just a part of culture. It's going to become a big part of culture, which is always fun if you're going to work somewhere. Speaker 3: What do you guys think about these companies that are, we were laughing, I think we said they were launched two years ago and they're at $300 million in revenue. Does that have longevity? Speaker 1: You have to ask a couple questions. One is, is it a fad, right? Do I think this is just like, is it like a, I don't know, whatever, Dubsmash or like, you know, one of these things where it's like, everyone's going to try it once, like the yearbook photo thing, and then there's really no reason to come back again. I don't think this is a fad. I think people are going to want to keep creating stuff. The second thing is it's going to have too much competition. And I do think that they're kind of on an island where all the big model companies are probably not going to. This isn't the kind of primary war front. And they have so many like bigger battles that they're fighting right now. I kind of think Suno is going to go uncontested for a little while. Longer where it's not the main thing that OpenAI or Anthropic is going to try to roll out and make mainstream. And so I think by focusing and specializing, you know, they have a lot of other stuff built in. Like if you make the song, they have like an editor where you get the stems and you can actually like remix the song and they have like a discovery platform. Like there's a lot more depth that they can go into. So I think that why it would be around is because it's not in the crosshairs. Of all the highest ELO battle in the world, the genius battle, which is like what OpenAI and Grok and Anthropic are all doing. Speaker 3: What are the bros? Speaker 4: Yeah, I think what you're getting at is basically like Suno is the front door to AI music in the way that ChatGPT has been the front door to large language models. That has a lot of value. I made a pretty similar case to a friend who had worked in the music industry for the last decade. Real musician, you know, has gone on tour all over the world. He had the opportunity to join Suno at around the same valuation. And I said, you know, I think, like, you've worked in the music industry your whole career. Where's the growth going to be in the industry over the next 10 years? It's going to be in AI, whether or not people like it. And I think what Suno's tapped into is the same thing that the vibe coding tools have tapped into, where Billions of people have an idea for an app, but very, very few people relatively can actually build an app. And now with 5Coding, anybody can build an app. Same thing with music. Everybody's had an idea for a song or could come up with an idea for a song that would You know, create even in the most simple way, you know, creating. We've heard stories from people that, you know, every single night they make a new bedtime song with their kids, right, to kind of like motivate the kids to to settle down or go to sleep or whatever. And so there's so many magical moments. It's the kind of thing that can have these sort of viral moments where people like realize it's available, create all these songs or there's like memes that can form. But it has this kind of like, I think people will continue to come back to it. So I'm with you, Shaan. Speaker 3: What happens to Spotify's market cap then? Speaker 2: Spotify's market cap should be resistant to this because it's a tool for creating music and music will be distributed on Spotify. And so Spotify never created an Ableton competitor or Fruity Loops competitor. They never sold guitars. They never sold any tools to create music. They might wind up launching some competitor, but... Speaker 4: Spotify's in kind of a tough spot, if you think about it. What would all the biggest artists on Spotify think of Spotify coming out with an AI tool that is competing for listening time with those artists? So it's like they're kind of in a position where Spotify can't jump into this without infuriating a lot of the artists on the platform. So I think it's possible that Suno could eat into the listening time of Spotify, but it's hard to imagine a world where I subscribe to Suno and I don't. Speaker 2: I would just see it similar to Sora and Instagram Reels or VO3 from Google and YouTube Shorts. People will be scrolling these feeds. Most people don't want any AI. Some people are okay with just like the best AI and so they want one out of a hundred Reels to be actually great AI, funny, inspired and people on Spotify will want to listen to the hits and the songs that everyone knows and then they might want to listen to that one Breakout AI-generated song, but it's just going to take one minute for whoever creates that banger on Suno to export it, upload it to Spotify, and Spotify will be able to instantly monetize it. So I wouldn't see it as a major threat to Spotify. There's also some interesting downside protection here that if you think about Suno at $2.5 billion, Who could possibly acquire them if they don't make it to Escape Velocity? Spotify has the market cap, but also Amazon could put it in Amazon Echoes. It could be an Apple thing. It could be a Google thing. It could be an OpenAI thing. There's so many other companies that have the market cap and scale to just pick this up and make it a good outcome for everyone. Speaker 4: The other thing is I know the industry, like the traditional music industry, is using Suno, but they I don't want to talk about it because it's still controversial. I heard from a friend that their friend ...was a backup vocalist for different artists. So like a studio vocalist, their job would be to go into the... somebody would write a song, their job would be to go into the studio and sing the song, and then that sample would be taken around to artists that would effectively bid on it. And so the vocalist would sing it in the style of one artist, sing it in the style of another artist to give people a feel for it. And they said that that person's revenue went from, you know, humming along for the last, you know, 20 years and like effectively to zero because you can now just generate any, you take the lyrics, you generate it in the style of any artist. And so the challenge for that individual in their career is nobody, people that don't hire backup, a backup, like a backup guitarist can go and tour with a band, right? Because people are there to see like the front man or whatever. But a backup vocalist, there's not really like touring demand because imagine you get a ticket to your favorite artist and then there's just like someone else singing. You're like, Not really getting your money's worth. So already disrupting certain corners of the internet. And I think that part of what's holding Suno back right now is just that the main artists will not talk about it because they know they're going to get blowback. But that'll eventually work. Speaker 3: Alright, you guys want to do one? Speaker 2: Yeah, let's move on to TrueMed, because I think it relates to Hone Health, interestingly. We have a couple other hard tech stuff, but TrueMed is a thin tech company founded by Justin Mayers. I think we all know him. Speaker 4: Our guest of the show. Speaker 3: I think we all have a, well, I don't want to speak for you guys, but he's in the man crush category. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's a killer. So, TrueMed adds a compliant pay-with-HSA health savings account or FSA button to online checkouts by handling eligibility through embedded telehealth. So, when you go to, whether it's peptides that are going to be popular or eight sleeps or supplements or whatever you're doing to improve your health, if you're going to do it online, there's an economic advantage of tax savings from paying for it with Pre-tax dollars through your HSA or FSA. And so TrueMed is this like layer on all of that. So you don't have as much like individual trend risk. Like, oh, is protein more popular than creatine this month or this year? Like, as long as health continues to be a trend, you're sort of like the rising tide. Speaker 4: This is like buying, like investing in an index fund for wellness, right? Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 4: They're going to be taking a cut of a huge amount of the volume going towards Wellness products in the US. I started a company called Rora with my friends Brian and Charlie, and we're a happy TrueMed customer. TrueMed has a very meaningful take rate, a bigger take rate than a traditional kind of payment provider, but it's a great trade because you're able to sell incremental product because people are able to buy it in a tax-advantaged way. And I'm just like an incredibly Firm believer in the entire mission of the company. I think that we know that running is going to increase your health span, increase your lifespan. You should be able to let people purchase products like this as a form of preventative treatment. So incredible founder, like very, very strong tailwinds and great experience as a customer. Speaker 3: What's your company, Jordi? Speaker 4: Rorra, R-O-R-R-A dot com. Speaker 1: Is that the water filter? Speaker 2: Yeah, the water filter. Speaker 4: So Andrew Huberman's kind of been an early partner there, which is awesome. And that was me. Speaker 1: I didn't know you helped start that. Speaker 4: Yeah, so I stumbled into kind of the water crisis years ago at this point and started looking at Started looking at all the solutions in the category and kind of ultimately felt like there needed to be kind of like a Dyson type brand in the categories, a brand that was like incredibly focused on R&D and making products in a variety of different. form factors because you're constantly interacting with water in your day-to-day life, whether it's in your shower, bath, drinking water, whole home filters, etc. And yeah, the market was quite exciting. It was like something I was personally motivated by because my son had kept getting eczema. I had like a six month old getting eczema and I was like trying to track down where like why it was happening and it ultimately was like tap water baths that we clocked and so like solving that and then realizing there was an opportunity and partnered with Charlie and Brian to bring it to life and they've absolutely crushed it. Speaker 3: I follow you online. I've followed your work for years before I think even Party Round. Are you the design guy of the two? Because you seem like you've had an eye for aesthetics for a while. Speaker 4: Yeah, I would generally say so. I mean, John has great taste and instinct around this stuff, but I've just loved advertising, marketing, product design. I've been obsessed with it since I was a boy, basically. I was super into skateboarding and surfing and snowboarding growing up. I was trying to figure out from a very young age, Why there was like a snowboard available for $100, but I really wanted the one that was $800. And so kind of working backwards from that and understanding design and brand and advertising and all these things. And so bring that in. I mean, that's the success of TBPN is due in part to our obsession with brand, which is, I think, something that podcasts historically would think about. Okay, let's design our cover art. Speaker 2: That was the first thing Shaan told me when we launched Technology Brothers, the original podcast. I was like, you sent me a really nice message. You were like, I think this is gonna work. I think this is the thing. You gotta go full-time on this. Do it, do it. And I was like, yeah, it seems like the numbers are pretty good. I was being very wonky and you were like, no, no, no. This is a brand. You've actually broken through and created something that feels, it has a feeling around it like brand. And I was like, yeah, that's almost all Jordi. I helped as much as I could with it, but just the idea to actually create this world and this brand, we had a lot of fun with. Speaker 4: The thing that's addicting about media is you're doing basically product development, but the feedback loops are so rapid. Speaker 2: Every day. Speaker 4: With Aurora, we have this idea to build a water filter company, but then the R&D process was 18 months or something between idea to actually shipping a product. Then with media, it's idea to product in these really rapid, hour-long, 24-hour cycles. And that's like something that I think we love because we'll be sitting here, you know, we'll be sitting there on a Friday and be like, OK, we should have a stock ticker on the bottom. Yeah, same day. Speaker 3: So are you guys disciplined with sticking within your brand parameters or sometimes like because that could be hard and it does require discipline. Speaker 4: I think it's got to constantly be evolving. Look back to the skate and surf and snowboard brands. Any brand that was just stuck in their way and didn't expand and evolve and reflect culture ultimately just didn't make it. These are brands that now you could go back and buy and bring back into the modern era. But yeah, it has to be flexible. I mean, the transition from being called Technology Brothers to TBPN was like a big moment for us. A lot of people would have said, like, Technology Brothers is a great brand. We had already kind of like saturated. We were X at the time, so we were small, but people knew about us, and so we knew that that was gonna be necessary to evolve into becoming the kind of media company that we wanted to be, but yeah, I think you need a commitment to evolving, and I think the internet allows you A lot of like the ideas that people have had around like brand and advertising were created in a world where you're doing like long-term planning around like print and television marketing and catalogs and things like that. And now with the internet you can just like iterate on ideas so rapidly and evolve your brand so rapidly and it's like a few clicks to like fully update yourself. And so I think the The only consistent thing for our company is the feeling that we're trying to create, what we want people to feel when interacting with the brand. I think that has to stay consistent because that is the brand. It's not necessarily whatever your logo is at any one given point. My first ever company was a skateboard company and this was like the pivotal moment for me at 12 years old. I found somebody in the Midwest that would manufacture skateboard decks for me. So that wasn't my first million, but that was my first time making $100 from building a product. And that was such an insane moment. I was like, you'll make this and then I get to put my logo on it and sell it like this is the most amazing thing ever. And so that was like my first experience building any type of brand. My first million was J-Man Designs. I still have a board in my home office and I think that once I realized that was my moment of you can just make things. Everything you see in the world is a business and there's no reason that you can't build it yourself. Speaker 3: We have to shred the gnar sometimes. I still skate. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen. You are incredible at skating. Speaker 4: I realized by like a teenager, I was like, this is a hobby that that destroys your body. So I switched to surfing. Speaker 2: I can't believe you still do that. Every time I see that video, it's like insane. Anyway. Speaker 3: Yeah, I still like to get after it. I want to be a 40 year old man doing handrails still. Speaker 2: It's crazy. Speaker 3: What do you do with the money once you've already made it? This is a question Shaan and I ask our successful guests all the time. And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money, information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by. And I know this because inside of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time. People have made $10 or $50 million. How do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders, guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Ramosi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth 50, 100, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their net worths, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turned these 80 interviews into one document. And I don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet. And it's completely free. So if you want to see behind the net worths of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios, their expenses, everything, you go to joinhampton.com slash reveal. Again, joinhampton.com slash reveal. Check it out. You guys are going to make fun of me. My next one is self-promoting. Speaker 2: I love this. No, this is amazing. Speaker 1: I'm so into it. Listen, guys, here's the deal. I thought you might do this. I was going to make fun of you. Speaker 3: But it just makes sense. I picked HubSpot, but the reality is there's probably 30 or 50 or 100 companies that could go in this case here. The SaaSpocalypse, was that what we're calling it? Insane, insane to me. So HubSpot, I think they peaked around $900, $850 a share. Went down, I think the low recently was $200. I think that is insane. HubSpot, and again, sub this out with so many different companies, it's probably the same story. HubSpot does $3 billion in revenue with a $14 billion market cap, okay? I think that is insane. They're projecting to do $3.7 billion in 26. So, you're buying a subscription software company that I don't think people are going to tear out of their business, something like 3X Revenue. Everyone talks about, like all the nerds on Twitter, which I'm one of them, are talking about building their own CRMs. Maybe, maybe the nerds are doing that, but a roofing company with 20 employees in Tennessee, they ain't gonna be doing it anytime soon. And so, I do think that there's a lot of I think this is overblown with them plus however many companies. I saw Monday.com, I think it was. I think they do a billion in revenue at a $2 billion market cap, something like that. I forget exactly. I think that's insane. The bear case with some of these SaaS companies is I do think the seat model is a little bit insane. Do you guys remember just the other day that Substack article went live? Where it was basically a guy telling a story about how like AI is going to be so good that people aren't going to work. And if they aren't going to work, they're not going to buy stuff. And so it does kind of like beg the question, if like software companies do pay per seat, if you have less employees, Square just laid off however many people, 40% of their staff or whatever. Like, do they need to continue buying software at the same rate that they were because of the seat model? That's like the bear case. But I just think the SaaSpocalypse totally overblown. Speaker 1: What do you guys think? Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, going back to this Sarah's List concept, the amazing thing about HubSpot equity is that it is Liquid, right? And so it's very real. There's a lot of companies in our industry where you might get a massive grant, but you're fully locked up. Speaker 2: And I think to the tune of like, can you get the 3, 4, 5x? Well, if the narrative flips and people are like, wait, actually HubSpot has some real significant moat and that thing that we thought was going to kill them isn't going to kill them. Well, it just pops right back up. And so that's sort of the option value I see. I would actually say there's more pressure from like maybe startups that are not doing the seat-based model, they're doing more outcome-based model, but a lot of those companies are just getting started and it's going to be years until there's ever like some real disruptive pressure. Speaker 4: Yeah, my general framework is that it's going to even like HubSpot will need to evolve In a way that it hasn't since inception, just naturally. And so... Speaker 2: We need great leadership. Speaker 4: I don't believe that SaaS is going away, but it's going to require great leadership to help evolve and help the company actually build a lot of momentum in this new era. So I'm with you. I don't think the local roofing company is going to just be five code and kind of maintain their own software stack. Leadership is going to have to like actually, it's going from like, hey, we can just compound. At this rate, annually forever and like this is just easy mode SaaS that we saw. Speaker 2: If they're going to bake off with a company that has some really crazy agentic features and basically the CRM is cleaning itself up and adding stuff and lead scoring even better, then they're going to need to invest a lot more. But in general, very, very strong position to be in, system of record. Speaker 3: What say you, Shaan? It doesn't even have to be HubSpot. It could be any, it could be the dozen. Speaker 1: I've been looking at this, I mean, I've been looking at it actually just as an investor to say like, okay, definitely seems like a overreaction. You know, Monish Parai came on the podcast and he said a great thing, which is that risk and uncertainty are two different words and most investors don't understand that. And he was explaining how the stock market responds to uncertainty more than it does to risk, which is what's happening right now. There's just uncertainty. And uncertainty is very different than saying, Something bad is actually going to happen. It's just that we don't know what the future cash flows look like. We don't know what the future growth rates look like. So you get this discount just for uncertainty. And so I've been looking at all these SaaS stocks and I've been trying to decide like, okay, Figma and you have Salesforce and you have HubSpot, you have like all of these on sale. And I'm like, do I want to stock up while these are all on sale? I think these are pretty good companies here, but they do have some level of uncertainty. I've definitely been looking at this. I was joking, groaning at your pick, but I actually think it's a pretty good pick, especially because the way John said it, you're going to be liquid the whole time if you seriously list this company. You're going to be working at a company with 20 years of success under its belt. You know, systems and all this good stuff. And then it's like at this all-time low, basically, for where it's at. Speaker 4: One thing you have to be aware of is like AI, there's not going to be some announcement by the labs that's like, hey, guys, AI is actually reversed in progress and it's getting way worse. We think it's going to be much worse in the future. And then the stock's going to rocket up. It's like the AI is only going to get more capable. There's going to be new capabilities unlocked. And so you have to be making this thesis with that in mind. And I think there's a way to do it, which is that HubSpot serves an incredible amount of small businesses. They're in a great position to actually deliver the value of AI to all those people. But that's what I'm saying. It's like it's all going to come down to management and their ability to not just build a story around ...AI as a tailwind for the business, but actually show that we are delivering the power of AI to our customer base, and they are giving us more money every single month than they were the last month. Speaker 1: In your bull case, Sam, I think you wrote, AI features still suck, which is a funny bull case, but it's true. I think there's been a few companies like this, like Intercom, Zendesk, where they added AI to their existing thing and they're like, oh yeah, I think Zendesk was at $200 million or something in ARR off of their AI feature. Intercom is over $100 million on their AI. Intercom has been around forever with customer support. You would think, oh, they're going to get disrupted by AI. And they're like, well, actually, the harder part is getting all these customer relationships. It's actually much easier to integrate an AI feature than it is to go get 100,000 small businesses to trust you and use you and integrate you. And so the question is, can they do that? If they do that, then the narrative is not just like, oh, they're not They're not getting disrupted, but actually, oh my God, look at all this extra growth they're getting because they have these AI features. Speaker 3: The thesis that I have been buying into for the past two or three years since AI got really popular was there are going to be a lot of new entrants, but the vast majority, I think Jordi or one of you guys made this joke, but it's not a joke, the vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger. I just think that it's much easier for Salesforce to get more efficient and launch new features than it is a new company, or at least picking those new companies very hard. But picking a company that works already and it's going to get just a little bit better, it makes so much more money. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: Love it. Speaker 1: All right. Let's move to the next pick. Let's get one from the TPPN guys. What do we got? Speaker 2: We should do SemiAnalysis. This is an interesting one. So SemiAnalysis looks like a Substack. If you go to the website, it might even be hosted on Substack. They have a website. They break down semiconductor and AI infrastructure build-outs. They have a model for how data centers are progressing, how much it costs to inference different AI models, how the different chips are doing. They'll do a review of the latest Google TPU. They'll explain to you how the latest NVIDIA chip works. They're doing... It's a great business because... Speaker 3: Wait, so is this like Wirecutter? Is this like a publication? Speaker 2: Almost, but Wirecutter for the richest people in the world because they run... Trillion dollar companies. Speaker 4: Yeah, institutions. Speaker 2: Institutions. So hedge funds, banks, also the actual hyperscalers themselves. So if you're AMD, you want to know what NVIDIA is doing. If you're NVIDIA, you want to know what AMD is doing. And SemiAnalysis is going to talk to everyone, do a ton of research, put together a whole bunch of data into a cleanly organized spreadsheet that you can import into your valuation model for whether or not Microsoft is going to beat earnings. And so they sell those models. Speaker 3: It's a publication or it's a... Speaker 1: It's a puzzle, dude. It's like your company, right? Speaker 2: It's a publication. Speaker 4: Also, think of it as a... Speaker 2: You can subscribe. You can subscribe to, like, weekly newsletters. Speaker 3: Subscribe, like, as a newsletter subscriber. Speaker 2: But you can also buy models that are pre-built, like Excel models with data in them. And those are very expensive. And then... Speaker 3: So... Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Sam, have you seen this guy, Dylan Patel? Speaker 3: No, this is great though. Speaker 1: I've never met an Indian guy named Dylan, but love it. Love it. And so he is, when he goes on podcasts, this guy is so knowledgeable about what's going on with GPUs. I don't know if you've ever seen the Louis CK bit where he talks about like how he likes to somehow sometimes use the n-word but in a positive way and he talks about like if he goes to a coffee shop and orders a coffee and the guy just like fully like foams it and froths it and like makes it perfect. He'll be like that n-word made the shit out of my coffee. That's how I feel watching Dilip Patel talk about GPUs and infrastructure. He'll be talking about the new. Speaker 2: Colossus thing. Speaker 1: And he knows the megawatts under the flops and what cables they're using. And he knows everything. He's like, we got satellites watching the parking lots. And we figured out this is how bad they're scaling. This guy knows. He knows so much. It's incredible how much this one person is knowledgeable about GPUs. Speaker 3: And is he writing all of this? It looks like an AI blog. Speaker 2: So they use AI imagery, but all the text is written by their staff of analysts. So they have about 50 people working there. And on a particular deep dive, they might have five to six authors attached. Dylan might write something. Other folks might write something. Doug O'Loughlin's also over there. Speaker 1: How much money are they making? Is this like a $5 million company? 50? 500? What's going on with this? Speaker 4: Tens of millions. Speaker 2: I would put it in tens of millions. But this is the interesting bull case is that right now they have Like a very respected analysis group, but they're also launching a fund, allegedly, according to the information, to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups. And they're already doing angel investing. And then also, they're going to do credit ratings. And so the real model to think about this, the comp is Moody's. So if you're familiar with Moody's, they do credit ratings. And Moody's got started during the railroad build-out because The railroad bill that was so capital intensive that there was a huge secondary market for like, okay, is this person that's going to build this railroad from Chicago to Atlanta, are they good for it? Do they have the money? And so Moody's is now an $80 billion business. And if you look at the stock, Moody's has not moved during the selloff. It's doing fine. And yes, this is very indexed to the AI boom. The actual business can be very, very stable, very high margin, and very big, like much bigger than people think when they think of just like publishing analysis. Speaker 3: This one's, this is the best one. This is the best one. This is super cool. Speaker 4: Yeah, one of our teammates, his brother just got a job here and John and I were so excited for him. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 4: Because if you want to, if you're excited about AI and you're not, Like a researcher or a product designer or product manager or a founder, but you want to be at the center of the action and actually understand what's happening. This is a fantastic. Speaker 2: It's a super interesting job with a lot of ups. Speaker 3: Do they have offices? It looks like the founder lives in SF. Is it like an in real life? Speaker 4: Yes, they have a West Coast and East Coast. Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's a lot of time with like hedge funds and banks and managers and And also Dylan Patel is very young. I believe he's in his 20s. And so your description of his, you know, encyclopedic knowledge of the semiconductor industry is correct. And I think if you just look at what that compounds like over two decades, I think you're already seeing one of the most important voices in the most important industry, but it just compounds. Speaker 3: Have you guys ever read this book called How to Get Rich? It's by an author called Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis, you guys have to read this. Speaker 4: The magazine guy, right? Speaker 3: The magazine guy. You should Google Felix Dennis. So Felix Dennis, he was like a combination of Richard Branson and Mick Jagger. He was kind of vulgar, but he had this like British aristocrat vibe. He was really funny. He's very funny. He died from cancer and he used to joke that he was a crackhead, like he was literally a cocaine and crack addict and he spent a lot of his money doing it and he wrote about it. But he's like funny, he wrote about it. Anyway, he got rich because he created the thing called Dennis Publications and Dennis Publications was a computer magazine started in the late 70s, early 80s and it made him a fortune. When he passed away, he was probably worth eight or nine hundred million dollars and this is like in 2008. So it's very, very wealthy. And there's been like 10 different guys. There's this guy named Pat McGovern, who was a multi-billionaire because of computer magazines in the 1990s. There's Ziff Davis, if you guys heard of that, Bill Ziff. There's been so many of these. And what you are explaining right now by what Dylan Patel does, it's this exact same B2B publication in a technology boom, owning a very small niche and just kicking ass and doing the same playbook of research media events. And it has created many billionaires. Speaker 4: Yeah, one way to look at SemiAnalysis is like what they're doing to like sell side research firms, which is like, hey, wait, like you're a sub stack. You can't do you can't do like advanced research on semis, you know, or you can't like compete with us. Speaker 2: You guys are the aesthetics of like a Goldman Sachs equity research or Morgan Stanley Report. But the data is just as good, if not better. Speaker 4: And with TBPN, it's like, wait, you guys aren't you don't have a cable network like you. You guys can't interview this person on the day that they're IPO-ing and it's like you can just do things. Speaker 3: It's the same thing. As someone, I'm a little bit of a media historian nerd. It's the same story over and over and over again and this is a great find. Shaan, you want to bring us home? What do you got? Speaker 1: All right, I got one for you guys. This is a name that a lot of people know, but I hadn't really put too much thought into it. So Harvey. Harvey is basically very simple. It's a AI lawyer. It's AI software for law firms, a bit more specifically. And I think right now they've just been, I mean, they're raising rounds. So like, you know, if I did this episode six months ago, it would have been like, oh, they're a whatever, $2 billion company, $5 billion. Now they're an $8 billion company. So I might be getting priced out here as it goes. But I do love the space. So they're about $200 million in revenue off of just like 1,000 customers. I think like half of the top 100 law firms in America are using them in some capacity. And I was just kind of, again, I like to do kind of bottoms up math to make my own case for these things. So I think in the US, there's about half a million law firms. That's just in the US. And right now, Harvey's average contract value is like $190,000, which means they're basically getting paid like they're a lawyer who works at the firm. And so, you know, I don't think that will be there for, you know, smaller law firms. I think they'll obviously be a lower price point. But just in general, legal work is like a perfect candidate for AI work, right? Because it's mostly text documents. It's mostly writing and reading and summarizing. And then there's all these like really bespoke workflows that a law firm needs. There's compliance, there's security, there's validation, there's all these like Things that you got to build that's like for a law firm versus like would a lawyer rather just upload it into ChatGPT? I don't think so. I think there's actually going to be like purpose-built tools for law firms. So Harvey's one, Legora's another. They're both companies in the same exact space kind of competing for this and I think the cool part about this is that if you can add leverage into the legal system, that'll kind of transform the economics of how these law firms work, right? Because currently there's billable hours, you put more bodies, there's sort of this incentive to spend more time on something. I think that's going to change. I think more and more law firms are going to use this and realize we don't need to have as many people to be able to do the same amount of work. And I think their billing model's gonna change. But anyways, I think Harvey is a perfect example of like, as AI happens right now, there's gonna be these winners for the decade. Like, oh, remember all those companies that got started when the AI happened? Like, yeah, there's the big ones, OpenAI and Anthropic and others. And then I think there's gonna be these like vertical ones. And to me, the legal one is like a clear cut, obvious, in your face, vertical one that will be, is pretty big. If you do the math, by the way, of like, Every law firm is going to use AI. I don't think there's going to be any law firms that are not using AI. Depending on how much market share you think they're going to capture, you sort of multiply that times $100,000 per firm, and you very quickly get into the tens of billions in revenue available to the leader. Speaker 4: Yeah, the thesis for Harvey is there hasn't been a lot of big outcomes of just building software for lawyers. So when investors have backed Harvey, it's been a general thesis that they're going to capture some of the current labor spend, which is a much, much bigger market than enterprise software. I've got a friend who is at one of the big law firms. He got an early demo of Harvey when I first talked to him about it. He was like, It's cool. And then a year later, somewhere in early Q4 of last year, his eyes were wide open and he's like, it's the real deal now. So they've made a lot of progress. The product gets better. As the models get better, the question is like, how much do the labs actually care to build out the kind of more enterprise functionality that Harvey's already built out? And so there'll naturally be some competition there over time, but we had John Quinn from Quinn Emanuel on our show today, the most feared lawyer in the world. Really cool guy. You guys would have a fun conversation with him. Speaker 1: Is that Elon's lawyer? Speaker 4: Yeah. Was he nice? Speaker 2: He was super nice. Speaker 4: He's a sweetheart, but not the kind you'd want on your bad side. But I asked him, so AI is really good at generating legal docs already. It might make some errors, but it can make them really fast. I was like, do you think we'll potentially have 100x more litigation? And he was like, Yeah, possibly. Right. But he also said that that's kind of like the bull case for lawyers still being at full employment is like we yeah, you might a lawyer might be way more effective, but there could just be way more cases. So that would be kind of a very American outcome. Speaker 1: It's like what's that story like in India where they were like, there's too many pythons and they put a bounty like if you bring us a dead python, you get like, you know, whatever. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: And then the Python population boomed because people just started breeding pythons. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: That's basically what you're saying is going to happen. We're just going to breed more just like useless litigation. Love it. Speaker 2: Well, this already happened in legal. There was a piece of software that would help lawyers write down their billable hours and it would sort of pad it out. And then so there was software on the client side that would automatically scan it and say, that's not work I'm paying for. Get that out of there. Get that out of there. And it became like bot on bot war. Very fun. Speaker 3: Did you guys see the episode we did with John Morgan? Speaker 2: No. Oh, for Morgan & Morgan? Speaker 3: Yeah, so we had John Morgan on. So for the listener, Jordi, I don't know if you would see his, I don't know if he's in California or not, but John Morgan. Speaker 4: I've seen the ads. Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I watched the episode. I think it might be the largest type of his law firm. What is he? He is a... Injury law. Injury law. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: So he has commercials everywhere. And he comes off like a sweet, he's older, he's in his 70s. He almost comes off like a grandpa, like you want to trust him. So he comes out like a very like, you know, PC soft guy. But you know, whatever. He's a lawyer. So we had him on the pod. I swear to God, the very first sentence that he says to us, I say to him, John, I hear that you own a museum on crime and punishment. That's really unique. Verbatim. Oh, that thing? That thing. Prince. That's the first line I swear to God that he said to us word for word. Speaker 2: It's a lot of money. Speaker 3: That's because he owns he owns an amusement park business and he owns seven We were like, how do you have time to do this? Speaker 1: You have a $5 billion law firm. And he was like, I don't hunt deer. Unknown Speaker: I hunt money. Speaker 1: We were like, this guy's incredible. Speaker 2: That's wild. Speaker 1: Where did you come from, John Morgan? Speaker 2: That's amazing. Speaker 3: It was one of the craziest interviews I think that we've ever done. It was the most different. The commercial versus the reality was like way different. Speaker 4: There's a number of Harveys for personal injury. People that are making software specifically to qualify these types of cases and will naturally be controversial because some people don't like the whole category. That's just an area. There's going to be vertical Harveys. Speaker 1: That's terrible. Just send me your deck. I just got to take a look. I can't believe you guys are doing that, but just send it over. Speaker 4: We got one more for you guys that I think you'll like. Have you guys heard of SendCutSend? Speaker 1: No, what is that? Speaker 4: Okay, so fun name for a pretty serious company. They let engineers upload CAD files and quickly get custom parts made using software automation to make quoting and production fast and frictionless. Speaker 2: So basically you send in like a 3D file that says I want a cube milled out of aluminum and it's got to have a cylinder attached to it. Speaker 4: Let's put it in skateboard terms. So let's say you want to design your own pair of trucks. You design the trucks on a computer and then you take this file and you send it to them. Speaker 2: They cut it, and then they send it to you. SendCutSend. Speaker 4: You send them the file. They cut it up. They cut up the metal. They send it back to you. So this one's cool because it's fully aligned with everything you hear about reindustrialization, the kind of things that America used to do but forgot how to do, that we shipped these capabilities overseas. But SendCutSend is a bootstrap company. The founder, Jim, has been on our show. Scaled over 100 million in annualized revenue, you know, completely independently and have Thousands and thousands of happy customers all over the U.S. Doing something that, again, people talk about why entrepreneurs end up manufacturing in Asia. One reason is because of cost, but another thing is just speed. Every person that's manufactured something here will tell you, I reached out to this shop. I asked them to make a part. They didn't get back to me for a week. When they got back to me, they said they could do it. We're gonna be talking about SendCutSend in two months. And so SendCutSend is really focused on speed and ease of use. And they've scaled up organically. And the founder, Jim, is just amazing. Speaker 3: And so, how'd you guys find this? This does not appear to be in your wheelhouse. Speaker 4: Well, yeah, we love having companies come on the show that don't, you know, every single day there's probably half a million Fundraising rounds that get announced on TBPN, but we love having founders on that have never raised a dollar. Speaker 2: I met him through Jason Karman. Because Jason Karman profiles a lot of hard tech companies and he is a supplier to a lot of those hard tech companies so you can kind of think of him as like the index on all of those like somewhat more risky reindustrialization bets where is this drone company gonna work or is that drone company gonna work? Well, they're both gonna be buying parts from SendCutSend. Speaker 3: Wow. Great find, man. This is a really cool one. When you described it, I was thinking more of a blue-collar looking guy. He owned a landing page company and then went into this business. Speaker 4: Yeah, he's just a hacker that decided to Make stuff in the real world. Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's very I mean the the bootstrap thing is I think important because like it's a capital intensive business But he's been you know thinking about profitability thinking about scalability from day one set up a very healthy business That's that's not gonna collapse at any point. Speaker 4: Yeah, we joked with him when he was on our show We said if you were venture-backed you'd be valued at five to ten billion. Yeah, you'd be getting some insane Multiple, but he's happy to just build a great business and compound every single year. And we hope that he scales up dramatically and enters a bunch of different verticals over time because Lord knows we need it. Speaker 3: Dude, there's been so many times where Shaan and I talk to someone and I'm like, what am I doing podcasting? It sounds so much cooler. Do you guys feel like that all the time by talking to all these amazing people? Speaker 4: I think most of the people we talk to, we know we have no business being in their business. And so I feel like we're lucky in that. I wouldn't want to compete with Peter Rahal in selling protein bars even though I could go make a protein bar, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I think I'm missing that common sense because every time I talk to these guys, I'm like, we're so similar, me and you. I was like, I shouldn't be just doing what you're doing. This is great. And I somehow think I can do all of those things. Speaker 3: Halfway through the interview, Shaan acts like I'm interviewing him. Shaan's like, you know, look, Sam, guys like us, we're just here to do amazing things and build great products. And we'll sign off by saying thanks for having us, Sam. Speaker 2: Become the guest on your own show. That's elite. I love it. Speaker 1: I do like the bootstrap side because, I mean, one of the things with the sales list is you don't want to be taking a ton of dilution, right? Because even if the stock price is going up, you don't want this company that keeps requiring more and more capital, has a bigger prep stack, all that stuff. I had one on mine that was, we don't have to go into it too much, but it's Column Bank. It's kind of like this. I don't know if you guys saw the story that came out just the other day. The founder of Plaid, his new company called Column is basically like, it's a fintech company. It's a bank. He actually bought a bank for I think $60 million of his own money. And then he started this and he basically uses it as the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies. And so he, and I think they're doing, this number's out of date, in 2026, they're doing $200 million in revenue. He owns all of it. He never raised any money. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: And it's like you said, it's an index. So it's an index into all the new fintech shit. It's like, great, if you think RAMP's going to keep growing and you think Mercury's going to keep growing, well, guess what? Column will keep doing well. Speaker 2: That's great. Speaker 1: And they're doing extremely well. And here you got a founder who owns the whole thing. And so you go work there, you're not going to take Delution in the same way because it's a profitable company. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 4: Yeah, they're competing with all the banking as a service providers because historically you'd have the fintech like a neobank. Like a Mercury, and then there'd be like a banking as a service provider, and then there would be the actual like chartered bank underneath it. And so Column is like eating up the bottom two layers of the stack and saying, hey, build the consumer facing financial services company, but we'll handle the, you know, all the different, you know, the API layer down to the actual bank. Speaker 3: So I'm just browsing. It looks so we started. I feel embarrassed. Plaid or plate, I know what it is. Yeah, it's one of these words where I read, I never say. Speaker 4: Column was started due to his experience building plaid, right? Because plaid is like the... Speaker 2: Yeah, the rails. Speaker 4: Allows, you know, is basically created in large part to help create the overall fintech boom. And so that's a good example of like when you're picking these companies, In Silicon Valley, we all want to believe that the founder with no experience can just come in and just dominate the industry just based on sheer willpower, but sometimes just going and attaching yourself to a team led by somebody who has deep, deep, deep experience and has vision that is grounded around having worked in the industry for a long time is like sometimes you don't need to overthink it. Just like if you're going to join a company, go work for somebody that has done it before at massive scale. Speaker 1: What an unfair advantage. Not only do you see the problem, like you said, but How many meetings can you get with fintech companies if you're like, oh, by the way, I started Plaid, right? You can get every single meeting. You walk in with incredible credibility and then you own the underlying bank. And then for whatever reason, I'm not a developer, but like for whatever reason, like having great, easy to use APIs is like a really big competitive advantage. That seems like every company should do because it sounds like handwriting, you know, it sounds like something so simple. It's like, well, a well-documented, well-designed API, but apparently it's a pretty big competitive advantage when you go into a space that historically didn't have that. And, you know, it's no surprise that a company like this is kicking ass. Speaker 3: What a boss, man. We got to get him on. Amazing person. Looks like he's only 35, 36 years old. Hey, the bros. You guys are the best, man. Thank you so much for doing this. Speaker 1: Of course, we're not the Technology Brothers anymore. Speaker 2: We're not. Speaker 1: By the way, John, I was wrong. I texted you when you changed the name to TBPN and I was like, oh, no, not going to work. Technology Brothers, that's the one. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: But I was wrong. You guys, you guys made TBPN work in an incredible way. Speaker 2: No, I mean, it still is a mouthful, but online people just type it out and having four letter domain, four letter handles like, you know, the other reason, you know, the other reason we did it is at that point we were shifting from just being the two of us talking. Speaker 4: We wanted the aesthetics of being like a cable network because we wanted to go and get these public company CEOs on. If you're trying to get a public company CEO, some of them, the really founder mode ones, you just talk, DM with, text and jump on. But a lot of them, there's layers of people in the communications department. That you're kind of like needing to gain their trust. And so like by having the optics of being like a network, even though we were just a podcast, we were able to, you know, end up getting a lot of those guests. Speaker 1: And that's a funny nuance of that. It's like, oh, the folks from TVPN have reached out. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: Feels very different than, you want to come hang with the technology brothers? Speaker 3: It's like Jordan Belfort is calling it Stratman Oakma. He's like, it's just a made up name. It just sounded official. Thank you guys. This is awesome. You're welcome anytime and we appreciate you. Speaker 4: Thanks for having us. Speaker 1: We did their sign on. Maybe we should let them do our sign off. So we basically asked you, is that it? Speaker 4: That's it. Speaker 1: And then you say, that's the pod. So can you give us a, we'll set you up. Is that it? Speaker 3: We done? Speaker 4: That's the pod. Unknown Speaker: 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 the road less traveled, never looking back. Speaker 3: If you made it this far, then you're going to love what I'm about to tell you. So there's this amazing entrepreneur, his name's Neil Patel. He's been on MFM. He's one of our favorite guests and he has a podcast. It's called Marketing School and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Marketing School brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches. They have over 100 million downloads and over 2,500 episodes. Marketing School gives you bite-sized marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately. Whether you have a new website or you already have this huge established business, you're going to learn about the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, conversion optimization, and general online marketing strategies that work today. You can get Marketing School wherever you get your podcasts.