The #1 Most Underrated Quality in an Entrepreneur
Revenge, Happiness, and YouTube University - December 18, 2024 (over 1 year ago) • 01:02:26
Transcript
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Shaan Puri | Josh Wolf has this phrase where he says, "*chips on shoulders equals chips and pockets.*" Basically, it's when you meet an entrepreneur who's got an incurable, unhealable identity wound that ends up being somebody who ends up doing really well. | |
Sam Parr | Let me fill you in on some things I saw this week that I just want your opinion on: **Sam Lessin**.
So, Sam Lessin — *I think he was an early Facebook employee and now he's an investor* — he says a lot of interesting stuff. He did a tweet where he talked about "revenge businesses": people who have started companies because they want revenge.
An example is **Parker Conrad**. He started a company called **Zenefits**, which was a fast-growing company — it kicked ass. He got fired because it had a bro-y culture: people were caught having sex in stairwells and doing drunk, dumb shit. There were also some compliance issues — not everyone was compliant — so he was fired. He then started a new company called **Rippling**, which has taken off like a rocket. Sam Lessin, I guess, invested in it.
Same with **Palmer Luckey**: the guy got fired from Facebook. He started Oculus and now started—what's it called—**Anduril**. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah andral yep | |
Sam Parr | And so, anyway, **Sam Lessin** has this really cool line. He says:
> "If you have in your diligence checklist, 'Is this company a form of deep revenge?' — the answer is **yes**. Cut the check."
The reason I'm bringing this up is because oftentimes you'll talk to someone and they'll say, "Hey, man, you got a lot of hate in your heart. You gotta let that out. You can't hold that in your heart; you can't live with that."
I've taken the opposite approach for the last handful of years. I actually think that hate, if you have it in your heart, can be really useful. Revenge and rage are very useful feelings. So is *shame*.
People will be like, "Why are you guilting someone into doing this or that?" I'm like, "Well, guilt is a wonderful emotion to improve." I wanted to get your opinion on his take here. | |
Shaan Puri | I mean, I think it's honestly kind of genius. I think people don't like to say things like this, but there are a bunch of heuristics for investing that sound so stupid or inappropriate and are actually true and useful.
For example — and you can frame this different ways — I have a friend who said, "You know how Paul Graham talks about he wants to invest in 'fierce nerds'?" A *fierce nerd* is basically a nerd who's overly competitive. | |
Sam Parr | and also like a little bit of a shithead | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. You know, someone who's looking to sort of break the system — beat the system — overly competitive, maybe unrefined in certain other areas of their life. But that's what you want.
My friend was like, "Yeah, I look for **fierce nerds who love money**." He said that "who love money" is a multiplier on the "fierce nerd" concept.
We've joked on this pod before: if, in your pitch deck, I'm like, "Okay — went on a Mormon mission," or "Grew up in a Slavic country, Eastern Europe," I'm like, "Yep." Little plus points go off in my head — these are green flags. It's not a for-sure yes, but I'm not stupid. Eventually you realize, "Goddamn, these people from Utah can sell," or, "Wow, these programmers from this area of the country are pretty badass."
Being a Harvard dropout can be a stronger signal than being a Harvard graduate. These things sound silly but actually end up being true: if you're the type of person who can get into Harvard and then has enough conviction and an idea to drop out against Harvard's social pressures, that turns out to be a pretty good filter.
Now, of course, these things can be gamed. If people realize these are the signals you're looking for — people showing up to pitch meetings and acting a little extra "autistic" — it's like, "Okay, we kind of know what you're doing; you're trying to fit some pattern that this investor is matching against." So obviously all these things can be gamed.
But it's great when you can figure out a signal that is not yet common. One is: is this person, you know, building a **"revenge company"**? That's a great signal — it's a green-flag signal. | |
Sam Parr | Have you seen the Ted Turner documentary that recently came out on HBO? No? Everyone should go and watch it.
Ted Turner has been one of my heroes for decades because his biography is so compelling. Basically, his story is that he inherited a billboard business from his father. It was a great billboard company — it was in the South and it was thriving. He took the money from that and started a local TV station. He eventually bought the Braves for cheap, bought Cox for cheap, and then parlayed all of that to bet everything on CNN.
He was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy — not because his businesses were bad, but because he was pushing everything 100% of the time.
There’s this great line from one of his employees about Ted’s mindset:
> “Ted had a great sense of paranoia within the company — a sense that we were the little guys fighting for our lives against some big unknown guys.”
The truth, of course, was that they were one of the biggest billboard companies in the South, and one of the biggest in the country. But they wanted to make everything seem more important than it probably was. In fact, Ted insisted on taking his telephone calls outside on pay phones because he wanted everyone to believe his phone was being tapped.
If you watch the documentary, he does all these amazing things. For example, he felt he had to launch CNN because, at the time, CNN was the first-ever 24-hour news network. As he put it, “We owe it to America — Americans need to have an option to know what’s going on in the world.” Everything had this grand sense of mission: *we have to do this for America* or *they’re trying to crush us.*
I remember thinking, “Who’s ‘they’? We’re the best.” That sense of audacity was a big takeaway from Ted that I loved. This post reminded me of that same lesson. | |
Shaan Puri | There's a couple other things that come to mind on this. One: **Travis Kalanick** is kinda like this. He'd gotten screwed in his first startup — literally, I think, by **Michael Ovitz** and others. Basically, it was during the *LimeWire* era...
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Sam Parr | Well, the background is **Travis Kalanick**, the founder of **Uber**. Before Uber, he started **Red Swoosh**, which was some type of *LimeWire* competitor. | |
Shaan Puri | sharing service | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Peer-to-peer file-sharing service, and he ends up not making a lot of money from it. By the way, **Naval**—same thing. He's now, like, this wise sage, this billionaire-type dude, but he was kind of an angry, vengeful dude when he started.
**Opinions**, back in the day—the VCs kicked him out of the company. I think Opinions ended up going public during the com boom [dot‑com boom] or had kind of a big exit. He got nothing; he got screwed by his own VCs. | |
Sam Parr | he didn't make anything from that | |
Shaan Puri | He ends up suing them. He does the thing that, normally in Silicon Valley, founders are very afraid to do: fight back against the VCs. He publicly sues his own investors and ends up creating *Venture Hacks*—a blog dedicated to helping founders not get screwed by VCs.
He said, "I didn't know how to read these term sheets and I didn't know what these contracts meant, and they just kept telling me the dangerous words: 'Oh, don't worry, it's all standard.'" He added, "There's nothing more dangerous than when a lawyer or a VC tells you, 'This is standard, don't worry about it,'" and "standard ended up getting me screwed." So he starts the Venture Hacks blog, which leads to *AngelList*.
*AngelList* essentially took power away— in many ways—from the VCs and gave it to angel investors and founders. It created a marketplace: more transparency, more liquidity, and more competition in that space. AngelList became a multibillion-dollar company.
Elon is on a revenge tour right now. Literally, the Democrats were attacking him, demonizing him, suing Tesla and SpaceX and all of his companies, and adding more and more regulation. So he flips the script, goes all in on Trump, and goes on a revenge tour. Now he's basically like a de facto president, and he's going in with Doge [Dogecoin] trying to rip out the guts of the bureaucracy. These revenge tours are really, really strong.
Josh Wolfe has this phrase: "Chips on shoulders equals chips in pockets." It refers to meeting an entrepreneur who has a deep chip on their shoulder—an uncurable, unhealable identity wound—that often ends up driving them to do really well. | |
Sam Parr | dude that's a 10 out of 10 phrase by the way | |
Shaan Puri | chips and shoulders and chips and pockets | |
Sam Parr | yeah that's a beautiful he he knocked that one out the park | |
Shaan Puri | It's a good one, and I've actually had trouble with this.
We would meet somebody and they would say something like, "there's a part of you that's broken inside" — like, "you're really carrying this revenge against somebody." I used to try to convince them that that's not true: either they shouldn't hold that, or this person isn't mature or wise to it.
In those moments my reaction was either to judge — which gets you nowhere — or to distance myself and think, "alright, this person's not like-minded; they're not seeing the world the way I am." I immediately missed out on several big opportunities.
What I've realized now is the exact opposite reaction is needed. You go really close to that person and you hand them a check and say, "Can I be a part of what you're doing? I'd like for your crazy psychosis to be to my financial benefit."
I'll give an example. I'm very close to this person. They basically had a bankruptcy [in their late twenties]. They were doing really well — got to like a $25,000,000 net worth — but were overextended. They were in the real estate game and doing development on behalf of another person who was expanding. That guy said, "You're going to do 15 locations," and my friend said, "Great, I'm in; I'll buy these and develop them for you."
Then that guy got in trouble and went to jail. Now my friend is holding the bag on these 15 locations that could only be used for one type of business. | |
Sam Parr | Alright, my friend. A lot of you who listen to the show listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose — or you may not even have an idea. You like our podcast *My First Million* because we've done a lot of the work for you researching business ideas.
Well, my friends, we've made life a lot easier for you because **HubSpot** just put together an entire list of resources you can use to find a market opportunity and validate your next business idea. So if you're looking for a market-size calculator, tools to identify market trends, or a huge list of ideas to get started, there's a link below. Click it and you can access the whole thing — it's completely free. [link below]
Now, back to the show. So you're saying it was like some guy — let's say a fast-food franchise — saying, "I'm going to create 50 locations" or whatever. Well, you go develop them and I'll meet you there. | |
Shaan Puri | They did deal one — it was great. Deal two — it was great. Deal three was great.
So he goes, "Awesome, you want to do 18 more of these boxes?" He goes and gets them permitted for this exact thing. He does exactly what he's supposed to do as a real estate developer.
But then that guy got in trouble for taxes — he hadn't been paying his taxes or whatever — and he can no longer do this. So now he's on the hook for, like, 18 payments for a business he can't run. He can't use it for any other purpose, and he can't really sell it because it's distressed.
This happened right in 2008 when the bank crisis hit, so nobody's investing in real estate anymore. A series of events ends up with him going **bankrupt**.
He has a traumatic experience and goes bankrupt. Not only does he go bankrupt — he was, I think, engaged or had just gotten married — and all of a sudden he's back in his childhood bedroom with his wife. They've had to move back to his parents' bedroom, and he's sort of ashamed of that. | |
Sam Parr | and he had a $25,000,000 net worth before that yeah | |
Shaan Puri | And he—yeah, crazy, buying like a $1,000,000 engagement ring; that kind of thing.
They turn off the lights to go to bed, and he's telling me, "You know, I promise you I will figure out a way. I don't care what the hell I have to do. I will fight back. I will figure out a way to make this right. Give me nine months. We're going to be here for nine months in this room." And, like... whatever. He gives her this inspiring speech, this *gladiator speech*, and then he turns off the lights. | |
Sam Parr | it's like oh shit | |
Shaan Puri | He had, like, the stars from—you know, those sticker stars on the ceiling, the neon ones that start glowing. They just crack up laughing and he's like, "Oh my God, where am I?"
And then he starts facing his *revenge tour*. In the 10 years since then, he has built up, like, a $1,000,000,000 real estate portfolio using only his own money—*no outside investors*. Probably, as you know—I don't know—something like $4 or $5 million of his own equity in these deals. He's, you know, really come back strong.
So, for years I have been looking for a good way to invest in real estate. I looked at: should I buy my own property? Should I have some rental properties? I think I kinda should take this internet money that I'm making—I'm all in on the internet—and I think I should take, like, you know, 10–20% of it and have it in hard, tangible assets you can touch and feel. That seems like a smart thing to do.
But I never knew how. Should I do it myself? I'm a beginner, and that takes time, and I don't want to go fix broken toilets. Should I give it to one of these funds or syndicators?
Then you would meet them and realize these guys are just *fee monsters*. They make all their money on the buy. They don't make any money—you can good luck on the sell. They make their money on acquisition fees and management fees. So I didn't like them.
And then when I met—when this guy was like, "Hey, you know, do you wanna do a deal with me?"—I was like, I'm all in because of the chip on this guy's shoulder of proving his dad wrong and coming back from that bankruptcy and all of this. Even though today he's super wealthy, he'll never... | |
Sam Parr | Stop. If you're a grown man who knows what it feels like to sleep with your wife in a twin bed... you know, that sticks with you.
The feeling of **exposed ankles** — blankets that don't cover your ankles — stays with you. | |
Shaan Puri | If you've ever had to call "top bunk" with your wife, yeah—you've experienced a trauma that I would like to invest in.
When we were selling the Milk Road [the business], I remember talking to— I think I can say this—some potential buyers. I was like, "Wow, you've been really successful." And I was like, "What?" I tried to get to the root: what was the motivation? Why did you even go down this path? Was it just that you had an idea, or did you want to solve a problem?
I talked to two people. One said, "No—this girl rejected me in ninth grade." I just remember thinking, "F that—I'm gonna become somebody. I'm gonna be..." He said, "Yeah, I know it sounds stupid," and it was stupid, but it was effective.
The other one said something similar: "I was trying to live in a house. We had six friends and we were all like, 'Hey, let's live together next year.' Then we found this awesome house, but it was a five-bedroom house and they were like, 'Hey man, it's only five beds.'" He said, "I realized I was at the bottom of my group, and I was like, 'F those guys—every night they're having fun in that house. I'm gonna be building an empire.'"
I remember thinking, "Really?" First of all, that was like 15 or 20 years ago, and it still bothers them. It still motivates them. And I thought, "Don't you feel kinda silly that that bothers you so much?" They were like, "No—I feel they were silly for ever counting me out." I was like, "Wow."
Okay. I am not wired like these people. I am not fueled by the same rage and revenge instincts. I'm not saying that's the only thing that motivated them, but the fact that it was still there 15 years later was very surprising to me. I've now learned to *bet on it*. | |
Sam Parr | I think I'm not surprised that you've never had issues, because — I've said this a bunch of times — you're very emotionally healthy, dude.
I use *rage* and, like, *guilt*... [unclear: "I wanna nicotine, I wanna end nicotine, no"] and I want to get back at someone. There are times I remember my big brother saying something smart-alecky to me, and I still feel that—like, "I'm going to prove you wrong." I still feel it. Yeah.
That shit runs deep, but it's pretty helpful. It... makes you pretty miserable at life, but it makes you fairly productive. | |
Shaan Puri | So, gonna lie — I'm *kinda jealous* about it. I think, on the whole, it's probably good. I don't have that, but it does seem *kinda badass* when I hear it. | |
Sam Parr | It’s crazy what happens. You know how I hate flying? I went through ten years of therapy to figure out why. I'm so claustrophobic. It comes down to when I was in second grade.
My brother put me in a *full nelson* — you know, a full nelson with your big brother's fingers — and he dipped me underwater in our pool. He was teasing me, but I sucked in a little water and I legitimately felt like I was drowning. I distinctly remember thinking, "I'm dying right now — I'm about to die."
He kept dunking me, and I was like, "You fucking asshole, I'm dying right now."
It's crazy how little moments do that. Since then, by the way, I cannot stay in elevators. I don't like taking subways. | |
Shaan Puri | because you'll swim you just don't you're like I will fly | |
Sam Parr | "I don't like anything where I'm constricted and I *can't escape*. That's rooted in—like, I can't escape. So if it's a boat you're going to go on and you can't see the shore, it's like, no, I'm not doing that shit." | |
Shaan Puri | the test unlocked on you or you're saying you figured this out through therapy or something else | |
Sam Parr | **Therapy and hypnotherapy.**
I've spent so much time and money trying to figure out the root cause and how to overcome this. It all came from a 60-second interaction with my brother when he was a kid too. He was being innocent and just messing with me.
Ain't that crazy how the things that happen as a kid can impact everything? | |
Shaan Puri | by the way does it help when you figure out the the root cause | |
Sam Parr | or yeah | |
Shaan Puri | like does it go away a little bit no no | |
Sam Parr | A little bit — I guess there's this idea of getting over stuff. It's called *walking to the gallows*. When you get panicky, it feels like you're dying. In order to overcome that, you just gotta be like, "fuck it — I'm gonna go die," meaning, "I'm going to experience this thing that I'm fearful of," and you just have to do it. It's pretty bad.
You have to tell yourself all these stories to help get over it. One of them is: "I only feel this way because John did this to me long ago, and I was fine. Okay, I was fine. I will make it through this." So you gotta *walk to the gallows* and tell yourself those stories. That's one of the many coping mechanisms.
A lot of it just happens because of a small thing when you're a kid. It could have been some girl said this, some guy said this to you. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | and it like it's crazy it just shapes like 50 years of your life | |
Shaan Puri | Dude, what a sick phrase: "walk to the gallows." Wow. What—what is a gallows even? Is that, like... | |
Sam Parr | "That's where you get hung, is it? I—I think it's... is that—it's where you get hung. It's like, so the *gallows* is the structure where you're about to get hung.
By the way, I tried to break this the other day. I went on the subway for the first time ever in New York. I was deathly afraid to go on the subway, and I was like, "We're just gonna go one stop," and then I was like, "Fuck it — we're walking to the gallows." | |
Shaan Puri | There's also—this isn't just for business. This is also, you know, *"revenge body"* is a thing. Remember that Medium post we both love, "How to Lose Weight in 4 Easy Steps"? It's like: portion control, avoid beer, and then it's like—have your heart broken—not just broken, shattered into one million itsy-bitsy pieces.
It talks about, basically, that the *heartbreak* is the fuel for the gym. In the same way that, you know, if you want Adele to go triple platinum, she just needs a bad heartbreak. It fuels artists, it fuels fitness, it fuels business, and I think it's sort of undeniable. I don't know if it's healthy, but it's **definitely effective**. | |
Sam Parr | taylor swift wouldn't write hits if she had a successful wonderful relationship | |
Shaan Puri | well we'll see travis kelce | |
Sam Parr | you know what | |
Shaan Puri | reading from you | |
Sam Parr | She hasn't had any new hits yet. She's—she's, *you know*, she has hits for a reason. | |
Shaan Puri | alright what else you got | |
Sam Parr | Alright, so—something a little bit happier. I saw this on *60 Minutes* about two weeks ago, and I cannot stop thinking about it. Let me fill you in on this story.
There's a small country called **Bhutan**. Bhutan is between **India** and **China**, so it's between these behemoth countries, and because of that, a lot of people don't know about it. | |
Shaan Puri | and it's tiny half the size of indiana | |
Sam Parr | it's tiny I think their stock market is 18 companies and the total market cap of their stock market is $800,000,000 which is 1 70,000th the size of the us stock market so it's like the super small country in fact I read that in 1999 that was the 1st year they got tv so it's like this tiny country well in the seventies the king of bhutan did a diplomatic trip to india and according to the story this indian reporter goes hey king you know we're neighbors but I don't know anything about you like what's your deal what what what are you about in fact what's your gross national product like like tell me what are you guys known for and he goes gross national product what what are you talking about gdp what are you saying in bhutan gross national happiness is more important than gross national product and it was just like offhanded comment that he made saying their biggest export is happiness we care about happiness and that totally hit it went viral everyone was like this little country is they must be the happiest place on earth the king says that they care more about gross national happiness than money and the king was like oh people like really resonate with that let's make that our thing and so over the next 5 10 years they actually implement this and make this its their thing and so in this country bhutan to this day every 5 years surveyors travel the country and they ask the people about education level salary and material possessions like a lot of like normal stuff but then they also say like do you have negative thoughts do you have positive thoughts how much time do you spend working how much time do you spend praying and sleeping and the the and the data that they get is factored in to a lot of their a lot of the rules and and things like that that they make and I thought it was like a great story about how you can care about things that aren't seemingly important like happiness and I had well you know what I mean like it's like you know we care about like money | |
Shaan Puri | and like stuff yeah potentially | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and there are a few critiques. According to the **World Happiness Report**, *Bhutan* is, like, average — it's not kicking ass. But, you know, I don't know if that's a matter of different ways of measuring things, because happiness is... it's kind of hard to measure.
Is it that fleeting moment you feel in the 30 seconds after you've eaten a good meal, or is it a deeper sense of contentment? Whatever.
I thought it was cool for three reasons. One: "the king just said some shit, and it hit, and he ran with it." | |
Shaan Puri | been there bro you I I feel that yeah it becomes your thing right | |
Sam Parr | yeah it's like wearing a certain outfit in 4th grade and you're like I guess this is my identity I guess | |
Shaan Puri | I'm a high sock guy | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, like, I'm a — the *chain wall* is my guy. I'm a *chain wall* guy; that's just my thing, because the teacher said that.
The second thing is that I do think it's pretty fascinating that in a culture that you and I are part of, and in America's case — because we're such hard workers — it's all about work, work, work. But that's not really the point of all this; it's about being happy. So I thought it was cool that they're measuring that.
Another, third and final thing that makes this interesting: have you ever heard of a pairing metric? | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, basically—two metrics. Let's say you have **revenue** on one side but **profitability** on the other. In order to make sure that if you over-optimize for revenue you might totally nuke your profits.
Or, if it's about growth, you want the **NPS** score to make sure your customers are happy. Is that what you mean? | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. So when Tim Ferriss invested in The Hustle, I got to hang out with him for an hour or so. I was telling him about how many subscribers we were growing by. He said, "You need a **pairing metric**. Not just top-line subscribers — email subscribers — but are they engaging? Are they opening? Whatever it is, you have to have a pairing metric; otherwise it kind of ruins the whole thing."
That was fascinating to me. I had never heard that phrase, and I hadn't thought about having a pairing metric outside of business — for government policy or anything else.
This is a great example of a pairing metric: look at **GDP** and traditional metrics, but also make sure your people are happy along the way. I thought it was pretty cool. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I love this story. I think I was telling you before this—I think we both, somehow, having Bhutan on our list is so weirdly unlikely. Maybe we both saw the same thing. I saw the "60 Minutes" piece a few weeks ago. What did you think?
First of all, it's so funny: we watched "60 Minutes." "60 Minutes" looks so old, dude. It looks... is "60 Minutes" basically just a YouTube channel? | |
Sam Parr | it's great though right | |
Shaan Puri | **It's great, but why does it look so old?** It's literally like the person on there is old. The clock they use for the "60 Minutes" thing is so dated. All of the editing is so outdated; they don't even know what a "jump cut" is. It's insane. | |
Sam Parr | I think it's *a fun fact*: I am almost positive it's the only TV show without a theme song. It's literally just "tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. When you watch 60 Minutes [TV show], it's interesting to just look at it and be like, "What is this dude?"
Here are a couple of the things that stood out to me. First — why am I interested in a country? I'm interested in a country for the same reason I'm interested in companies that are run in interesting ways. If a company had a unique mission, business model, or a unique way of doing things, that would be interesting to me.
**Countries are just big companies**, and I found this pretty interesting if you looked at it like a company. You ask, "What's our main metric?" It's not revenue — it's *happiness*. So instead of GMV, they're looking at how much happiness they're producing in their own economy.
I like that they measure their own... Did you look at their *happiness index*, kind of 0 to 1, and how that all works? | |
Sam Parr | yeah it's like a weighted score right what what and what were all the metrics or is that | |
Shaan Puri | It's a weighted score. They ask people a bunch of questions about their psychological well-being, their health, their time, their education—all these different things—and they end up with, basically, a 7: a 0.781 on their scale, which is pretty good.
They measure that it's up 3.3% since last year. According to them, 9.5% of Bhutanese people are *deeply happy*, 38% are *extensively happy*, 45% are *narrowly happy*, and 6.4% were unhappy.
What I thought was cool was a couple of things. Number one: it's one of the very few cases where someone in power gives it up. They had a king, and he voluntarily said, essentially, "This could just go to my son, but we need a democracy." The funny thing is the people there were like, "No, no—king, stay king." He was like, "No, no, we need a democracy." The people responded, "Democracy? You see, India is a democracy, Pakistan is a democracy—look at those places; they're always at war. It's violent. Forget democracy, we don't want it. We're happy."
He thought if he just kept passing power down by birth, it wouldn't end well. So seeing somebody relinquish power is crazy—it’s so rare that you just overlook it on the surface. But if you actually think about it deeply, that is really noble and very cool and very unique.
Biden didn't want to give up power, and Trump doesn't want to give up power—nobody wants to give up power. *Power is one of the most addictive things in the world*, so I thought it was really noble and really cool of him to voluntarily move to democracy at a time of peace, which is not usually what happens. Usually, if a democracy happens, it's after a time of violence or war—people need change—or a Western country comes in and helps and then tries to force a democracy on them. So I thought that was cool. | |
Sam Parr | did they say that was the only time that's ever happened that way | |
Shaan Puri | It's the only one I know of. Yeah, they kind of referenced that — that's never really happened before: a democracy arising in a time of peace, voluntarily.
It's also crazy that, just, you know... until the seventies — like in **1974** — there are people listening to this podcast who were born before 1974 and didn't have a currency. It was *barter* even up until 1974.</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | that's crazy right | |
Shaan Puri | The crazy thing was, even though there was barter, they still had to pay taxes. You could pay your tax by giving the government a cow. If you didn't have livestock, you did labor instead.
Because of that, they built these amazing buildings — your taxes were basically community service. People would say, "I'll donate 100 hours of labor to pay my tax for the year," and because of that they built these really cool buildings.
**Side note:** our friend Sheila — friend of the pod, Sheila. | |
Sam Parr | went to tom | |
Shaan Puri | I think he posted this thread — it's a thread about him going there. He meets the king, because it sounds crazy to meet the king. He says he was at a bar and talking to a guy who turned out to be the former prime minister [now a surgeon]. The guy was just drinking at the bar and said, "You want to meet the king?" "Yeah, I can introduce you." So he meets the king and then talks about his experience there.
One of the crazy things he points out is that a lot of the buildings have **penises** painted on them in artful ways. So, you know, it's a little bit of *super bad* mixed in there. The other crazy thing is the **Bitcoin** stuff — did you see their Bitcoin stuff? | |
Sam Parr | I know they **own more Bitcoin** than the total market value of their stock. It's like $1,000,000,000 in Bitcoin. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, they basically have made themselves **wealthy for life**. They use their vast nature [unclear]. They use hydroelectric mining to mine Bitcoin, and it's believed that they have $1 billion in Bitcoin.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | But that was reported, I think, about eight months ago. It's as if they have *double that now*, you know what I mean? They've had a great run. | |
Shaan Puri | The US has it because they seized the Silk Road, right? So they have—the US has 20,000,000,000 (20 billion); China has 20,000,000,000 (20 billion); the UK has 6,000,000,000 (6 billion). El Salvador has been buying and holding **Bitcoin**. | |
Sam Parr | [Unclear fragment: "has 6"]
The guy on that *60 Minutes* show did a great job of saying, "We're human. We still want to be rich, and we want stuff and all these other things. We also want to be happy."
Because people were like, "So if you're just about happiness, why are you buying Bitcoin and all this?" he replied, "Well, I still want nice shit." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah. The more prosperous we are, the happier we'll be.
The other thing I thought was cool: they do free education, free health care — all that good stuff. But they also said, "60% of the land is going to be dedicated to nature." I think they don't allow mountain climbing. They have these amazing mountains because they're in the Himalayas, but you're not allowed to climb them.
He said this great line: "*Nature is not meant to be conquered.*" He went on to say that man has this thirst to conquer everything — "Oh, there's a mountain, I gotta climb it, put my flag on top." They just had a different attitude. It's like nature is beautiful, meant to be enjoyed. It's sacred; it's meant to be revered, not conquered.
I just thought, man, these people roll to a different beat, and I respect it. I'm glad that these little experiments live. | |
Sam Parr | I had the exact same feeling. I saw him talk, and they sort of fit a lot of the stereotypes you would have — like Nepal, the Dalai Lama.
I think they have a national outfit or something like that, and it looks like the [unclear: "boot"]. They are Buddhist, and it looks like the Dalai Lama’s shawl or whatever he wears. So, they have, like, "good genes." | |
Shaan Puri | yeah we love jacob | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. The natural sport is grinding.
They had this cool vibe of wisdom... and it was very shocking to see that because I was just watching this on a Sunday night as I was gearing up to talk about money and gearing up to get after—crush—the week. Then I see this guy who talks about happiness... and I was like, *"This is incredibly refreshing."*
It was pretty cool. It seems like a great country, I think. By the way, there are all these other downsides. I think Scheele even said, "It's a pain in the ass to get there— I don't even think they have an international airport." | |
Shaan Puri | Like, the roads are not very developed. There's another point: when you *prioritize happiness above all*, maybe your roads kind of suck.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | yeah so like it was pretty sick dude I I thought it was great I was very inspired so I wanted to bring up bhutan | |
Shaan Puri | Well, there is one other piece to it, which I— I guess a bunch of young people are leaving the country. Did you see that part? I didn't fully follow that, but they were then going to build a new city in **Bhutan** — the *mindfulness city*.
It was going to be like they'd launched a $100,100,000,000 bond. They're basically trying to make it a city focused on walking and cycling, with green spaces for meditation, mindfulness-based education, and ecotourism. It's like all the shit **Balaji** talks about with a *network state*, or like what the **Praxis** guys are trying to do.
Basically, Bhutan is building a new city with its own cultural values, trying to use that to attract people to the country. | |
Sam Parr | Well, you want to hear a funny story? **Balaji** and a lot of these crypto guys are in on this new thing called *American Colossus*. It's that monument they are proposing to build in the **Bay Area**. I don't know if it— it will never get built, very likely.
But the same architect who's on board with that is the one from the *60 Minutes* episode; he's the guy who's building **Bhutan**'s new city.
So there is this weird crossover of the crypto guys and these people who are like, "Let's... what's in it? What would a new city look like in Bhutan?" | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, it's pretty inspiring, honestly. It makes you think bigger. It makes you think about things that you just take for granted — they seem *set in stone*. They seem like they were always here: "it always was this way" and "it'll always be this way."
Then you hear about somebody — you know, people who are trying to shake that — and you realize, "Oh wow, the whole world is more *malleable* than you thought." | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and they also were approaching it in an interesting way with their new city. I forget the quotes, but he said something like, "We know that this is a *50-year project*. We're going to go slow because we don't want to hurt the environment."
And it was... the guy was like, "But you're going to be dead when they do that," and he was like, "Isn't that awesome that something will outlive me?"
They had a very... So, if you're listening to this, this is on YouTube for free, so Google *"Bhutan 60 Minutes."* It was an awesome segment. | |
Shaan Puri | Alright. Now that we talked about Bhutan and happiness, and how there's more to life than money—can I tell you about one of the most *ruthless, capitalist, bloodthirsty* moves that I've seen in a while? | |
Sam Parr | You know how in boxing they say *"steal the round"*? Because in the last 10 seconds that's what judges remember. They don't remember the first 100... they don't remember the first 120 seconds, but they remember the last 10 seconds. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah but so yeah | |
Sam Parr | Whatever you say *last* is what I'm going to be most inspired by. So let's... we skipped. | |
Shaan Puri | so sit down baton you had your moment | |
Sam Parr | yeah now tell me how I can go cut some fuckers alright | |
Shaan Puri | **This is a private equity roll-up in the education space** that I found pretty interesting.
"Alright, what is—what does that mean?" So I went to high school in Texas for the first two years. Then my mom and dad came to me one day and they were like, "Hey, check this out. Doesn't this look like a cool house?" I said, "Yeah, it looks pretty cool." Then they said, "We're gonna live there." I was like, "Okay." And they added, "It's in Beijing."
Then my family moved me to Beijing in tenth grade. | |
Sam Parr | they went too | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah yeah it wasn't just me there that would have been super cool | |
Sam Parr | they moved me there and they moved themselves | |
Shaan Puri | So they were like, "Hey, you know all those friends you've had? You're not gonna see them anymore."
They also lied to me and said my dog couldn't come, and told me that *China doesn't allow dogs*. Later in life I found out that was a huge lie.
So, you know, maybe that'll be my revenge tour, dude. That's it. That's the thing.
"Wait — so did they leave the dog?"
"Yeah, we sold our dog because dogs can't go to China." I was like, "What?" | |
Sam Parr | oh my god it was | |
Shaan Puri | Stupid—there was no Google at the time. I think... this is pre-Google.
I finished high school in China and I went to a school called the *International School of Beijing*. It was actually an awesome school, and it turned out to be great that I moved there. All these amazing things happened to me.
But, like one of those things, I just went to the school and took it for granted. There's a school here — I don't know, schools are part of the government, they're just like from the land. I don't know—God put it here. I don't know what puts these international schools here.
Now I'm in my thirties and I'm reading up, and I realize, "Oh shit — these international schools are an absolute juggernaut of a business." I'd like to tell you about this roll-up that happened called *Nord Anglia*. Have you ever heard of this? | |
Sam Parr | yeah my friend anand from cb insights is obsessed with it | |
Shaan Puri | And so here's what these guys did. The founding story goes back to the seventies — about 50 years ago. There was one school in the UK… or actually there wasn't even a school; it was more like a company making materials for other schools to teach English as a foreign language to people trying to learn English in the UK.
They expanded that into Eastern Europe, and then they started their own school. They thought, "We'll do our own school for international students and teach them in a sort of English as a second language way."
Over time the operation grew from one school to multiple schools. They created a business that eventually became a **$14 billion** conglomerate of **80+ international private schools**. | |
Sam Parr | can you say the name one more time | |
Shaan Puri | Nord Anglia — N-O-R-D, and then Anglia is A-N-G-L-I-A.
So what do they do? By the way, remember when IMG sold — IMG, which is like the sports prep academy — and it sold for $1 billion? We were like, "Wow." Nord Anglia bought it. So they bought IMG. The reason they bought IMG: IMG is a really cool, sports-focused brand, but it's all in the U.S.
We know how to basically create international schools that the richest, wealthiest expats living overseas want their kids to go to, to be able to get into, you know, maybe U.S. colleges. So they bought it for $1 billion thinking, "Cool — we're just going to take the IMG brand and pop it up in China and India and all these different countries in order to get those types of students who are sports-focused."
Whereas their schools are more, you know, teaching the IB curriculum — the International Baccalaureate. The equivalent of AP in the United States is IB, so I took the IB program.
But the cool thing about this business is that, for the first ten years, it was just a slow burn. These businesses fascinate me. I don't even really fully understand how you can go from kind of a consultant selling teaching materials at one point... | |
Shaan Puri | They had a day care like a nursery built in it was like just this slow sleepy business for like 10 years | |
Sam Parr | was it like a family run thing | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah — it was privately owned at first. Then they hired a CEO and started to expand: they opened their own schools and began buying other school chains. For example, they bought a six-school chain that had a presence in France, and another with a presence in Latin America. They were essentially rolling up as many international schools as they could.
They bought five schools in India for $200 million, so now they had five international schools in India. The company ended up going public, then received a take-private offer, and now is valued at $14 billion — which is pretty wild.
One Swedish private equity (PE) firm has made an absolute killing on this roughly 20-year run. It's called **EQT**.
Here’s the timeline:
- 1970s: Teacher training and language programs.
- 1990s: About 20 years into the business, they pivot to owning and operating their own international schools.
- 2008: Another ~18 years later, the Swedish PE firm comes in and provides capital to rapidly expand and acquire schools. At that point they had about $40 million in EBITDA and roughly $200 million in revenue.
- 2014: They go public.
- 2017: They go private again for $4 billion.
- 2024: They are acquired for about $14.5 billion.
These assets trade at roughly 8.5x EBITDA, and even after all this consolidation they only own about 10% of the international school market — the other 90% remains fragmented and not owned by any single player. | |
Sam Parr | well now they do a 1,000,000,000 in revenue it said | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah. Now they do $1,000,000,000 in revenue (one billion dollars), with, you know, *100 of 1,000,000 in EBITDA* [phrase unclear]. Actually, I think it might even be more than that.
But just to give you an example: here's a slide. This is one of their schools, so they show the profitability of a school. This is one of their case studies — *Dubai*. They opened an international school in Dubai in 2014. It took $7.5 million to build and open it.
Basically, they break even in year 2/3, and then it's basically making *55% net cash-on-cash* once it's at that mature level — once they get the enrollment up to about 1,400–1,500 students. You can see the enrollment: by year 3 they're at almost 1,400 students, so almost at capacity. | |
Sam Parr | "How do they convince parents that they're worth it? Because, with school, it's tradition—usually that's what gets people to buy in." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so it's kind of the same thing. If you go look at their pitch, it's basically: "We have the best-run schools. Our kids get into top-tier colleges and X% of them—huge, like 90-something percent—graduate. They do better than their peers on standardized tests and things like that." | |
Sam Parr | It's basically like when **Chick-fil-A** started expanding to New York, and all the New Yorkers were like, "Finally." You know what I mean? People know this brand.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | In Beijing, the school I went to probably had a **100% graduation rate**—no dropouts; everybody graduated, and **98% went to college**.
By comparison, the school I attended in Houston before that had about a **75% graduation rate**, and less than **50%** would enroll in college the following year.
The school in Beijing was a 1st through 12th grade school, and every year the fees were basically like paying college tuition. It was about **$40 a year** to attend, whether you were in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grade.
The way my parents afforded to send me there was the same as many families: when companies bring you overseas. For example, my dad worked for a company that wanted him to relocate to build up their business in China, and the company basically paid for your kid’s education as part of the relocation package. | |
Sam Parr | and that's like a really good perk | |
Shaan Puri | That's the perk. It's... you know, these schools are basically kind of like U.S. schools. How they make their money is because the government will give student loans to anybody — like anybody can get a student loan. So you can get, like, $200,000 of debt to go to the school whether you're going to be able to pay that off or not. It doesn't matter. So the schools are like, "Great!" That's why tuitions keep going up — because they're like, "Awesome, the government will just keep paying for this. This is amazing."
International schools work largely the same way. It's either very wealthy people there who want their kids to go abroad — for example, if you're very wealthy in Indonesia, China, or India, you want your kids to study in the United States — you're probably, you know, very, very rich, and so you're happy to pay $40,000 a year for an elite education. Or the companies are paying for it. So it's this *beautiful business model* where you're only catering to that top kind of **1%**. | |
Sam Parr | And, interestingly, I think there's actually a *blue zone* in America. Because when you think of a for‑profit university, I think of "University of Phoenix."
Yeah, I think they're bad. I think they're the ones who let everyone in and they just buy all the Facebook ads and Google ads. It's *slimy*. But for some reason, when I look at these schools I think *prestige*. I think... it can be done well. Do you know what I mean? | |
Shaan Puri | You know, the one I want to do — or the one I've been very tempted to do — is the *modern-day film school*.
Film schools exist in the States; you can go to USC or UCLA. Those are the famous ones you can attend. But media and content have changed dramatically since those schools were founded, right? | |
Sam Parr | and credentials are less important I would think | |
Shaan Puri | **And credentials are way less important.** Back then, let's say you were a student in the 1980s and you wanted to work in film someday. When you were in school you really had no shot. You could go be an intern somewhere—maybe hold up, you're holding the lamp in the back and you're holding the light—and that's like all you would be qualified to do.
Today, let's say you want to be good at creating films, or content, or music, or whatever. You could literally be publishing on **YouTube**, on **TikTok**, on **Instagram**, on **Spotify**. You can be publishing everywhere, and actually, you could be in the market; you can be the day. | |
Sam Parr | you have the idea to do it you could be published that night | |
Shaan Puri | You could be 14 years old and be the best in the world at doing Twitch streams or whatever. So what? The number one dream of young kids is to be a **content creator**. It's the number one aspirational profession. You could judge and say that's stupid or whatever you want—the dream is the dream. That means there's a lot of demand for people who want to learn this.
"Why don't I go to MrBeast? Why don't I go to Jimmy and say, 'Hey, why don't you create with your brand a university that is the modern-day content-creation skill stack?'" So it's all the things you need to know: videography, photography, script writing, editing, sound production, music production—basically all the creative arts. But do them in a way where it's like a **two-year program**, like a business school.
It's two years and it's all project-based. You go there and you have access to all the equipment you normally can't afford as a young person: the best cameras, the best recording studios, the best editor terminals, animators. There are people with different disciplines—one person wants to be an animator, one wants to be an editor, another wants to be talent—and you work together on projects. You create content, you actually put it out on the networks, and you get judged based on the number of projects you create and the quality of those projects. You're getting real feedback along the way.
Then you have mentors or teachers—like MrBeast or others—who drop in and basically teach you some fundamentals, maybe storytelling or other things you actually need to do.
And I think if you did this, the math of this stuff is pretty crazy. You get 5,000 or 10,000 people coming to your school and it's $25,000 a year for two years. That one batch of kids—10,000 people in a class, if they're paying $25,000 a year for two years—that's $500,000,000 in revenue. | |
Sam Parr | what stopped you from doing this you seem pretty hyped up on it and it seems like a very logical thing | |
Shaan Puri | well I had the idea of like 4 days ago so you know that's probably | |
Sam Parr | no new idea you've been talking about | |
Shaan Puri | You know, specifically the *media* thing. I've always been interested. Like, "what would you do if you were doing a new school?" I always thought of it in terms of entrepreneurship, but I actually think a more trade-school–style school is better. Yeah. | |
Sam Parr | for sure | |
Shaan Puri | For sure. Teaching entrepreneurship is hard because—there's not really a class for business. *Business school doesn't teach you business; it teaches you management.* What you think of as Harvard Business School is actually a middle-management to senior-management training program. That's what it is.
When you actually learn a skill and learn a trade, that's good. The skill of business takes a lot of time, and it's not one skill—it's like 15. It's a bundle of about 15 skills. You have to know a little bit about strategy, negotiation, marketing, building, and managing—all these things. So I think this trade-school style is much better.
There's an interesting example of this, by the way: do you know what Full Sail University is?
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | Yes. I'm looking up *ITT Tech*, but I'm also looking at *Full Sail*. I know a few people who went to Full Sail, and they had great things to say. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so **Full Sail** is kind of at that scale: 25,000 undergrads, and it's $26,000 a year. It's a private, for-profit college.
So you just do the math. By the way, 25,000 undergrads × $26,000 a year — that's like the annual revenue. Let's do some public math because big numbers are an exception: that's $600,000,000–$650,000,000 a year of revenue that they're generating from a four-year cohort, my friend. | |
Sam Parr | chris have you heard of the company linode | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah | |
Sam Parr | He bootstrapped and sold it for, I don't know, like **$800 million**. He's from Nashville, and I knew him when I was younger. He went to *Full Sail*, and that's kinda how I learned about *Full Sail*. But they have, like—if you look at... | |
Shaan Puri | you know jason citron the founder of discord he's one of the alums | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. I think they do more than just that. I knew it as, "That's where you'd go to get... if you were to become a **music engineer**." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so it was like game design was one. That's why Jason went there—because he wanted to build video games. They have music, and then they have the *Dan Patrick School of Sports Broadcasting*. | |
Sam Parr | so he won't be like that much | |
Shaan Puri | **A TV broadcaster.** They had their own little program—a degree, a sportscaster degree program. But how? | |
Sam Parr | Does it work, since it's not a normal—it's a **for-profit university**? Does **Dan Patrick** actually get paid to use his name, or didn't he donate it?
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | a licensing a royalty that's crazy | |
Sam Parr | that's great | |
Shaan Puri | That's what I'm saying: if you're Jimmy—if you're MrBeast—why are you selling chocolate? We should do this. We just need to find an operator and run it with a physical campus, do the whole thing right, and make the whole thing happen.
There's an enormous talent economy that needs to be built—not just for people who want to be famous YouTubers, but because every single company has to create content. **Content is marketing.**
Look at every corporation, from Nestlé down to your nearby eyebrow-waxing place: they all have Instagram, they all have TikTok, they're all posting content. So every company needs media-creation talent, and nobody teaches that today. It's something you learn on your own outside of school, using your own social media as a testing ground. I think that's a little crazy given the value of this skill.
I think this is the type of thing that could be built into a **multibillion-dollar** business within three or four years. Getting 5,000 or 10,000 people to enroll is not hard for something like this because it has tangible value. When you walk out, not only will you have hard skills in actual content creation—the whole bucket of content-creation skills—but you'll also be highly employable.
Whether you become a creator or go get a job, you're highly employable with that set of skills, especially if you make the program elite. Don't make it University of Phoenix—make it more like Harvard or Juilliard. Ask, "Where do the talented people go?" Build that reputation. I think that's the key to getting this right. | |
Sam Parr | This is an incredibly compelling pitch — thank you. I want to know what the *downsides* are, which I don't even know if you know at the moment, because you're **72 hours** into this accreditation career transition. | |
Shaan Puri | accreditation can matter so if you want accreditation you can do that | |
Sam Parr | does that matter does accreditation matter I guess it I guess it does for optics right | |
Shaan Puri | no it matters for for to funding so if you | |
Sam Parr | got it | |
Shaan Puri | "So how do you get funding from the government? How do your students get loans if you're an unaccredited school?"
"Students can't get loans; they have to pay for it out of pocket." | |
Sam Parr | understood | |
Shaan Puri | And so, you want accreditation so that you're eligible for loans, which would let students go there who don't already have the money. You know, it's much easier to spend money the government gives you when you're 18–20 years old. So you want to be eligible for that.
But you can get accredited, or you could buy a school with existing accreditation. That's not a blocker; it's just a thing you have to do. The hard part is actually running it and doing it well—actually providing quality education. You don't want to be *University of Phoenix*. So you have to have some soul; you have to have some energy. You have to have the entrepreneurial energy.
Why am I not personally doing this? Because I am not going to be the person running it. I want to make it happen and find an operator who wants to create something like this, and I can connect all the dots—how we get the capital, because this takes a lot of capital. Like Joe Lonsdale started a school in Austin. I don't know how much that cost, but I think it's like, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 project of infrastructure. | |
Sam Parr | University of... University of Austin? Austin University? That's crazy. I mean, yeah—that's pretty wild. And if you look at, like... | |
Shaan Puri | So, billionaires have put $200,000,000 into funding that school. Yeah—it’s a big capex [capital expenditure] lift to do it when you have a physical campus.
I wouldn't do it remote. I would do it legit—with a physical campus—and I would just try to make it awesome.
It's the same thing we talked about with the baton idea: it's a **50-year play**. You want to build prestige and legacy like *Harvard* or *Stanford*, where the reputation and the brand are the value. You want the best people to pay top dollar to come and get the best education. Then you want all the companies you hire from to value the label you have.
So, to do that, you have to assume you're going to do something that peaks about 50 years later in terms of brand prestige. | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, that's an *interesting* thing, by the way.
There have been a lot of times when people will sign up for a university with the goal that, after 10 or 15 years, the brand name has elevated. So you bought at the price before it was full — it's just like investing in a stock.
Then there are other times when a university... well... | |
Shaan Puri | it's 30 under 30 | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. When a university has a protest or something happens and it hurts the brand, you're like... For example, let's say you graduated from Columbia. You're like, "Shit — it's a controversial place right now. Is my... I bought this brand; is that now worth less than what I was anticipating?"
There's this weird tension. That is an *interesting* way to look at building a university brand. I'm like, "I have to increase the value so I can justify that the people who bought it actually bought it when it was cheaper, as opposed to what it will be worth in 20 years." | |
Shaan Puri | "Dude, did you see **Bill Ackman** did a presentation about **Harvard**? Did you... did you see this?" | |
Sam Parr | no what what he said oh my god | |
Shaan Puri | Alright. Well, I know we're supposed to wrap up, but this is honestly incredible. **Jim Grant** asked me to give a talk at **Harvard**: *"Buy, Sell, or Hold"* — in the same way you would do with a stock. I think the Harvard motto or slogan is *"Veritas,"* and the title is *"Veritas"?* | |
Sam Parr | Because you | |
Shaan Puri | know he's on this like anti harvard crusade right now | |
Sam Parr | what's a veritas mean forever truth I think truth | |
Shaan Puri | Oh, and so he breaks it down like it's a company. He says, "The business of Harvard College is private education to students," and then he shows a graph.
**Enrollment has been flat over the last 20 years.** Faculty growth has been modest—about **0.5%**—but administrative growth has increased by **40%** in 20 years. So he's basically saying, "You're not growing students, but you're growing your admin—your OPEX (operating expenses) on the back end," analyzing it like a business. | |
Sam Parr | this is amazing | |
Shaan Puri | and the cost has grown basically the cost has doubled in 20 years | |
Sam Parr | he says you're growing by increasing prices not by increasing the number of customers served | |
Shaan Puri | Exactly. And then he breaks down the **P&L**. He explains where the revenue stream is: how much is coming from donations versus tuition. How much of your faculty has diverse viewpoints?
I mean, really — obviously his agenda in this whole thing was basically to say, "Harvard has gone *too woke*, the administration has gone rogue, and you're ruining the brand and the mission of Harvard." | |
Sam Parr | He said, "The operating margin would be *negative 40%* without distributions from its endowment." | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, and he says in **1643** — that's how old Harvard is. In **1643**, Harvard's first mission was set up simply as **"Veritas"** (truth).
He has an old screenshot of a hand-drawn logo of the shield, and then he reads the **"Laws, Liberties, and Orders of Harvard College"**. It's a handwritten document about the goal to encourage Harvard students to seek wisdom.
He's basically saying that, and then he shows how the mission charter has changed. In **2020**, instead of focusing on seeking truth, it removed a bunch of references to the **1650** charter and basically left it more as a **DEI-style** mission [DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion]. | |
Sam Parr | yeah and | |
Shaan Puri | He’s like, "you know, paying attention to that," so he asks, "what happened to new ideas? What happened to the truth?" Then he breaks down the facts.
He says, "even in the faculty growth— is it growth in computer science teachers or is it growth in African American Studies?" He basically shows that African American Studies grew dramatically compared to economics or computer science.
But then he looks at the number of degrees people are getting, and that’s not growing. He says, "your supply is not meeting the demand of the consumer—your supply is growing arbitrarily, not to match demand." I think there was only one degree recipient in 2023 in African American Studies and 57 faculty. | |
Sam Parr | This is wild. If you go all the way to the last slide, his verdict is: is Harvard a "buy, sell, or hold"?
His verdict, as of now, is that Harvard is a **hold**. It still has many positive attributes: a strong brand, a 400-year operating history, a $51 billion endowment, and huge real estate holdings. But it also has many challenges. The quality of the education has deteriorated. There are so many competitors. Many talented people aren't going to traditional universities. They've misallocated resources, and the endowment has been a chronic underperformer.
This is a very interesting way to look at many, many, many different decisions in life that are beyond just money. | |
Shaan Puri | how awesome is this | |
Sam Parr | this is the greatest this is this is a fantastic way to think | |
Shaan Puri | yeah this is so cool | |
Sam Parr | Is this all decisions? I think I should—**every big decision I have in life**—put together a *PowerPoint* like this. We did this with our child's name, by the way. We put three names in a *PowerPoint*, and Sarah presented them and argued in favor of which name we were going to choose. | |
Shaan Puri | hold on hold on what what is that what is even in the slot what do you say like what | |
Sam Parr | So, the way that we make decisions in our house: oftentimes, one person will present *three options*, and then the other person can select the *one option* that they want. And so, if it's like... | |
Shaan Puri | cheesecake factory chipotle or | |
Sam Parr | "Frozen dinner"—so it's like, if I'm selecting the three, I will select three that I'm at least okay with, and then she could select the one that is of most interest to her.
For baby names it was the same. She was like, "I wanna select three and then you can select one." So she made a PowerPoint and it explained: "Here are the three names; here's the background of each name."
I had parameters. I said, "I want something somewhat traditional. I prefer it being in the Bible, because everyone in my family was named for someone in the Bible," whatever.
She said, "Alright, here are the three that I like — I'm cool with all of them. Here's the background of each name, here's what it means, here's famous people named that, here's where it ranks on the popularity list, here's what—"
[transcription cuts off] | |
Shaan Puri | "Are they trying to persuade you toward one, or is it a *completely neutral* pros-and-cons discussion of each?" | |
Sam Parr | In that case it was neutral. But yeah, oftentimes there is an underlying persuasion bit.
If you're the person who selects the **three**, you should select three things that you like. One thing you could do is select three options you like, and then I, as the *final decision maker*, will pick one. You're happy no matter what. It's a great way to make decisions, I think.
So she did this big presentation on three different names. I selected the winner, and that's how we got our baby's name. | |
Shaan Puri | > "Every month we sit down at the end of the month at our table, and we review the month's budget, financial decisions — key financial decisions that were made. We discuss unresolved issues that might be lingering."
I'm kinda into *Parr Corporation*. *Parr Corp.* is probably one of my favorite corporations to learn from, and I think the way you run your *marriage like a business partnership* is both effective and hilarious. | |
Sam Parr | we do we did that | |
Shaan Puri | great combo | |
Sam Parr | Before we got married, we did that. We said, "This is going great—we really love each other, we like each other. It appears as though marriage is in the cards."
About six months into dating we said, "Write down where you want to be in 10 years: what do you want to do, how do you want to raise a family, where do you want to live?" We made sure our wants and interests aligned. We disagreed here and there, and that's okay—I'm malleable—but here's a *deal breaker*: what do you feel about that?
For hers it was, "I want to raise children in the New York area so I can be around my family. That's a deal breaker." I was like, "No, that's cool. I could fuck with that."
So yeah, we do this type of stuff. It feels cold—I don't even like talking about it because people think it feels cold—but dude, this shit works. These types of discussions where it's like, "Alright, now is the...
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | To discuss this you have the floor right that stuff is so effective I think | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, yeah. It always is great. Before you guys go to bed, you just shake hands instead of kiss. It's just nice to keep everything, you know, *on the up and up* and *as calculated as can be*. That's why. | |
Sam Parr | I hate talking about it because people think that everything's like systematic. It's like, no — there's two hours a month set aside to have these relatively formal discussions. But it's *freaking awesome*.
I think if you have a lot of kids, don't people do family meetings? I know I saw it in TV shows growing up, but it's not a thing. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah. Family meetings are a thing. I think you guys just really take it to that next level. You guys are the **McKinsey of family meetings**, right? Like "vows.pdf" before your wedding—you had it all set up. It's good. I like it. | |
Sam Parr | it works I suggest everyone at least try it it definitely works I think | |
Shaan Puri | alright I think that's I think that's a killer episode to be honest | |
Sam Parr | I feel hyped up | |
Shaan Puri | I I have energy perfectly honest with a with a hard h that was a great episode | |
Sam Parr | alright that's it that's the part |