The $30M app that lets you invest like a politician

- June 30, 2026 (about 3 hours ago) • 01:08:04

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	MFM	"Alright, I own $4,010,000,000 in revenue."
00:03	MFM	We acquire, and this year we'll generate around $20,000,000 in revenue we manage. </FormattedResponse>
00:10	MFM	And that makes $30,000,000 per year in revenue for the company.
00:13	Shaan Puri	Those are three ideas that didn't even exist in my cone of vision... I didn't even know that people do businesses like that.
00:26	Sam Parr	"Alright, how's it feel to be in real life? This is strange."
00:28	Shaan Puri	This is weird. It's been...
00:30	Sam Parr	There's normally a situation.
00:31	Shaan Puri	Right — side-by-side with the last time we were in person in San Francisco, doing it on the red chairs. </FormattedResponse>
00:37	Sam Parr	So when you started this thing, and I came on two or three months later, we had these bright red chairs that we bought off Amazon for $150. It was just us sitting on the chairs, and I hated it because you could see a crotch shot.
00:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think I might be doing it now.
00:51	Sam Parr	And you're just sitting like this, and then we had a camcorder.
00:57	Shaan Puri	We would have a guy in the room, and we'd be like, "Hey — are we good to go? Is it all good — audio, video?" And he'd be like, "I think so." "I think so" is not what you want to hear from the guy who's just setting up. He was my severed intern [unclear], yeah.
01:11	Sam Parr	And it was one camera.
01:12	Shaan Puri	Have you ever done audio before?</FormattedResponse>
01:13	Sam Parr	No, but I hear you.
01:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I can hear you great.
01:19	Sam Parr	"What do you think of New York? Have you been to a bodega yet?"
01:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah, we went to a bodega.
01:23	Sam Parr	Yeah, so I talk about bodega culture. I don't know if you've seen any of that. Have you seen any that have impressed you?
01:28	Shaan Puri	I have to stay out of the bodega because I just start chatting it up for too long. It's...
01:31	Sam Parr	Best, right?
01:32	Shaan Puri	Like, dude, I've been here for 75 minutes talking to this guy.
01:34	Sam Parr	Dude... the cashier, right? He's the best. I'm friends with so many bodega owners in his— [trails off]
01:39	Shaan Puri	I could do a full MFM just inside a bodega. I probably should have done that, actually.
01:44	Sam Parr	And it's the pure definition of entrepreneurship. You can clearly tell: one day someone asked for cereal, and now they have ten Costco-sized boxes of cereal. They're individually packed into an iced coffee cup, and they just sell cereal now. Yeah — that's just what they do. There's no, "Does this go with our mission statement?" No. We sell cereal now, right?
02:00	Shaan Puri	And don't know if you need.
02:01	Sam Parr	We have a license to sell food, even though it says "not just for individual sale." We sell cereal now, right? That's what I love. All right, so today we're doing something a little bit special. You said you were coming, and I reached out. I basically just slacked the Hampton channel [on Slack] and asked, "Who in New York has an odd business that we can impress Sean with?" So we picked three different entrepreneurs. I tried to find three businesses that were a bit off the beaten path, because that's why people like watching MFM. You guys like watching or seeing kind of strange businesses. Hopefully you can open up your mind and think, "Oh, there's a million ways to get whatever I want to get done and build a big company."
02:35	Shaan Puri	Right.
02:35	Sam Parr	So I picked 3K. Okay — so they're going to come on; what are they going to do?
02:39	Shaan Puri	So, we told them we just bumped into them. We just told them, "Hey, come in here, and don't start with words as an MFM. You gotta start with a number, and don't make us dig it out — just give it to us."
02:49	MFM	You know...
02:49	Shaan Puri	The shtick: you know what—we like to brag. We want you to not be humble and to brag about it. We want you to brag a little. [unclear term: "mfm"] They’re going to say a number. They’re going to say what they do. Then we’re going to get to know their business because we’re nerdy about businesses. At the end, we will ask them two things: 1. “What adjacent business opportunities are there?” In other words, what other businesses do they see because of where they are in their tiny niche—opportunities we don’t have enough exposure to that other people might go run at. 2. “How can we help them?” What’s the burning question? If they just had me and you for ten minutes, what would they want to talk to us about?
03:23	MFM	Cool. So that's what we're...
03:24	Shaan Puri	Going to try.
03:24	Sam Parr	Alright, the first guy.
03:26	Shaan Puri	Ben, we could bring him in. What's up?
03:28	MFM	How you?</FormattedResponse>
03:29	Shaan Puri	Doing alright. Welcome to the podcast.
03:31	Sam Parr	"Thanks. Alright, so I've known Alex for years—well, for a year. Yeah, a year. A year. We're very good friends, so I'm going to be biased. Okay, start us off with the big number."
03:42	MFM	Alright. I have four. I own 40 publications, 40 magazines, and $10,000,000 in revenue.
03:48	Shaan Puri	"40 magazines, $10,000,000 in revenue. Yeah... what—what source of magazines are we talking [about]?"
03:52	MFM	Real estate advertising.
03:54	Shaan Puri	Real estate advertising. Okay — give us an example. All right.
03:56	MFM	So, by the...
03:57	Shaan Puri	Wait — you gotta carry one? You don't have one on you at all times? That's insane.
04:00	MFM	Yeah, real estate agents basically pay us to promote their listings. The magazine is like a lookbook of all the listings that are on the market at that time in their neighborhood.
04:08	Sam Parr	And it goes to a lot of different locations. They do have different meanings.
04:13	MFM	40 — "forty." Meaning, basically, we've divided the country into 40 locations (zones). So we're covering all of the U.S. and Canada.
04:20	Sam Parr	How big is a magazine? Like, many pages?
04:22	MFM	Anywhere from 100 to 200.
04:24	Shaan Puri	Well—who's the reader? Because you said, "realtors are the ones advertising." Or... wait—"realtors are advertising." So who's the reader?
04:29	MFM	We have a mixture, but basically we mail the magazine out, and we'll mail it out based on property value, income, things like that.
04:36	Sam Parr	With the goal of being a real estate agent who has a bunch of listings in New York City—or something. I don't know, Dayton, Ohio. Yep. You want to show the residents of the homes on this block that they should either use this real estate agent or buy some of the nearby homes.
04:53	MFM	Yeah, either or. Agents definitely are using it to pick up listings. They want to be able to say, "Look where I'm gonna advertise your home," things like that. But they also want to sell the listing they have — and what's it called, Haven Lifestyles?
05:04	Shaan Puri	Haven Lifestyles. Okay — how did you come up with this idea?
05:07	MFM	Alright, so I started it with my business partner, Ryan. We were college roommates. I was a couple years out of college. I was actually a bill collector for five years—through college and after. </FormattedResponse>
05:18	Shaan Puri	A bill collector.</FormattedResponse>
05:19	MFM	I was a bill collector, which I actually think really helped with sales — just having to call people all day for our money. </FormattedResponse>
05:26	Shaan Puri	"You, like the muscle? Like, what is a bill collector actually doing here—dialing them up?" </FormattedResponse>
05:30	MFM	It was a credit card—like Victoria's Secret. It's literally Victoria's Secret credit cards. But yeah, anyhow, I did that. I was actually a supervisor and got dragged into some HR nonsense that I couldn't believe—basically having to defend myself. I texted my college buddy: "Dude, you wanna do something?" He was like, "Yeah, let's—let's start the magazine." So that's where we started.
05:54	Shaan Puri	But why the idea of the magazine? He was...
05:56	MFM	Already doing it. He had a small publication in Annapolis, Maryland, and he said that, basically, agents had reached out to him and asked, "Why don't you do something in D.C.? We want to advertise in D.C. — we just launched one."
06:05	Sam Parr	"Who's the biggest? How many companies do what you do?"
06:08	MFM	Most cities have a lot of small publications. Each city you go into will have a local publication, and we have them across the whole country.
06:15	Sam Parr	And you do 10 million in revenue.</FormattedResponse>
06:16	MFM	Can you?
06:17	Sam Parr	Say how much profit.
06:18	MFM	Yeah... 2.5.
06:19	Sam Parr	Okay. And the biggest one in the space is: "how big."
06:22	MFM	I don't know. It's not public. I don't... I mean, we could be one of the biggest in the space. Most of them are franchised.
06:29	Shaan Puri	"How many years have you been doing this?" "Ten." "Ten? Okay. So it's been a slow build. You've been steady at this revenue for a while."
06:36	Sam Parr	What's... it's been a...
06:37	MFM	"Slow build that has jumps. Give us year one—what was year one like? 300. That's just me going to meetings individually, just grinding it out."
06:46	Shaan Puri	Okay.
06:46	MFM	And my business partner is handling everything else.
06:48	Shaan Puri	"And you know, right away, was this it? Like, 'I'm gonna do this for a while'? Or were you — even after year one — still like, 'I don't know'?" </FormattedResponse>
06:54	MFM	I never thought 10 million, but I thought enough to support myself. We launched an initial public version — we just did a free version of the magazine, like, "let us put you in, we'll show you what it's gonna look like." Then I went around and had meetings all week. I'm like, "Here it is." Literally the very first meeting the guy's like, "Alright, I'll do it." I was like, I'm 25 years old. Meeting after meeting was like that. Then we got to a meeting where a guy asked, "What can you do for $10,000?" which was way more than we were charging. He asked, "How many covers can I get?" I kept calling my business partner every few minutes, "Dude, there's another one... another one... there's something here." But I kept my other job for like eight months. </FormattedResponse>
07:31	Sam Parr	But it's more like a brochure — it's a magazine because it's got a lot of pages, but it's a brochure. I mean, you're just showing off other people's... you're the damn brochure, man.
07:41	MFM	"You're just the magazine."
07:41	Shaan Puri	"You're just sending a magazine unsolicited, correct?"
07:44	MFM	There's not... yes, yes, yes. True. It's on "No Subscribers." It's junk mail — sure, junk. Yeah, it's not... it's not a subscriber magazine. Also should say "mean."
07:53	Shaan Puri	"It's like calling Victoria's Secret 'just underwear.'" "Yeah — exactly."
07:58	MFM	A huge portion is online at this? Like, we do drive most of our traffic online, but everyone is paying to be in the magazine.
08:04	Sam Parr	"And who is doing it? Let's say I want to be in the magazine, and I say, 'Yeah, I'm in.' Who does the artwork? Who actually makes the pages?"
08:11	MFM	We handle it. Most of our designers are... </FormattedResponse>
08:14	Shaan Puri	Philippines... what's?
08:15	MFM	That Philippines.
08:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, basically.
08:17	Sam Parr	And how many of them are there? Because they have "40 Magazine." And how often—quarterly or monthly?
08:21	MFM	They're all... Every once—every six weeks we print 30 different magazines a month. Why did you just say, "So every week we've got seven going forward"?
08:27	Shaan Puri	Most of it’s online.</FormattedResponse>
08:29	MFM	Most of the exposure. So when you're talking about subscribers, junk mail, whatever, we mail copies out. We do that based on—like I said—network things. We're also driving another 90% of our readers online, which targets people who have recently been looking for homes, things like that.
08:44	Sam Parr	"How many people work there?"
08:45	Shaan Puri	[20] So I'm confused. This is a dumb question—I don't really understand how junk mail works. Can I mail anything to anyone? Do you just look up, like, "Which zip codes or neighborhoods have a certain profile?" And then download all the addresses from some site?
09:03	MFM	Yeah, it's all through the post office. Basically, you can pick postal routes and they'll deliver. It's actually cheaper when...
09:08	Sam Parr	You do that? How many magazines do you send a year?
09:12	MFM	Like, half a million.
09:14	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So, this is the post office's business model, right? Basically, the post office is pretty much funded by guys like you who are...
09:19	Sam Parr	Using it.
09:20	MFM	To... we have to make it stay within certain dimensions. It can't exceed a certain weight, or we're... it's a process. It's basically Facebook ads.
09:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. It's Facebook — it's selling you. You are the product. It's selling your address and your mailbox to others without you benefiting or agreeing to it.
09:36	Sam Parr	What would it take to get you to 100 million in revenue? It's definitely possible.
09:40	Shaan Puri	No, no — ask in the Asian mom way: "Why aren't you at 100 million?"
09:45	MFM	Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.
09:48	Shaan Puri	Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the unsexy business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast — from hundreds of episodes. The team at HubSpot went through and pulled out all the unsexy ideas: not the super high-tech ones, but the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed. They're all available to download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.
10:17	MFM	It's kind of a question I would have for you too, because I know you always say you can get to 10 million. I know you can get to 100 million, so how? I think there are a few different ways. I don't think there's one flip of a switch. I think there are a lot of other verticals we could be hitting.
10:33	Sam Parr	Other than real estate agents
10:34	Shaan Puri	Like "home services, home services." </FormattedResponse>
10:36	MFM	Is that?
10:36	Shaan Puri	Sort of thing you're talking about, yeah.
10:37	MFM	Yeah — which we do within our publication — but I think if it was specific to their market.
10:43	Shaan Puri	You've told us about the business magazine company—aka "junk mail"—you send it to people. What's the burning question? Like, where could smart friends help you?
10:52	MFM	Yeah. I mean, honestly, I do think the question is: "How do you take this from 10 to 100?"
10:57	Shaan Puri	Can I take a stab at helping you? First, I always want to know what's the default growth rate—meaning, how much did you grow last year to this year? What do we... what do I expect if nothing changes? </FormattedResponse>
11:07	MFM	Probably like 10%.
11:08	Shaan Puri	10%? Okay, so to get to a 100, or is your real goal a 100? What's your real goal?
11:13	MFM	My real goal is to double profit — double profit, okay. </FormattedResponse>
11:16	Shaan Puri	Because you might not even need to grow the top line.
11:17	MFM	We grow profit faster than we grow revenue.</FormattedResponse>
11:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it seemed like when Sam was asking you, "Who's the biggest at doing this?" you were kind of like, "We might be the biggest." One thing I can immediately tell that's very different about you, compared to the way both me and Sam are, is that we're reverse-engineer type guys. We like to understand what's working for others and how big other people are to give ourselves—like, we create this almost "box." I feel like you don't do that as much. Is that fair?
11:42	MFM	That's definitely a weakness, yeah.
11:43	Sam Parr	"Yeah, but you're happy."
11:45	MFM	"Yeah. Super happy, yeah."
11:46	Sam Parr	It's like... what I mean is, like...
11:49	Shaan Puri	To be clear, we have a sickness. You seem fine, but we'd like to infect you with our sickness.</FormattedResponse>
11:54	Sam Parr	She doesn't need to anymore.
11:55	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you did want to change, here's what I might do. I think what I would do is—maybe it's not direct, like "who also sends home listings, sells to realtors"—but just the general model of mailing out magazines or informational stuff.
12:11	Sam Parr	Yeah.
12:11	Shaan Puri	To homes and generating a big business off the back of that. Who else does that? That's not exactly your space.
12:16	MFM	"Like, yeah."
12:17	Shaan Puri	Are there wealth management companies that grow this way, or is there some other category that grows this way?
12:23	MFM	I think the most— I mean, it's a little different, but I think the most intriguing are neighborhood publications. So I don't know if you've heard of "Stroll."
12:30	Sam Parr	Revolution is that one.
12:31	MFM	I don't think it's a revolution. There's Stroll; there are others.
12:35	Shaan Puri	This kind of, like, what's going on in your area these years?
12:37	Sam Parr	A while ago I talked about this. I think it was called "Revolution." It was a neighborhood publication that was a franchise model. Back then, I think we were in real life when we did this. Actually, it was like north of $100,000,000.
12:49	MFM	Yeah, they're definitely over 100 million.
12:51	Sam Parr	My gut tells me that if you did have dedicated home services, that would be much...
12:57	Shaan Puri	And maybe there's a way to do it more informationally. So instead of the one you do right now—you're just like, "here's the homes for sale"—it's kind of utilitarian. If you just said, "hey, here's all the home service providers," that wouldn't be that great. But if it was like—let's say it's winter—and it's, "here are the five tips every homeowner should do," like listicle-type content, right? Then on the inside there's providers. But you just do something that's actually like the ad—the front cover is basically like a free give [free giveaway]. It's useful information—entertaining, useful information about home service or home care. And then inside you obviously have home care providers, where if people don't want to do it themselves they could hire pros to come do this stuff for [them]. I wonder if you could get good at that. But I would—if I were you—I would start not with an answer but with a study. I would go get real familiar with what all the other players are doing in this space: who's big, who's not, who used to work there. Go talk to them. Go learn from them. I would kind of go on a one-month expedition of that, and I think you'll know so much more about the head
13:55	Sam Parr	He and I are buddies. We talk about hiring all the time. I'm like, "Just go recruit someone who's at the bigger company and have them come work for you." "Yeah—why? And is there a world where, instead of 40, it could be 80 markets?"
14:07	MFM	It would be "[dicing the well]" [unclear phrase]. We could go international — we're already in Canada — so there are markets that make sense for us to go into. But as far as 40 to 80, you would then break down the 40 into 80. It's the same geographical area, just going to be more, because I mean, we're literally covering the whole U.S. Got it. I do think if you break it down it's going to resonate more. There are areas where we have full states combined together because it's just not like Ohio, Indiana — it's just not that sexy of a market. "Would you ever sell this?" "I would. It's not necessarily my goal." </FormattedResponse>
14:36	Sam Parr	I'm pretty sure you're happy.
14:36	MFM	I've been doing it forever.
14:37	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that is crazy. You might be too happy.
14:39	Sam Parr	"It's crazy talking to... an emotionally stable person."
14:42	Shaan Puri	Yeah — you wanted to double profits, and I wonder what would happen. Again, I think this is more psychological than strategic, and I think people underrate how much of entrepreneurship is psychological and not strategic. I wonder: if you just decided that instead of 25% net margins you're going to have 35% net margins in the next six months, what would happen differently? Because my read is that you would like there to be more profits, but you don't really have an "I have to have more profits by this date" goal. If you literally just change the way you talk about it and think about it, I'm sure the answers would become pretty obvious to you as you started. Is that true? Do you have a goal and a date where it's going to happen by? "Yes."
15:24	MFM	But it is... it is a more recent change in the mindset. So what is the—I...
15:29	Shaan Puri	"Have a golden date we can hold you to?" </FormattedResponse>
15:30	MFM	It was one year from a month ago, so it's got eleven months to double, yeah.
15:36	Shaan Puri	Double profit.
15:36	MFM	To be at a "double double" — as in double the run rate at that?
15:40	Sam Parr	So get to 4,000,000 in run-rate profit. Five. Yeah, five.
15:43	Shaan Puri	How's the first month been? In terms of—if we were saying, like, out of twelve months you've already used whatever, 8% of your... [sentence trails off]</FormattedResponse>
15:52	MFM	Yeah, exactly.
15:52	Shaan Puri	"Time — are you doing what you needed to do to create a bunch of momentum, or not really?" "It's like... yeah."
15:56	MFM	I think so. The main thing—the easiest way to double profits right now, I think, is retention. We already work with 10,000+ agents every year, but we don't get them to advertise it that many times. So, I mean, literally double retention and we're fine.
16:11	Shaan Puri	You have the inventory.
16:12	MFM	Yourself—exactly. We—we have the clients. Like, we have people that are agreeing to advertise with us.
16:17	Sam Parr	Do you ask them multiple times?
16:18	MFM	"Yeah, we ask them every cycle."
16:20	Shaan Puri	Why don't they just do it again if they're—if it's a money... [trails off]
16:22	MFM	But a lot of times they just want... It's like, "You know, I've got a big listing—great, now's the time," and then they just drop off.</FormattedResponse>
16:28	Sam Parr	Do you ever pre-sell them on, instead of saying "yeah, this one time," saying, "I'll give you a discount if you do it for 12 months"? </FormattedResponse>
16:33	MFM	Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have about 1,500 people that do it for the year, so they're just on auto-debit. There's a decent amount doing that. But I think there's a lot of things we can do to improve their experience so they're coming back every month, or I just need them to advertise one more time, basically.
16:47	Sam Parr	"I wish you would have brought us."
16:48	MFM	One.
16:48	Shaan Puri	"In the last... okay, let's say this year: how many of those agents have you personally talked to on..." [unfinished question]
16:54	MFM	"The phone zero."
16:57	Shaan Puri	Should I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Not necessarily to sell them, but even just take your top 100 spenders. You should call every single one of them and figure out: what do they love? What do they hate? Why aren't they doing it more? How do you get them? Are they actually—it's just been out of sight, out of mind? "Oh yeah, I will do it," I said. "You will learn a lot just by taking a roster of your top 100." I also learned this in our recent business that has done pretty well. I asked the CEO, "Hey, this has gone pretty well—what'd you do?" He said: > "You know what I did? I came in and I tiered out our key clients as Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three, and I created a definition for each. Tier One is somebody who would do me a favor. I have them on a texting relationship—they know me, I know them; they would do me a favor. Tier Two is: I got their email, we've traded some emails, we like each other…"
17:47	Sam Parr	We're acquaintances.
17:48	Shaan Puri	We're—yeah, we're friendly acquaintances. Tier three is like we're transactional: when they need me, they call me; when I need them, I call them. We haven't really talked much because that transaction is infrequent. Yeah, and then there's tier four, which is like worse than that. And he's like, when you do that and you just score yourself, you're like, "What would a really healthy relationship look like here? What would a really weak relationship look like here?" And then you look at your top 100 and you realize—shit—you have no tier ones.
18:14	MFM	Mhmm.
18:14	Shaan Puri	A couple of tier-two customers, and everybody else is tier three or four. Then it's like a wake-up call. Nothing bad is going to happen by talking to your top 100 customers, but a lot of good can happen from going and talking to them.
18:24	MFM	Yeah, I like that.
18:24	Shaan Puri	And you could do that in 30 days. You could talk to all 100 in 30 days. </FormattedResponse>
18:27	Sam Parr	"What do you think? Are you impressed? Did you ever know that something like this could exist?"
18:31	Shaan Puri	No, it's so simple.
18:32	MFM	Of a
18:33	Shaan Puri	Business, too, right? Yeah, it's pretty simple. I mean, they didn't even subscribe. I'm used to media businesses where it's like: first I win their hearts and minds, and I get them to listen to me regularly or read me every day. Then I get to make money. He's like, "No — read this." "Yeah, read."
18:49	Sam Parr	Heh, heh — that's incredible.
18:52	Shaan Puri	"Why are we doing junk mail?"
18:54	Sam Parr	Do you know Lindy?
18:55	Shaan Puri	The AI tool.
18:56	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flo—the guy who started Lindy's in Hammond—he's like, "Alex Daniels has the most impressive AI setup I've ever seen." Oh, and that's been, like, a little bit of a claim to fame, that...
19:07	Shaan Puri	"He's—what? What can I give us a little sauce, real quick? What are you doing?"
19:11	MFM	We used LinkedIn, basically, to run the sales process, so they...
19:16	Sam Parr	Don't have salespeople.
19:17	MFM	We do have salespeople, but they've shifted. Where they've really shifted to is a different focus—basically where I'd like them to be: more on the customer experience and getting people to come back. Lindy is able to respond to every email that's coming in, follow up with it, upsell them, and just go through the whole process. But yeah, it was a big Lindy, which is what Flo was talking about. It's crazy.
19:39	MFM	That's awesome. Alright, appreciate you, dude. Cool.
19:42	Shaan Puri	What you've done is awesome, dude. Alright, thanks, guys. We need a name for this: - "The Dragon's Den" - "The Shark Tank" - "The Swimming Pool" - "The Denim Dungeon" Let's go.
19:54	Sam Parr	The Denim Dungeon
19:57	Shaan Puri	What's up?
19:58	Sam Parr	"What up, brother?"
19:59	Shaan Puri	How's it going? How are you? Alright.
20:01	Sam Parr	Your name and the impressive number.
20:04	Shaan Puri	"Hit us with the big number."
20:05	MFM	Great. I'm Josh. I run Team Outsider. We acquire family-owned campgrounds, and this year we'll generate around $20,000,000 in revenue.
20:14	Shaan Puri	"Twenty million in revenue. Okay—explain like I'm an idiot, because I kind of am: what do you do exactly?"
20:21	MFM	So, yeah. We acquire campgrounds typically from families who are looking to retire. At a campground, the majority of it is like a hotel, right? We're renting different spaces. Some people come in their RVs, so they effectively have a traveling hotel room. We also have tent spaces and cabins that we rent to people who don't want to stay in a tent and don't have an RV.
20:40	Shaan Puri	"You camp? When's the last time you went camping?"
20:42	Sam Parr	Like ten years ago, but I appreciate it.
20:46	Shaan Puri	I haven't gone camping in like 20 years, so a campground is literally just a piece...
20:50	MFM	Of dirt, right? So the ground — we have amenities. All of our campgrounds have stores. We typically have a café where we'll sell ice cream and, sometimes, burgers and pizza.
20:59	Shaan Puri	Cabins, basically... or...
21:00	MFM	We have cabins as well. Yeah, we have swimming pools and lakes. At one of our campgrounds, we have a go-kart track.
21:05	Shaan Puri	Oh, okay. So it's a very outdoorsy hotel, essentially — effectively, yeah. Okay, we're looking at one here. Perfect. What's the most popular one you guys have?
21:13	MFM	They're all really popular in their local communities. Okay. The first one we bought, which is right near Grand Teton in Yellowstone, is really popular because that's a major tourist destination. We have one right outside New York City called the Never Sink River Resort. It's a couple of hours away, and that's really popular with folks who live around here.
21:29	Shaan Puri	"So, give us a story. What makes a guy want to buy a campground? How'd you even realize that that's a good opportunity?"
21:36	MFM	Yeah. I met my partner in college, Cody. We studied together and started a business together, which was tremendously unsuccessful but showed us that it was a really good relationship. So we stayed friends post-college, got some working experience, and then realized we wanted to do something together again. We were looking for a business where two non-technical founders could hopefully have a winning situation. We wanted a market that was large enough to participate in and interesting—one where there was an immense amount of fragmentation of ownership, one that was operationally complex, and one that was meaningful, where the team members would feel good working there and where the customers would feel good about being part of it as well. "So how many do you own currently?" We have 16, and there are about 4,000 sites among those across 10 states. "And did you raise money?" Yeah. The first one we did with our own cash and an SBA loan, so it just kinda...
22:25	Shaan Puri	That was the Yellowstone one.
22:26	MFM	"Yep. How much was that? About three million."
22:28	Sam Parr	And so, how much of your own money and how much in loans did you put in?
22:31	MFM	The loan was 80%+. Yeah, the rest was cash.
22:35	Shaan Puri	Sorry — so that was an already operating site.
22:37	MFM	Everything we buy is existing cash flow. It's been there, generally for decades. Most of these are staples within their local communities.
22:43	Shaan Puri	So, let's walk through that first one. So, you find this property — it's doing what when you buy it?
22:48	MFM	It was generating around half a million dollars in total income.
22:52	Shaan Puri	Top line, and then the cash flow on—that's what.
22:54	MFM	About 35%.
22:56	Sam Parr	"Can you do that for me?"
22:57	Shaan Puri	Yeah... we call.
22:58	MFM	It's a 150.
22:59	Sam Parr	Okay.
23:00	Shaan Puri	And you buy that for $3,000,000. Mm-hmm. Okay, so that's the entry. Then you do that knowing, "Hey, we think we can turn that $1.50 to $2.50." What was the insight at the time?
23:12	MFM	Yeah, so that one didn't have a lot of digital marketing. It was...
23:16	Sam Parr	"It's like a mom-and-pop thing."
23:18	MFM	All of them are.
23:18	Sam Parr	"And everything's on paper, and they've been doing it forever. They're like, 'Our kids don't want this shit. Do you want it?'"
23:22	MFM	Exactly. So we are, oftentimes, a succession plan for these sellers. These are years-long relationships. We've got a couple under contract right now. One of them — I've been talking to the seller for five years. Generally, what happens is we maintain the relationship, and when they're ready to sell, we get the call — hopefully.
23:38	Sam Parr	And what are we going to do to make it better? And what does "better" mean? Yeah—so, there... </FormattedResponse>
23:41	MFM	There are a few things we can do. One of them is to introduce more professionalized systems: digital marketing, a better website, and voice/VoIP systems for the phone—to ensure that the training is happening the right way.
23:52	Sam Parr	Does marketing mean, like, Yelp and Google reviews?
23:55	MFM	Google reviews, but also paid ads and a better website. Oftentimes there are no digital reservation systems — we'll introduce that. Got it. So that's kind of on the technology side. </FormattedResponse>
24:03	Shaan Puri	I think I missed it. So you're like, "I wanted to do something with my friend," and then you had the business-school explanation—it's like high fragmentation, "blah blah blah." No, no, no. Where were you sitting when someone was like, "Should we buy campgrounds?" Or did you meet a guy who's rich who bought campgrounds and said, "We should do that shit"? What actually happened?
24:19	MFM	Our backgrounds were in hospitality and real estate. There's the obvious confluence there. Cody lives in Bozeman, Montana and is an avid RVer. He said, "Hey, the thesis sounds interesting. Why don't you fly out here and let's drive around the country, meet some owners, team members, guests, and see if this is something that actually has a little bit of a spark to it?" So I flew out from New York, spent some time on the road meeting different campground owners, team members, and guests, and just fell in love with the space.
24:45	Sam Parr	"And how much money have you raised in total now?"
24:48	MFM	We have raised around $60,000,000.
24:53	Sam Parr	"You've raised $60,000,000 from Fire." </FormattedResponse>
24:55	Shaan Puri	"What'd you say, 15-ish properties?"
24:56	MFM	We've sold a couple, but we have 16 currently.
24:59	Sam Parr	And what is it all worth — north of 100 million? Does that mean that 40 million is you and your partner's equity?
25:07	MFM	No, we've raised outside capital. So [at this?], we have family offices we work with, a select group of accredited investors we work with, and a few institutional partners we've worked with as well.
25:15	Sam Parr	I guess what I'm saying is: of the $20,000,000 in revenue—or, if you value it (I don't know anything about real estate), however you value it—how do you get personal cash flow or net worth from it?
25:24	MFM	Like most real estate operators, it's promote-based, and different deals vary depending on the investment partner. We are largely back-end incentivized in most of these typical private equity structures. There's a preferred return, a return of capital, and then a split depending on the investor profile.
25:43	Shaan Puri	And so, when you do that first one, you buy it for $3,000,000. It's doing $1,000,000 in revenue and $150k of cash flow. What happened? What was the, like, success story of that one? "Obviously, it was so successful — you wouldn't have 16 more." Well, we were able...
25:56	MFM	We planned to refinance a couple years later, so we took all of our cash out.</FormattedResponse>
25:59	Sam Parr	And you.
25:59	Shaan Puri	Brought the income — the NOI — up to what?
26:01	MFM	The NOI in that one went from closer to 300, at that.</FormattedResponse>
26:05	Shaan Puri	Okay. So you doubled the profit on the thing, recapped and refinanced it out, and used that capital to go buy the next one.
26:11	MFM	Exactly, exactly.
26:13	Sam Parr	"That's pretty awesome."
26:14	Shaan Puri	"Why campgrounds? If I wanted to go into real estate, why would I choose campgrounds instead of retail, shopping, multifamily, office — whatever? What would be my advantages if I was going into this?"
26:25	MFM	Strong yield. It's operationally complex, which means there's opportunity to drive value and there's really attractive depreciation—similar to manufactured housing, for example. You can depreciate the roads and the infrastructure. There's very limited land value in many of these more rural markets, and limited building value. So the depreciation characteristics are also really attractive to people who are tax-sensitive.
26:47	Sam Parr	"Will you do this forever?"
26:49	MFM	I hope so.
26:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah, like... just like.
26:51	Sam Parr	"Looking down ten years—or twenty years—down the line, where do you hope to be, business‑wise?"
26:56	MFM	Yes. Look, I think the larger opportunity—as more of life moves online—is that businesses that get people together in the real world are going to be more valuable. There are different types of experience-oriented real estate that can speak to that thesis. Campgrounds still have a lot of runway. We still have a big pipeline of properties we'd like to be a part of, and so hopefully we're doing this forever.
27:20	Shaan Puri	Who are the big dogs in this space?
27:22	MFM	Yeah. So there are two very large REITs in this space that initially focused on the manufactured-housing side of the business. But they recognized—both from a depreciation perspective and because the infrastructure is very similar—that there's overlap with campgrounds. Right: your rental "pads" and campground REITs. Some manufactured-housing REITs have a large portion of campground exposure.
27:38	MFM	Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
27:40	MFM	So, that was one of the ways. When we were researching this, we got a little more comfortable with the idea: "You're buying these."
27:45	Shaan Puri	You're buying out the operator, and then you put a property manager or a property management company.
27:50	MFM	Or we're the manager. </FormattedResponse>
27:51	Shaan Puri	You are the manager.
27:52	MFM	Yeah, so initially we didn't think we were going to go that route. Initially, Cody, my partner, went and managed our first location for the first year—scrubbed toilets, did the whole thing. We thought, you know, learn how to hold a shovel and dig a hole, and then you can hire a third party to manage it, like most real estate sponsors do. What we realized was: (a) you can't outsource culture, and that was going to be really important for our success; and (b) if we wanted to scale, there weren't really—at least at that time—competent third parties that could scale with us. So we made the decision to build an OpCo [operating company] in-house and have been managing our properties ever since.
28:22	Sam Parr	Your branding's cool. Thanks — that's awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. When I was looking at it, I was like, "Oh, I would love to go see." Is there a world where you would buy many of them in a similar region and create a membership? You know, like Koa — is it Koa?
28:33	MFM	Yeah, actually, franchisee in certain markets.
28:36	Sam Parr	So, how do I—how do I explain Koa to someone? I mean... I don't know about all...
28:40	MFM	Of campgrounds. Okay, they've got 550 flags across the country. They own about 50 of them themselves, but they are a franchise. "No for no" [unclear].
28:47	Shaan Puri	There — but is it, like, he's saying whether it's a membership or it's just a brand you trust? You know what you're going to get with it.
28:51	MFM	It's a brand you trust. You know what you can get.
28:53	Sam Parr	Yeah, so, like, when I do road trips and I want to camp, it's like something might be a lot nicer, something could be a lot worse. But KOA [Kampgrounds of America] — I just know what I'm rolling up on.
29:02	Shaan Puri	I was talking to, like, a kind of famous guy. He was like, "Out an hour outside of cities there's something called... was it Postcard Cabins or something like that?" I said, "Yeah, I love going to those with my kids." I asked, "What's the story there?" Then I looked it up — it's owned by Marriott or something.
29:15	MFM	They sold to Marriott last year. It's a little bit of a different model. They were focused on very remote, single units in destinations where you didn't have to see your neighbors. We are more community-focused, so a lot of our campgrounds have seasonal guests. This basically means these are people who reserve the right to a specific space for the duration of the season, pay before the season starts, and come every year. Grandmas, aunts and uncles, and kids are there. Everyone's been raised there and all the friends are around, so it's very sticky and communal. </FormattedResponse>
29:42	Sam Parr	But is there a world where you brand it so it's similar? Each property has maybe a different shtick, but it's all under one brand.
29:51	MFM	Potentially down the road, I think real estate brands are inherently tough to scale. Yeah, and until we have meaningfully more scale, that's probably not the right focus for us. But as regional concentration starts to happen—which is already naturally happening—perhaps that's something to explore.
30:05	Sam Parr	"So, when I hear you — I know nothing about real estate. When you describe it, I think that sounds awesome: you're outdoors all the time. I realize that's not the case, obviously. What's the day-to-day work? Are you just cold-calling these places, trying to make a deal?"
30:17	MFM	Writing a lot of handwritten letters, a lot of cold calling, and a lot of checking up on.
30:22	Shaan Puri	Have you found that a letter with a cookie converts better than, you know, a cold call?
30:26	MFM	A lot of it is luck. The challenge in this space is that, effectively, our sellers are behind the front desk most of the time. That means, in season, they're exhausted and they don't want to take a call. </FormattedResponse>
30:35	Sam Parr	So, the bottleneck of the business is just getting in touch and wooing.
30:38	Shaan Puri	Finding people who want to sell.
30:39	MFM	Building relationships and being the trusted succession plan.
30:43	Sam Parr	Because they care. They don't care — it's not just a money thing for them.
30:46	MFM	Exactly. These are their friends that they have been personally servicing for, oftentimes, decades. So whoever's taking over that relationship is a really...
30:52	Sam Parr	Important: "Is there, like, a person—campground owners, like a publication or summit, or... yeah?"
30:59	MFM	There are Facebook groups and conventions...
31:01	MFM	All they're like.
31:02	Sam Parr	Posting them all the time with the same thumbnail image across all of them. Everyone starts saying, "Oh, this is the guy—he seems like a good guy."
31:07	MFM	A bit of that. We're trying to figure out how to do it in an authentic way, and that's a tough balance because there's a level of mistrust around being over-marketed in this space. So a lot of it is catching them on the right day—when the campground's a little less busy and they answer the phone. We can start a relationship, and then years later, when they're ready to sell, we get the call.
31:27	Sam Parr	This sounds pretty awesome. Is this how many hours a week do you work?
31:30	MFM	A lot, yeah.
31:31	Sam Parr	You grind.
31:32	MFM	Oh.
31:32	MFM	Yeah, you're in grind mode. Yeah — absolutely — but I love it.
31:35	Shaan Puri	There's a lot of real estate people — they choose real estate because all real estate is work. There's a way to do it, a state you can reach that is not about grinding. It's about having a lot of flexibility: you have cash flow coming in, or you flip a property and you can take time off. Now you could do all kinds of things. Sounds like you're approaching it more like company building than...
31:55	Sam Parr	It is.
31:56	MFM	It's company building, and it's a hospitality business. Yeah — we've got tens of thousands of guests every year and a team of 50 people, so there's no easy break. </FormattedResponse>
32:05	Sam Parr	"Are the people you employ to run a campsite pains in the ass? Are they hippies, or are they meth addicts?"
32:12	MFM	No, we have some amazing people that work with us.
32:14	Shaan Puri	We'll put disincentives in the back. Please answer this question. Actually, the majority of...
32:18	MFM	Our team is incredible. They're aligned with our mission, which is to be the "most hospitable team in the world." That alignment is really important when you're trying to replace a mom-and-pop operator, because the hospitality that a family provides is...
32:28	MFM	It was awesome.
32:29	MFM	Really tough to beat, but we do have some fun stories of team members that haven't been the right fit. We had a situation where we found out we had employed a convicted bank robber. He had robbed nine banks. I had to go and fire him in person. It was... what?
32:41	Sam Parr	Was that, like...?
32:42	MFM	Terrifying. Yeah, he actually was incredibly nice and reasonable, but the drive-in, I was very scared. I had another situation where we found out, through a guest, that some people on the team had been cutting down our trees and selling the wood for cash on a Facebook page. So it wasn't a great situation. And again, these are total outlier situations — they're just fun for conversation. Hey, why do... </FormattedResponse>
33:02	Sam Parr	"You live in New York. Why do you do this in New York?"
33:05	MFM	My family's here — my wife's here, my son's here, my parents are here, my in‑laws are here. So, you know, when you have kids and the grandparents around... but my partner's in Bozeman. Let's hit it real quick — what's the...
33:16	Shaan Puri	If you had a burning question—something we could give you a quick, perhaps different insight on as an outsider—what would be helpful?
33:24	MFM	Sure. As you think about what we do in trying to scale culture to a team of hourly employees across 10 states, with this workforce, what is something that we could do differently to keep people incentivized to deliver the level of service that we're trying to deliver? If you can solve this in 10 minutes, I will love you forever.
33:43	Shaan Puri	Well, actually, I'll give you a quick story. My first rep business was a restaurant business, which has the same problem: frontline workers in hundreds of locations. If you do it right, and we met with the founder of Chipotle, he said, "If you can get a frontline worker to care about the customer—treat this the way you're treating this first location—you'll make billions of dollars." The problem is that's the hardest thing in the world to do. Chipotle actually did some pretty interesting things, both in the naming of roles and in incentives. They have general managers. The general managers get comped: if any employee you've ever had becomes a general manager—even if you no longer work at Chipotle—you get $10 in the mail. They do lots of things to build a culture so people stay longer than they normally would, work their way up the ranks, and actually think like an owner of the place. So I would study this. I'd make a list of the 15 companies that have already solved this problem. I would study what works, look for common patterns, and try to hire people who were there in the early days—either as consultants or as full-time people. Often you can find retired people; you're not going to hire them, but they kind of want something to do and they're sitting on a wealth of knowledge because they helped scale, you know, whatever—some cruise line, sure—and now they're just retired. I think, well, that's what I would do if I was going to solve this problem. My real-life answer is I run away from businesses that have that problem because I'd rather pick a different "hard." But you've picked this hard—yeah, good luck. Have you read? Thank you.
35:02	Sam Parr	Obviously you've read Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality. Big fan. We had him on the podcast and he told two stories that were interesting because I was like, "Okay — this works in a fancy restaurant. Where else does this work?" The first story: he worked with a Ford dealer. He said, "Let's just find a forgotten moment where we could blow someone away." So they sat in the car and looked around. He asked, "What's in the glove box?" The dealer said, "Nothing, we don't keep anything there." Guidara said, "I got it — let's put a $15 Starbucks gift card in the glove box of every car and a note that says..." > "Whenever you go to open this glove box, we wanted to surprise you with something special." The second example: he told the story of a UPS Store owner [not exactly a high-margin or glamorous business]. Every week the owner held a contest: the person who did the most hospitable thing got a $20 bill. That one contest changed the whole culture because everyone was competing over who could be the most hospitable. "Grown-ups are just like kids — we just like stickers," he said. He tracked referral business and it definitely worked. You should listen to that podcast: My First Million — Will Guidara.
36:26	Shaan Puri	It was.
36:26	Sam Parr	Really cool.
36:27	MFM	Amazing
36:27	Sam Parr	Look forward to it. But yeah, that guy's awesome, and he gave you some actionable tips.
36:31	MFM	Yeah — fantastic. Thank you.
36:32	Shaan Puri	Right on. Well, for doing—congrats on everything, man. Thanks for coming on.
36:35	MFM	Appreciate it, guys. Alright.
36:35	MFM	Very much.
36:36	Sam Parr	Alright, see you.
36:37	Shaan Puri	"We should go camping." </FormattedResponse>
36:39	Sam Parr	"Yeah, it's pretty awesome. All right — the last one is going to be funny."
36:45	MFM	Alright, how's it going?
36:46	Shaan Puri	What's up? Alright, welcome to the hot seat — the Denim Den.
36:51	MFM	The Denim Den — let's go. Is it live right now?
36:55	Shaan Puri	The dudes in denim — we're live. Alright.
36:58	Sam Parr	You wanna give us the big—the...
36:59	MFM	Big. Alright. I'm Brian. I run a company called Autopilot. We manage $1.8 billion, and that makes $30 million per year of revenue for the company. We started Autopilot about three years ago. One number that kind of blows my mind — I think it's a testament to how much people want to invest in retail traders — is that it took Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio about ten to fifteen years to start managing a billion dollars. The fact that Autopilot, this tech company that plugs into your Robinhood account or your Schwab account, could manage $1.8 billion... to me, that just blows my mind.
37:33	Sam Parr	"I’m shocked — that’s crazy. I didn’t realize how big you guys were. So, what does the business do?"
37:37	MFM	Yeah, so the business we're most known for is launching the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker.
37:41	Shaan Puri	On Twitter, I thought your big number was going to be like 44%. That's Nancy Pelosi's annual returns. Or, you know... like, yeah — what are her annual returns? What does Nancy Pelosi...?
37:51	MFM	The last three years she's up around 240%. Check the app for the actual performance — I have to say that for SEC compliance — but she's outperformed the SPY [S&P 500 ETF] significantly. I think the SPY in that same time is up around 30–40%, and she's up 240%.
38:07	Sam Parr	"In your app, I can invest alongside her picks because she's a politician." Exactly. "So there — or is she? She's not a politician anymore."
38:15	MFM	So, well—she retires in January 2027. We have that much time to copy her trades and follow her trades. But basically, I can follow anyone. You could follow anyone. So you could follow her, you could follow different politicians. We also took 13 apps from different hedge funds, and that was the way that we kickstarted the marketplace. I think every startup has that chicken-and-egg problem they have to solve for a marketplace: you have the supply side and the demand side. If you don't have anyone to follow, that's... you're not gonna get people to come follow that person. But if you don't have anyone to follow, no one's gonna want to launch on your platform — they're like, "Why am I doing this?" So Chris and I got together and we were like, let's just manufacture the supply side. Let's take publicly available information.
38:54	Sam Parr	Because the whole premise of autopilot was: "Anyone can become a..." Is that, "Anyone can become a..."
38:59	MFM	Hedge fund—exactly.
39:00	Sam Parr	So, instead of having a Substack newsletter where you could follow my content, I can charge a certain amount and you could follow my trades or my portfolio that I think is good.
39:10	MFM	Exactly — got it. Okay. I think there are a lot of Substacks. I'm sure we've all read some of them, but you don't know the performance of the person, right? Maybe the right one, and there'll always be winners.
39:19	Shaan Puri	They write a very convincing case, and then they talk about how last time they were right. But you only know they're... yeah.
39:24	MFM	They might have been wrong three or four other times for that one. So, with Autopilot, you have a track record of success. You can see people's winners, their losers, their entire performance. Then you can see how many dollars are following them, their content, etc.—how much.
39:37	Sam Parr	Money—have you raised?</FormattedResponse>
39:38	MFM	We've raised about $16,000,001.06. Yeah—$1.06... 16.
39:42	Sam Parr	And 30,000,000 in revenue seems like a good company. Yeah, what's that worth?
39:47	MFM	I don't know. We're going out to raise a Series B. The valuations at different venture firms have... floated rounds between $300 million and $400 million, which is crazy — but that is venture money. I'm not sure what it's actually worth.
40:01	Sam Parr	How old are you?
40:03	Shaan Puri	[00:31] Speaker 1: "You start this business — what's the first idea you had here?" Speaker 2: "First idea is what?"
40:08	MFM	So, the first idea we actually started six years ago was a company called Iris — "Iris" for the eyes. It let you see into other people's portfolios. I was trading on Robinhood.
40:17	Shaan Puri	You've been thinking about this idea for, like, six-plus years.
40:20	MFM	Yeah, yeah. I think—like—we're all kind of... any retail trader. I don't know if you guys invest in the stock market yourselves on an app. But anyone knows there are stocks that just fly, and it's kind of obvious. I remember buying Nvidia or buying Tesla. You're like, some things are just obvious to younger people. But if you don't do the research, you're not going to get those asymmetric gains.
40:40	Sam Parr	Yeah, but most people don't do the research.
40:42	MFM	Most—yeah, most people don't. And I... I think.
40:44	Shaan Puri	"And most things I think are obvious are wrong. Most of the time, when I invest, I lose money."
40:49	MFM	That is fair.
40:50	Sam Parr	And there's...
40:50	MFM	Or do you have the inverse Kramer effect? </FormattedResponse>
40:52	Shaan Puri	Or no, no, no.
40:53	MFM	But I think there are certain people who just have a knack for it. We were talking earlier about how most people should just invest in index funds. I would say that's true for the most part, because a lot of people want to do it themselves — especially with the advent of DIY. The goal, I think, is autopilot: find someone you have confidence in and whose track record of success you can see. Then put about 10 to 20% of your net worth — not all of it, but around 10–20% — into these "high-risk, high-reward" strategies.
41:19	Sam Parr	Know what's fun? Wait. So we're doing this Ray Dalio thing tomorrow—we're interviewing him. He started as a newsletter; it was like a $1,500-a-month newsletter. That's smart. Then someone was like, "Hey, if you think you're the man, why don't you have your own fund?" And, you know what, he's like, "Maybe I will."
41:34	Shaan Puri	And now we got the biggest one. Now we...
41:35	Sam Parr	Got the biggest, so my question is: why doesn't— I think you know Motley Fool. Mhmm. So, Motley Fool does nine figures a year in subscription revenue. For those who don't know, with Motley Fool you give them $100 (or some amount of money) and they give you stock picks. They also have a fund where they invest in their own picks, and I think they have over $1 billion AUM [assets under management]. It's all public; you can look it up. So, will every financial blogger who is a stock picker be an "autopilot" person?
42:01	MFM	Yeah, I think that's going to happen. We have...
42:03	Sam Parr	Then there are going to be way fewer of them, because everyone is going to be able to see who's legit and who's not. </FormattedResponse>
42:07	MFM	See, exactly. We have a 6,000-person waitlist to launch a portfolio on autopilot. We do a lot of due diligence. We look at the track record of success and analyze their actual portfolio. For example, if you run a newsletter but your actual portfolio is bad, we don't really want you on the platform.
42:24	Shaan Puri	"Who's the most famous or successful person that launched their portfolio on here? Not like you're tracking the politicians."
42:30	MFM	It's a guy named Peter Wolf. So I checked out his personal Robinhood account, and I was like, "This guy's up 200%."
42:35	Sam Parr	"How do you check someone's personal Robinhood?"
42:37	MFM	Just by... I would go on a video call and look at it. But right now we have technology where he could actually connect his Robinhood account to our platform, and we could analyze it.
42:44	Shaan Puri	And 200%, but over... over... over three and... [utterance incomplete]
42:48	MFM	"I was like, Alright."
42:49	Shaan Puri	200% over three years' time, right? Three years is, like...
42:53	MFM	I mean, you're right. It's like: does it do in a downturn? But I liked the way he was thinking about what he does to hedge against risk, and I was like, "You know what? Launch on the platform."
43:03	Shaan Puri	So you guys are kind of like—you're the editorial team. You're the "American Idol": you're letting them sort of audition, and you're the ones picking, right? Yeah. So you're picking the pickers. Then they launch their portfolio. Do people pay upfront to do it, or do people just copy the trade and you get... you get that? </FormattedResponse>
43:19	MFM	A person gets a commission. Yeah, there's a subscription fee, very similar to Substack. "How much?" "The pilot—could we call them pilots?" They could set it. It ranges from $100 a year to $500 a year.
43:29	Shaan Puri	And so they do that. How much are the top people making—as the top people?
43:33	MFM	Are making around $1–$2 million per year on autopilot.
43:37	Sam Parr	Woah. Okay — that's...</FormattedResponse>
43:38	Shaan Puri	That's outside of their stock print. That's just their autopilot.
43:41	MFM	Revenue is just on autopilot.
43:42	Shaan Puri	And so that's like — does that mean they have how many subscribers? Like 10,000 subscribers or 100,000?
43:47	MFM	It depends on how much they charge. For example, Pure Wolf has around $220 million following him on autopilot.
43:54	Shaan Puri	"Oh, so you see how many dollars are backing you?"
43:57	MFM	Yeah — so, again, for example, this is the stat that we pull: Bill Ackman, who traditionally raised a lot of money really quickly. When he graduated Harvard, it took him about five years to raise $60,000,000. This guy, on autopilot, within one year raised $220,000,000.
44:13	Shaan Puri	So, you're basically... it's kind of like Justin Bieber was YouTube-native. Yeah — he was a YouTuber first and became Justin Bieber. And you're basically saying the next Bill Ackman, the next generation's Ray Dalio, is going to come. </FormattedResponse>
44:28	MFM	Is it going to come from ours or from you guys?
44:30	Sam Parr	This — I put my money into Peter's fund.
44:33	MFM	> Yeah, so what would happen is you connect your Robinhood account—or whatever brokerage you have—and it automatically follows his fund. > > So when he makes a trade, we send a notification to your brokerage to automatically buy or sell that security.
44:43	Sam Parr	Copy trade.
44:44	Shaan Puri	"But it's not giving the money to the guy."
44:45	MFM	Yeah... and that's...
44:46	Shaan Puri	Actually, money to your Robinhood.</FormattedResponse>
44:47	MFM	Yeah, and that's how we are able to operate from a legal standpoint. Whenever you're giving custody of assets away to someone, the SEC gets really involved. If it's a brokerage that has custody, that's when a lot of regulation pops up. [SEC = Securities and Exchange Commission]
44:58	Sam Parr	"How is the business? It's a..." [sentence trails off]
45:00	MFM	We've been running autopilot for three years, but the entire business structure is six years.
45:05	Sam Parr	So, autopilot has existed for three awesome years. Yep. What's going to happen in six years when you have three shit years?
45:13	MFM	If we have three shit years.
45:14	Shaan Puri	Like stock-market shit — "years" is what he's saying.</FormattedResponse>
45:16	MFM	I think what we see is the retail investor right now perseveres longer than they used to. Three years is a long time, I would say. If it were a three-year downturn consistently, I feel like the whole world—there would be a lot of questions for the whole world.
45:31	Sam Parr	That happens.
45:31	Shaan Puri	Well, it happens to, like, Robinhood and these other guys, right? What do you mean?
45:34	MFM	I think three years straight it hasn't really happened, but I think you'll see one and a half years happen. So I think...
45:39	Sam Parr	If... and there's Robin Hood — almost died. </FormattedResponse>
45:42	MFM	Yeah, I think they didn't because they...
45:44	Sam Parr	Had raised billions of dollars.
45:46	MFM	Yeah, and they had an emergency funding round.
45:48	Sam Parr	Yeah, so it was a near-death moment.
45:50	Shaan Puri	"When was that? During that... that was, yeah."
45:51	MFM	During GameStop, they were about to go under, and I think they had raised $40 billion immediately—or no, sorry, $4 billion immediately. </FormattedResponse>
45:59	Shaan Puri	"Because they needed liquidity, or what?"
46:01	MFM	There's something with being a brokerage and the DTCC. I'm not too familiar with it, but they're like, "You need to post up this money." We don't have it.
46:07	Sam Parr	Are people nervous to invest? Are venture—venture guys nervous to invest?
46:11	MFM	I think what we've seen in venture is just the AI wave. It's just... not fintech. Fintech was sexy in 2020–2021. Right now, with our metrics, I would think it would be very exciting for...
46:23	Sam Parr	Winter, I have some friends in fintech. A lot of fintech companies make almost no revenue. You know, take "Wealthfront": you could have billions of dollars in AUM [assets under management], but your fees are so tiny that you're making about $30 million in revenue, I think. Yeah, I think — or GMV [gross merchandise volume] like that. You still have to pay to... </FormattedResponse>
46:42	MFM	So right now, because we've launched our own portfolios where we take 100% of the revenue — like the Posty portfolio is ours, so we get 100% of that revenue. Our GMV revenue is $30,000,000, but our Autopilot ARR is around $22,000,000.
46:53	Sam Parr	Okay, so you have more real revenue than—remember, Ankur was doing carry, and he had a billion in AUM, but the revenue was literally a million, yeah.
47:03	MFM	I think—yeah, I know—that always blows my mind. I think the interesting thing about us is: when you look at other traditional asset managers, they just put your money in ETFs and mutual funds and there's no real alpha they're trying to get you. They can't really charge that much money because you're like, why would I go to them? Why don't I just go to Wealthfront that charges 1%? So with autopilot, the reason you pay so much is because these people—the hope is that they outperform the market. I think the average AUM [management fee on assets under management] that people pay on autopilot is around 3% to 4%. </FormattedResponse>
47:33	Shaan Puri	Does Nancy Pelosi hate you? Probably, I would say. Did you guys interact? Like, we've never—no cease and desist, even from her.
47:40	MFM	Like, no.</FormattedResponse>
47:40	MFM	No. Wow, Nancy.
47:42	Shaan Puri	"They're perfect."
47:45	Sam Parr	Or she's getting sucked... same—those games.</FormattedResponse>
47:47	MFM	The goal is that when she retires, we have her join. We try to have her actually join the fight and be...
47:53	Sam Parr	And have a commercial.
47:53	MFM	That'd be incredible. We did sponsor the UFC and got a fake Nancy Pelosi. Did you see this? This is incredible. The goal was—this was the UFC before the election—and Trump was supposed to sit row one at the UFC. We were like, "Wouldn't it be funny if we sponsored the UFC and it shows, like, a politician right in front of Donald Trump, and then we have a fake Nancy Pelosi right by him?"
48:15	Sam Parr	"Like, you bought a ticket? Or... oh yeah, or as part of the sponsorship? No."
48:18	Shaan Puri	We had the ring sponsors. Yeah—had the ring sponsors. And then they hired a lookalike, Nancy Pelosi, and they had her walking in. They had, like, kind of social content of her entering the arena.
48:29	Sam Parr	Yeah, did you have to actually buy that ticket?</FormattedResponse>
48:30	MFM	We had to buy that ticket. That ticket—row one—was $60,000. "No way. How much did you spend on the whole marketing buy?" "About $450,000."
48:38	Sam Parr	Did it help?
48:39	MFM	It didn't help directly. I think the brand affinity was there. Would I do it again? Probably not. It would have helped if Trump had actually shown up. That was the weekend when there was an assassination attempt, so that makes sense. I was like, "Dang — he's not here," but I'm glad he's safe. I think if he did show up, the media that would have been picked up — the earned media — would have been insane.
49:00	Shaan Puri	Hey, it was ballsy. Yeah — sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
49:03	MFM	That's I.
49:04	Shaan Puri	I think it's cool we're still talking about it now, right?
49:05	MFM	So, things.
49:05	Shaan Puri	Are bursts — that's attention.
49:07	MFM	That's fair.
49:08	Shaan Puri	That happens when you do unique, over-the-top things. So, yeah — that's amazing.
49:12	MFM	Yeah, we're trying to think of the next stunt, but...
49:14	Sam Parr	Most — how many people work there?
49:15	MFM	Right now: thirty (30), thirty-five (35).
49:18	Sam Parr	So you're doing 800,000 of revenue per...
49:21	MFM	It's... it's... it's about $1,000,000 per employee.
49:24	Shaan Puri	Walk me through — what does this look like if this is actually big? Because some of the weird ideas... there's a weird idea, yeah. Weird ideas have a lot of potential, even though, on the surface, it takes a little time to understand. </FormattedResponse>
49:35	MFM	Kind of a common-sense idea. I don't know—growing up I was like, "Man, why can't my Robinhood account just follow this other guy's Robinhood account automatically?" I don't want to just give my funds away to someone else. I want to be able to do things myself, but I also want to go on vacation without worrying about when to sell or when to buy. I think the solution, to me, was just the most obvious. But I think the ultimate goal of Autopilot is to become the world's largest asset manager. When you look at BlackRock, they actually do this for institutions. BlackRock connects financial institutions—companies will go on a tool called BlackRock Aladdin and buy different portfolios. So it already exists at the institutional level.
50:10	Shaan Puri	When you...
50:10	MFM	Say, buy different portfolios. BlackRock will create their own portfolios based on different risk levels. So, if you're Walmart and you're heavily invested in groceries for this quarter, you could hedge your bet using BlackRock's Aladdin. If you're a Facebook employee, you could find a portfolio on Autopilot that hedges tech. That tool BlackRock created makes around $6 billion per year, and BlackRock is one of the largest asset managers. I think with Autopilot, one of our goals is to get that same tech and build it for retail investors.
50:38	Sam Parr	How do you get those? How are you going to hire those people?
50:40	Shaan Puri	Well, he's saying people come to the platform like it's a two-sided marketplace, right? </FormattedResponse>
50:44	MFM	Yeah. And so then the pilots come, and they're the ones with the ideas. You verify — you know — their employment, where they've worked. But really the goal is that anyone could just publish those portfolios and get paid, and then us, as a marketplace, we take a cut... </FormattedResponse>
50:56	Shaan Puri	That revenue—what would be the burning question?
50:58	MFM	I have a bunch of large macro questions on AI, but I also have questions because you guys have been running companies for ten-plus years. One of the biggest things is hiring: how do you find people who are highly motivated? What questions do you ask? One thing I've noticed is when you hire—especially more senior-level people—their ability to BS is greater than my ability to detect BS. I think there are certain questions or things you can look at that you probably have more experience with, and that would actually really help Autopilot get to the next step.
51:27	Sam Parr	Well, for one, having a personal audience is definitely — that's probably one of the biggest perks. You're able to, if you cold email someone, have them say, "Oh, I've heard of you," or "I know of you," at the very least. At best, you have a lot of people who apply. But whenever I would hire people for roles that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I would definitely have an outsider hiring committee. I would have outsiders interview people all the time. Mmm-hmm. And that helped me a lot.
51:51	Shaan Puri	Yeah. That was going to be one of my— I have probably three or four tips. They're not all related. First, I find a lot of my hiring mistakes came from not actually understanding what I was hiring for. I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes that comes from doing the work for a little bit and then thinking, "Oh, okay, what the person's going to need to do is x, y, z." As you scale that happens less, but still: write it down. Not a generic spec. A lot of people outsource the job spec to either ChatGPT or a recruiter. It's super generic. It's going to attract a generic candidate, and it's not actually clear what you're trying to get somebody to come change in your company. What do they need to be world-class at? What sort of problem are they going to have to solve? Be really, really clear. Second, this is kind of yours on outside help. I have a buddy who's better at hiring than I am. For any executive hire, I would call a favor and say, "Hey, once I've done the screening, will you talk to my favorite kind of three or four candidates and give me your take?" It really wasn't about who he picked. It was me becoming a better hirer and interviewer by understanding the delta. I thought this person was great; he sniffed out their bullshit really quick. Why did he do that? I'm watching the call and realizing, "Oh, he dug in in a different way, asked a different style of question, didn't accept their first answer at face value." I got better by doing that—not just because they helped me pick the person, but because I realized where I was weak in the interviewing process. I also think there are two really good pools to hire from. One is people who've done it before. The other is people who never did anything but can do anything. Done it before means: who solved this problem before? I always start there, because if I can find somebody who's already done this exact thing before, that's going to help me a lot. And I mean specifically—it's not just, "Oh, he worked at a successful company." If they worked in enterprise sales and we don't even do enterprise sales, that doesn't help. No—did they do this exact thing before? </FormattedResponse>
53:43	Sam Parr	We've talked about this a lot on the pod, where it's like — it's so fun to hire young people. They don't have any experience; it's so fun, right? Because that's what you were recently. But, like, nine out of ten times, if you're just like, "Hey, you did that there; do that same thing here," right? And that tends to just be...
53:58	Shaan Puri	We will map out which companies have solved this problem before. Who was the person that was there the year they had this problem? Where we are, who was that person? And were they the real shot-caller on the team, or were they just doing something while someone else was amazing? I like to go to that level of detail. So that's one pool you gotta get good at. The other pool is basically diamonds in the rough — unproven talent that you can almost be a stock-picker on and be like, "Okay, I think this person's a 10xer," and I build the company with those two pools of people. You build systems so that you consistently are sourcing from both of those. Yeah — one thing: most people are... Are you the CEO of the business? Yeah. How much time per week do you spend recruiting right now?
54:34	MFM	Right now, about 20%.
54:36	Shaan Puri	That's pretty good. Most people — that means one full day a week, basically.
54:39	MFM	Yeah.
54:40	Shaan Puri	Most founders who have hiring problems—if you ask them that question—they'll say, "Hours... I... they don't really track it."
54:45	MFM	It used to be that, and now I'm, like, seeing how important it is.
54:48	Shaan Puri	If you listen to a lot of the most successful founders who were in a scaling phase, they spend over 30% of their time just on recruiting.
54:57	Sam Parr	"Are you guys profitable?" "Yep." "Okay, so you're at 20 million in revenue, or...?"
55:01	MFM	$3,030,000,000</FormattedResponse>
55:02	Shaan Puri	30,000,000 (thirty million)
55:03	MFM	30 million, I guess. Cash-flow positive — not GAAP-profitable, but sure.
55:06	Sam Parr	So, your "default alive"? Yep. What's the growth rate going to be this year over the...
55:10	MFM	Next year, about 250%.
55:13	Sam Parr	I would think almost your entire job is collecting people.
55:16	Shaan Puri	What sorts of people do you need to be hiring right now? </FormattedResponse>
55:18	MFM	A lot of software engineers, product people, growth people, marketing people — really anyone.
55:25	Shaan Puri	I think people — people — people, just people.
55:27	MFM	I think the thing is just maintaining that high bar. We've just hired a lot of people, and perhaps I'm actually very quick to get rid of people. If they come in and, within two to three weeks, they haven't really done anything, I immediately say, "alright."
55:39	MFM	"You're getting out of here."
55:40	Sam Parr	Is that impact? That impacts culture, which is why you gotta get the hiring right. It impacts culture.
55:45	MFM	But I think everyone who's been here—anyone who... we tell people, "If you're here for longer than three months, you don't have to worry." So I think after the three-month mark, people are like, "Okay, I'm chilling." But before that, everyone's freaked out.
55:57	Sam Parr	"Are you going to only hire in New York?"
55:58	MFM	Yeah — can we afford it? We've... I think, especially with AI, the salaries we're paying people... We just offered a guy a $350,000 salary, and I'm like, this is crazy because I've never made that much money. I still don't. But yeah, I think the goal is with AI each person is much, much more effective. So a good person with AI could be ten to twenty times more effective than an average person with AI. That's crazy. </FormattedResponse>
56:24	Shaan Puri	My CTO used to say it, too. He's like, "You're one person—no, you're three people." He'd say, "You're three people." He used to say that all the time, and people... it's funny.
56:33	MFM	It's... I might start.
56:33	Shaan Puri	To say it's real simple: it's people just realizing what you mean. It's like, "Oh — you need to be able to do the work of three people," because you've got to be smart about what you don't do. Don't do the bullshit. Automate stuff. Figure out a faster path. If your job is to be three people... we used to do off-sites where we would say, "Every day is two days." It's like two days of work needs to happen every day. When you set that expectation, you set a different bar for your team and how they operate. Yeah, dude — thanks for doing this.
57:00	MFM	"Dude, this is awesome."
57:00	Sam Parr	You're awesome. I messaged him roughly two hours ago, and I was like, "Where are you?"
57:07	MFM	Yeah, I saw the post. I'm like, "Yo, Sam, I gotta get on my first birthday — this is a dream."
57:10	Sam Parr	"Can you be?"
57:11	Shaan Puri	Here — well, you guys are one of the great growth-hack stories. What you did with the "Pelosi tracker"… Do you have another tracker? Do you have other trackers?
57:19	MFM	Yeah, we have the Leopold tracker, who's the best right now. Leopold—he's up by the same amount.</FormattedResponse>
57:25	Sam Parr	He's like a 25-year-old. He's like a 22-year-old. He worked.
57:27	MFM	For OpenAI, now he's like 25. He left OpenAI and then started a fund.
57:32	Shaan Puri	Can he up it to, like, $10 billion or something?
57:34	MFM	5 — around 5,000,000,000.
57:35	Sam Parr	So, he's a billionaire now.
57:37	MFM	I think so.
57:38	Sam Parr	"I think so, and he raised outside capital."
57:40	MFM	I think a lot of it was friends and family.
57:42	Shaan Puri	Daniel, but he gross [unclear], and Nat Friedman — and... smart money was immediately behind him. How much did...
57:48	Sam Parr	He raise.</FormattedResponse>
57:49	MFM	I think originally it was $500 million — not that much. Now he's at, like, upward of $5 billion. But what he did, which was super... he's smart.
57:55	Sam Parr	10× in two years.
57:56	MFM	Yeah. He looked at companies—what were the bottlenecks for OpenAI? He was like, "Okay, well, SSDs." A lot of people were thinking GPUs, but he said, "SSDs—Micron." So he started buying up all of the other bottlenecks that no one was focusing on, and now they're just skyrocketing.
58:12	Shaan Puri	Isn't he, like, somebody—like the chief of staff at Anthropic? He's got some... some information flow as well. That's pretty good. "Yeah, I mean, he's brilliant. Have you read his 'situational awareness' paper?" "No." "Like I said, 'Do this, I did this,' and it was very, very useful. Take the PDF for situational awareness — it was on my list of, like..."
58:29	Sam Parr	What is situational awareness in a hedge fund?
58:31	Shaan Puri	"Name — he published a white paper or blog post, like a PDF, before he launched the hedge fund, or... yeah?"
58:39	MFM	Right after.
58:40	MFM	Think it.
58:40	Shaan Puri	It was actually, maybe before, and this is how he attracted the money: he launched this thing which was basically that he had a very strong view on what the next ten years of AI would look like — very bold predictions. There was huge tension between China and America, and because of that he made super specific predictions about where the puck was going. So he published this thing, and a lot of smart people were like: > "Yo, this is one of the smarter takes of what's going on." I think that attracted more capital.
59:06	Sam Parr	More awareness. Situational awareness was the name of...
59:08	Shaan Puri	It's the name of his PDF publication, and I think it's called Desk Two — or his… whatever his company is. So take it and give it to Victor in your Slack. Just say, "Victor, break this down into the 10 key ideas — the predictions and hypotheses that he has. Explain it to me." Victor did a wonderful job. He just chewed up this PDF for me; he explained it step by step. Then I asked follow-up questions, and it was just great. I was like, "So did that play out? Was he right about this? Did he trade on that?" It answered every single question.
59:39	Sam Parr	Was so. Is a guy like him?
59:41	Shaan Puri	Victor, by the way, is like an AI thing that Sam put me onto. I'm now hooked. I ended up investing in it.
59:47	Sam Parr	Yeah — thanks for telling me. After I told you about it, you should've told me that. Well...
59:50	Shaan Puri	It was at an absurd valuation, but it's that good that I was like, "Yeah."
59:54	Sam Parr	Well, I told you. I told him about those tools.
59:56	Shaan Puri	"He's like..."
59:56	Sam Parr	"I don't know. I don't trust these tools — these are stupid. And then, two days later, he..." [trails off]
59:59	Shaan Puri	Goes was like, "Why?"
01:00:00	Sam Parr	These tools are awesome. I feel... over this tool. [unclear phrasing]
01:00:01	Shaan Puri	"I made him feel dumb. I was like, 'Why do you just trust a random startup with all your stuff?' Then I heard about it a little more, and I was like, 'Let's try it out.' I tried it in one of my Slack channels and I was like, 'This is amazing.' Now it's in every business I have."
01:00:11	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's good. But I'm curious about the personal side of this: is he low-key right now? Is he trying to hide out?
01:00:19	MFM	No, he posts on Twitter.
01:00:21	Sam Parr	"Really, he said he's..." </FormattedResponse>
01:00:22	MFM	Like with OKC, he's very good.
01:00:23	Shaan Puri	Friends with Dwarkesh, so he's done the "Dwarkesh Pod" a couple of times... or, I mean...
01:00:27	Sam Parr	Is he cool? Yeah.
01:00:28	Shaan Puri	Do you think Peter Thiel's cool? Like... you know. So he's [unclear: "lot of jazz burgers"]. He's a genius. Cool—yeah, like that energy. Yeah, he has that.
01:00:35	MFM	He's great.
01:00:36	Sam Parr	"I love him. I..."
01:00:36	Shaan Puri	Love it. Yeah.
01:00:39	MFM	Can follow him.</FormattedResponse>
01:00:40	Shaan Puri	I'm not saying "cool" is the word I would use. I love it. Yes — I think he's awesome.
01:00:45	Sam Parr	And so, you can replicate his...
01:00:47	MFM	You could follow his top 15 picks on autopilot.
01:00:49	Sam Parr	"And how do you know his picks?"
01:00:50	MFM	Because he follows a 13F, and so it is... there's a... </FormattedResponse>
01:00:52	Sam Parr	Little lag.
01:00:53	MFM	Yeah, there's about a 45-day lag, but even we only track with the lag.</FormattedResponse>
01:00:56	Sam Parr	And a thirteen-day [unclear: "f"]... How big does?
01:00:58	MFM	Your fund needs to be... $100,000,000.
01:01:01	Sam Parr	Oh, okay. Damn. So he's the guy right now?
01:01:03	MFM	"He's the guy."
01:01:04	Shaan Puri	He's the guy.
01:01:04	Sam Parr	Does he do podcasts that you actually get?
01:01:07	Shaan Puri	Them all. There's a couple we're trying... I... I think we were reaching out. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:10	MFM	Yeah, and it's stuff like this that makes me very adamant that people should always invest in index funds, but there should always be 10–15% of your net worth in high-risk, high-reward stocks or portfolios. And so this is where Autopilot doesn't—right now—want to take 100% of what you have, but...
01:01:25	Sam Parr	Just what, like?
01:01:26	MFM	Oh, 10–15%. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:27	Sam Parr	Your liquid net worth—where is it allocated? Who are you following?
01:01:31	MFM	Right now, I follow basically like 20 different pilots on autopilot right now. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:35	Sam Parr	So, right now, of your 100% net worth? </FormattedResponse>
01:01:38	MFM	So, 100% of my net worth — it's about 90% on autopilot. A lot of it is in autopilot.
01:01:43	Shaan Puri	I want to know the truthiness. So, you said you connect with their brokerage account?
01:01:46	MFM	Yep.
01:01:46	Shaan Puri	But people have many different accounts, yes.</FormattedResponse>
01:01:48	MFM	So, you could connect to all of them... you could.
01:01:50	Shaan Puri	"But you don't know if this is tracking all of them or if it's just tracking something, right? Me, as the user, I don't know if you have everything that this person has done, right? Yeah — winners and losers."
01:01:59	MFM	So, what it is: people go on our platform and create a model portfolio. You only see the history of the model portfolio from when the pilot joins to now. It's not like actually following their brokerage account. Oh, okay. What we do have is what's called "skin in the game," where the pilots will also put their money on Autopilot, following their own portfolio. So you could be like, "Wow — Peter Wolf has $500,000 following his own trades, verified by Autopilot."
01:02:24	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.
01:02:26	Sam Parr	"Are you having fun?"
01:02:27	MFM	"I would say right now I'm having fun. I would say the last three years have been... it's hard. I would say getting from 0 to 1 million in revenue was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Getting from 1 to 30 was actually a piece of cake."
01:02:39	Sam Parr	"What do you think the next threshold will be?"
01:02:42	MFM	I think we're on track to hit $100,000,000 in revenue by March next year. I think it's going to be difficult.
01:02:50	Sam Parr	Run rate.
01:02:52	MFM	Recurring revenue, not run rate. Right now we're at, like, a $70 million run rate, but we want to get, like... </FormattedResponse>
01:02:58	Shaan Puri	I passed on investing in this twice.
01:02:59	MFM	I already do it, I know, but it seems like...
01:03:02	Shaan Puri	A really hard thing to get off the ground.
01:03:03	Sam Parr	It was very hard to get with this.
01:03:06	Shaan Puri	Well, I'm a degenerate, and they were listening to MFM, I think. So they knew that I'm...
01:03:11	MFM	I've talked to Chris a couple times.
01:03:12	Shaan Puri	I talked to Chris. I really admired the marketing, so I think I just reached out to give respect. I was like, "Hey, I think it's brilliant what you guys are doing with the + tracker on Twitter and UFC." I just thought you guys were doing a really...
01:03:20	MFM	Good job. Without the marketing, we wouldn't be here—just because of how hard this stuff is to do.
01:03:25	Sam Parr	What's your... what was the first?
01:03:26	MFM	Round's valuation. The first round was $7,000,000, right? Yeah, but that was 2021—there's a lot of... </FormattedResponse>
01:03:33	Sam Parr	Yeah, man. Yeah.
01:03:37	Shaan Puri	Well, either way, I'm a fan, and I think what you guys are doing is great. Man, I appreciate you coming on.
01:03:41	Sam Parr	"This is awesome. Alright, we appreciate you. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you a little bit. That was awesome." </FormattedResponse>
01:03:47	Shaan Puri	Good pics. Yeah, that was cool. That was fun. I hope.
01:03:51	Sam Parr	This is a—this is a Hampton plug, by the way. I definitely just went into the New York channel and I just said, "Yeah, who's interested?" because I didn't want to tweet it out; I wasn't sure what we were going to get.
01:03:58	Shaan Puri	"Well, I'll do the plug for you. If you're an interesting business owner and you want to be in a community of other interesting business owners, join Hampton, and maybe you, too, can be on MFM someday."
01:04:08	Sam Parr	I didn't realize how big autopilot was. I thought...
01:04:10	Shaan Puri	It's been scaling a lot. It wasn't that big six months ago, you know what I mean?
01:04:13	Sam Parr	Well, look, I knew it was 30 million in revenue. I thought that meant, like, GME — GME-ish — like, because those businesses — not his business, but that category of business — is usually pretty shitty.
01:04:24	Shaan Puri	Right.
01:04:25	Sam Parr	Numbers can be huge, but the actual business... but not his. That's insane. Yeah, he's doing well. That was cool.
01:04:30	Shaan Puri	Right. You know, one of the things—probably the biggest thing for me from when I started my first million until today—was this: I remember the period before my first million, roughly ten years earlier, the whole decade, I felt like opportunity, like success, was this... this needle.
01:04:45	Sam Parr	"You had to do."
01:04:46	Shaan Puri	It felt like a needle in a haystack, or it was this narrow thing I had to search for in a room. It was so hard to find. I thought I needed a brilliant idea and perfect execution. I kept asking, "Is this the brilliant idea? Where is the brilliant idea that I need?" I remember opportunity felt so scarce. Then, when you move to San Francisco, you meet a bunch of people. We started doing this podcast, and you just realize, "Oh dude, there are thousands—tens of thousands—of different ways that I can win." Opportunity is everywhere. It's really about picking what's the right fit for me. It was a total shift from a lack mindset to an abundance mindset about success—about where success lives. What I like about something like what we did today is that those were three ideas that didn't even exist in my cone of vision. I couldn't even— I didn't even know people build businesses like that.
01:05:34	Sam Parr	And there's also parts of their business, their lifestyles, and personality that I want—I love and I want to steal, right. But I don't admire the whole thing. For example, Alex: I'm like, "Oh man, he's so calm," right? "Oh, I need to learn from that." I don't necessarily want to trade what I have for what he has, but I want to steal this from him... and I
01:05:50	Shaan Puri	He wasn't in a rush, for better and for worse, but mostly for better.
01:05:53	Sam Parr	And same with Brian — a huge business taking off. I don't want to do all those stunts. I don't want to raise VC, but that's pretty awesome.
01:05:59	Shaan Puri	But I admire the creativity. Yeah, and they're like...
01:06:02	Sam Parr	Josh's outdoor business. I'm like, "That's awesome." I don't want to raise money, but...
01:06:06	MFM	It would be.
01:06:06	Sam Parr	Maybe fun to own one.
01:06:07	Shaan Puri	Like you.
01:06:08	Sam Parr	You know... there's really... but...</FormattedResponse>
01:06:09	Shaan Puri	I should go camping, yeah.
01:06:11	Sam Parr	No, but there are, like, small things, Rod. Like, you know, I think people sometimes in the comments tease us about having — I hate when people say, "You have these guests that are out of touch." Whenever I hear that, I'm like, "No, you're out of touch with his life."
01:06:24	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, that's about you."
01:06:25	Sam Parr	"You're out of touch. No — what I mean is, I'm equally impressed by a billion-dollar company versus a $5,000,000 company. They're both equally awesome." </FormattedResponse>
01:06:37	Shaan Puri	Somebody — Jesse Itzler — said this at one of our events. It was like an intro: someone asked, "What should people know about you?" He said, "Hey, I'm Jesse Itzler, blah blah blah, I did this." Then he said, "My thing is I root for everybody, because when you root for everybody, you can never lose." He sat down, and I was like, "Yo, I kinda like that fortune-cookie shit he just did."
01:06:56	Sam Parr	I like it. Is Jesse Isler really a cool Black man? Yeah, yeah, though.
01:07:01	Shaan Puri	He's the best. It's cool—black guys like him. Yeah, it's like, whoa, that's the next level. In the same way, when you root for everybody, you can never lose. If you think you can learn from everybody, you can never lose. So, great—tomorrow we're talking to Ray Dalio. There's going to be some awesome things to learn from him. Again: parts, not the whole. We're not trying to do what he's doing, but I'm still going to pull something, dude.
01:07:21	Sam Parr	"When I can get equal, I'm gonna get."
01:07:22	MFM	A win, and I'm...
01:07:23	Shaan Puri	I'm going to have some fun in that hour. It's the same way I got wins, learnings, and fun in this hour.</FormattedResponse>
01:07:29	Sam Parr	I think the new slogan should be, "We get, you know, high-high and low-low." I get equal joy. Like, we'll pop into a bodega — I'll love that shit. And now we're gonna go hang out with, like, "the 80 of the richest person in the world" [unclear: possibly "one of the 80 richest people" or "the 80th richest person"]. I'm gonna love that equally, right? Alright. That's it — that's the pod.

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