How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)

- October 28, 2025 (5 months ago) • 56:19

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Today we're talking about something that is the brutal truth about startups: your business's success is completely dependent on your growth as a CEO. We're covering what you need to be doing as a CEO, from starting a company to getting to that first $1–$3 million in revenue. Sam was sharing examples of what happens after $3,000,000 — scaling from $3,000,000 to the tens of millions, and what it takes to get to $100,000,000 in revenue. How you have to make this brain shift and what you have to do as a CEO. Mistakes we've made, stuff that works for us, tactics, techniques, and specific frameworks we're using — it's all in here. </FormattedResponse>
00:40	Sam Parr	"I was journaling this morning. Can I tell you what I was writing about, and tell me if you've ever experienced it this way?"
00:45	Shaan Puri	Yeah, but you have to start with "Dear Diary."
00:47	Sam Parr	So I was realizing — and tell me if you've ever had this realization — that my company's growth is limited by my personal growth. My company can only grow as fast as I can grow as a leader. Have you ever experienced that?
01:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I have a similar belief: the bottleneck of any business is the psychology of the founder. That's kind of the way I've always said it. So, not necessarily my growth, but my psychology is the limiting factor.
01:11	Sam Parr	Yeah, your business is basically a mirror of your strengths and weaknesses. Here's what happens: a lot of people don't realize that — I hadn't realized it until recently — because in the early stages of a business... I don't know exactly where that is; some number between $1 million and $20 million in revenue. Honestly, it probably starts at $3,000,000 in revenue where you're out of the brute-force stage. It depends on your business, but something like $1,000,000 a year in profit may be where you're out of that stage. What happens next is actually the hard part. The hard part is: how do you scale as a leader? Your job then becomes leading people, not actually doing. I was thinking about where that shift is and — not the shift itself, but — what tactics or strategy need to change. I tried to list what those were. Let me explain, and tell me if you agree with each of these. The first one is advocating versus delegating. Let me walk you through a scenario — tell me if you've done this exact same thing. I hire someone, or I get a freelancer, and I sit down. They sit next to me in a chair and I'm looking at them and I go, "All right, so here's what I do: I do this, this, this, and this." "All right, great — there you go. Talk to me later and let me know how you've made this better." Have you done that?
02:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. You got this, right? Yeah, yeah — I got this. Cool. Your problem, not mine. I'm mentally relieved of duties.
02:34	Sam Parr	And you say, "Alright — next week. How did... how did you improve it? Why aren't the numbers going up? It's been a month, man. Why aren't the numbers going up? What the hell? I showed you how to do this." That's a conversation I've had so many times in my life, and I'm having to break it. I cannot do that anymore. So the bottleneck I'm facing to grow is advocating versus delegating — that's the huge thing. The second is having hard conversations.
02:58	Shaan Puri	By the way, can you just play it back — what is the "good" version of it? So "abdicating" is basically: you take the ball and put it on somebody else's plate. You mentally relieve yourself of duty, and then, in your mind, the blame for potential failure or issues lies with them. What is the definition of "abdicate" there? What's the problem with abdicating?
03:25	Sam Parr	Well, let me tell you the other way around. Let me tell you what the solution is, which is proper delegation. So how do you properly delegate? I actually have it written down right here — this framework that I've been trying to learn: what, how, when, and motivation. What that basically means is training. You explain what you expect of someone. You show them how to do it by training them. Then you give them very specific deadlines, and you have scheduled follow-ups. Sometimes it takes months to properly train people. For a really easy example: salespeople. How do you train a salesperson? You watch their sales calls and you sit down with them for two hours every single week. You say, "Instead of saying this, try this next time, and let's see what happens." Or, "You said this; oftentimes that doesn't get the solution or the answer you want because of X, Y, and Z. Do this instead, and here's a script I want you to follow." After you do that for three or four months, they're going to start learning to be better than you. They'll say, "Hey, by the way, you didn't think about this. I actually went this way this time, and here's the better result that I got." So the opposite of advocating is properly delegating, which includes training and communicating with clarity about expectations.
04:28	Shaan Puri	Yeah, have you ever used...? </FormattedResponse>
04:29	Sam Parr	"The RACI model—what's that?"
04:32	Shaan Puri	RACI. One thing that happens in a company is that it's unclear who's got it. Imagine we're playing catch. I throw the ball and you're the only one there — you better catch it. Whether you catch it or not may depend on your skill, but there's absolutely no doubt that you need to go after it and catch the ball. There's nobody else there to do it. Now add a second person. What changes? I throw the same ball; I didn't say who it's for. I don't know if you're getting it, I don't know if we're supposed to fight over it, I don't know if I'm supposed to back off, and I don't know if we need to have a quick conversation about this. I really don't know what to do. Add another person, then another. Imagine once you get to seven people, what starts to happen in a company is that some people have sharp elbows and try to fight for it. Some people just don't want the ball to drop and are frustrated that others are standing around doing nothing. Some people feel resentful that they're not being included — they never get the ball. This is what happens inside a company. How do you solve this? One fix I learned is the RACI model. When you do a project, you don't just set the goal and the deadline. You also need to define the RACI model up front. - R is Responsible: who is responsible for doing it. That's the person driving the action forward in the project. - A is Accountable: who is accountable for it. This is usually that person's boss. For example, let's say you're the Chief Revenue Officer and under you is the Head of Sales. The Head of Sales is the one who needs to get the sales team to go from a 15% close rate to a 19% close rate, so he's responsible for implementing the plan — or maybe even coming up with the plan. But ultimately the buck stops with the Chief Revenue Officer because it's a revenue activity. The CRO is accountable for the result; he's just not responsible for doing the work to get the result.
06:23	Sam Parr	Yeah.
06:24	Shaan Puri	Okay, then you have C — the consulted party. Who else do I need to talk to? Maybe I need to be talking to the head of delivery because I'm closing a bunch of sales but I'm overloading the delivery team. That is causing customers to churn and not actually get the product or service they wanted. Because I didn't tell him we were going to suddenly start doing this free promotion and flood us with customers, he is now on the other side of something he wasn't consulted on. Sometimes it's a lawyer. Nobody likes to bring legal in, but if there's going to be a legal component to this, they need to be consulted. They don't get to drive it because they're not the responsible party, but they do get to be consulted. And I think the last one is Informed. Informed is basically: who needs an "FYI"? Who needs to be in the loop but whose input or action I don't need to make this happen? You define that at the beginning, and that's how you prevent the situation where, when you throw the ball and there are seven people, somehow the ball hits the floor more often than when there was one. That's a common dynamic in companies.
07:26	Sam Parr	And I know a lot of people listening to this are wantrepreneurs — meaning they want to eventually start a company. Then there’s a smaller percentage who have started something, and a much smaller percentage who already have something that’s thriving. I want to speak to the first category: people who don’t have a thing yet. For the first — let’s say — $3 million in revenue (maybe a little less, honestly), you can kind of ignore this. You can brute-force your way. But it’s going to happen faster than you think. The transition, for me and for a lot of people, is going to be harder than you expect. What separates the winners from the losers is embracing this stuff. It doesn’t feel natural; it actually feels incredibly unnatural, because for a lot of people who start things, they say, “screw the rules.” But I’ve noticed that what separates the pretty decent and the great from the truly great is actually following these rules. Do you agree with that?
08:17	Shaan Puri	"When you say 'these rules', what do you mean?"
08:18	Sam Parr	Sorry. These best practices — creating processes, having cute phrases, or constantly reminding people within your company what they have to do — are important. Someone could be listening to this and thinking, "I'm not gonna inform people; I'm just gonna make the decision and go."
08:33	Shaan Puri	I totally agree. I think that—you have to figure out which of these work for you—but the act of hunting these down and constantly trying to get it right, constantly trying to improve it, that's the thing you have to commit to. One simple way of thinking about this—and this happens all the time with founders—is if you consult with them they'll be complaining about something. No, there's no bigger pack of whiners than a group of founders and CEOs. If you get them all to be honest, there's no bigger group of whiners. When they start whining, they complain about how this person isn't doing this, how this other company is doing that, how this isn't working, and how that isn't working. You just start with the people problems, because anybody knows—in a company, I would have started five more companies if I didn't have people problems. I don't know about you, but people problems are the ones that drain you; that's the thing that hurts you. It's also the thing that feels magical inside a company when you just get some star people. I'm sure you had the hustle—whether it's staff or Trunk or some of these people—where you're just like, "Oh my God, this is kind of amazing."
09:31	Sam Parr	Yes
09:31	Shaan Puri	They're just doing all these things better and differently than I would have ever done them, and I don't have to worry about that anymore. Like... holy — this is... this is a next-level heaven as a CEO. The exact opposite is true too. When somebody is not doing what you expect them to do — they're not doing it better than you would have done it — you're constantly having this grief. It's...
09:49	Sam Parr	Have you ever gone for walks with a dog that bites other dogs or other people? Have you ever had one of those dogs? I've had one.
09:54	Shaan Puri	Of those dogs, don't bite every dog she sees.
09:56	Sam Parr	It's exhausting. You walk around the corner and you're like, "Oh..." — you're always on edge. It's horrible.
10:01	Shaan Puri	And people will ask, "Is she friendly?" I'm like, "No—you need to get away." But then you talk to that founder. All you gotta ask is one simple question: "Who picks the people in the company? Who hires and fires?" "Oh—that's you." Okay, gotcha. Alright, cool. That problem actually rolls up to you. Same thing with accountability. "They said they were gonna do this and then they didn't." They weren't accountable for what they said they were going to do. Who holds people accountable? Who sets the culture of accountability? "Oh—that's you again." At some point you sort of realize, "Oh, I am the root cause underneath all of the underlying causes in my company." Even if it's something that feels external—like, "Oh my god, tariffs are so crazy"—it can be because, for example, you didn't build a robust and resilient supply chain. So yeah, I'm at the mercy of this new tariff policy or whatever. You're the root cause of all the problems, which also means you are the root cause of all the solutions. You have the power to implement the solutions. So then the question is: what are you going to do to do it? When you're talking about best practices, one big realization I had—this sounds elementary, but I had to learn it the hard way—is: to get the results you want, you simply need to be the type of person for whom that result is inevitable. You say, "I want a well-run company." Cool. Are you being the type of CEO who would have a well-run company? Are you hiring great people? Are you training them well? Are you holding them accountable? Are you celebrating the wins? Do you give them enough ownership and equity? Do you do all those things? If you're not doing those things, what's going to happen?
11:39	Sam Parr	Hey everyone — if you're liking this episode on how to be a better CEO, I've got good news. We actually compiled all of the information from this podcast into a PDF that you can read and download. We added a bunch of stuff, including word-for-word emails you can send, and scripts on how to have better (and harder) conversations, when to delegate, and things like that. If you're trying to be a better CEO, click the link in the description to download it — it's completely free. Or just scan this QR code.
12:06	Shaan Puri	I sent a voice note to my piano teacher the other day and I was like, "Hey, is there anything that I could be—are we doing our sessions right? Is there a different approach that we should be doing? Just wanna check in." > She said, "Thought about your question. So here's the thing: to get good at piano, here's what you gotta do. Find songs you're interested in and play them a ton until you can play them well. Every song will teach you something. The only way to get better at the piano is to find things you're interested in playing because you have genuine motivation, and then play it until you're good at playing it and practice." She was just like, "Yeah, and in doing that we're learning sight reading, we're learning to play by ear, and we're learning how to control volume and control between right and left hand."
12:44	Sam Parr	Wait—was she criticizing you because you don't practice?
12:46	Shaan Puri	No, no, no. She was just saying there's no "third door" like this.
12:50	Sam Parr	Is—oh, got it.
12:50	Shaan Puri	These are—this is the way. If I look at all the areas of my life I'm working on right now, it's fitness. Great. Guess what: no secret strategy. You're going to show up to the gym or not. You're going to eat clean or you're going to eat shitty. Which one are you going to do? Similarly, with being a great leader or CEO, it's not that different from being fit. You have to follow best practices on diet and best practices on exercise, and don't get lost in the weeds about it. Just be honest: are you doing those things or not? There's a version of that for managing a company.
13:19	Sam Parr	And what's interesting is I've noticed that leading up to starting something, you read all the self-help books that you possibly can. That gives you the motivation to start. Then you get into it and you think, "I don't have time for that; I just need to put my head down and get after it." Then you get up to what I call the "second mountain," which is: you're no longer there just to survive. You're for sure "default alive," but you're not "default thrive." So what do you do to actually thrive? You go back to the well and you actually start learning all this stuff.
13:46	Shaan Puri	Start asking questions again for a...
13:48	Sam Parr	A lot of people—like me and you—start going to, like, Tony Robbins. You're going to see both losers and really successful people there, because they both need the same thing. For a lot of people, particularly people like me, I'm basically slightly autistic and slightly a meathead. You get to the point where I'm just going to pile-drive through this, brute-force it, put my head down. But you actually have to learn how to have a conversation with someone and how to correct someone effectively. Here's the thing: I had to read a whole book on how to have a difficult conversation. That was the second or third thing I was going to bring up. For example, if you have a meeting and the person is on their phone, there's actually a proper way to correct them.
14:32	Shaan Puri	"Snatch it? Or what—do you flap it down?"
14:37	Sam Parr	"Yeah. You just give them a wedgie, call them a 'nerd,' and push them out of the room."
14:41	Shaan Puri	"Have you read Nonviolent Communication?"
14:44	Sam Parr	Yeah, I actually didn't like it as much as a lot of people did. What I preferred was The Motive. Have you read The Motive?
14:51	Shaan Puri	"No, what's the premise of that?"
14:53	Sam Parr	Basically, to be a CEO or a leader, you have to recognize that a large percentage of your time will be spent having difficult conversations. The best way to have a difficult conversation is to get to it early. For example, if you're in a meeting and you see that someone isn't paying attention, don't wait for it to fix itself. Correct small things quickly, because that will have a lot of leverage later on. They'll know very early, based on the small things, what you expect from them on the big things. The second thing is: when you have a conversation, do it privately, and tend to start with a compliment. You might say something like, "Look, I know you don't mean to be this way, but here's how you come off. I'd prefer it if you did this. Does that sound good? Is that okay with you?" There's a natural hesitation — you think, "I don't want to correct that person; who am I to tell them not to look at their phone in a meeting? And maybe it was just a one-time mistake; they'll probably figure it out." However, the book The Motive actually says, "No — that is nonsense. You want to correct this early, early on."
15:56	Shaan Puri	Have you ever read The One Minute Manager?
15:59	Sam Parr	Years ago—what was the takeaway? I can't remember. </FormattedResponse>
16:02	Shaan Puri	So it's a very thin book — I love it because it's very short. You can read the whole thing in probably 25–30 minutes. The idea is it's almost written like a fable, like The Alchemist: "I wanted to be a better manager, so I went to the town next door where there was this great manager." He meets the first employee, and the manager meets three employees in a way that's sort of like "three wishes" from a genie. The manager basically says, "You want to see how I do it? Come tomorrow at 6 a.m. and I'll tell you the one thing — the most important thing." He does that three times. The core of the book for me was two things I changed from doing it. The first was planning. I used to do either top-down or bottoms-up planning. - Top-down: "I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, how this needs to work... I'm going to hand you this thing and you need to execute it." Then I'm disappointed when it doesn't match the way I envisioned it in my head. At that time I thought it would work and there would be no problems, so you're on the hook for all the delivery. You got handed this thing and were never fully bought into it. - Bottoms-up: "You come up with the plans." Maybe I don't tell you anything; I'm just waiting to see if you come up with plans. People inevitably come up with some sort of half-baked plan. I'm disappointed, I say, "Let me see that," you fix it, I criticize it and try to improve it. That also doesn't work great. This guy talked about basically a one-minute plan. The idea is creating a one-pager where the employee writes what they think they should focus on and what they're going to do. There's a revision process where the manager gives feedback, the employee goes back and works on it based on that feedback, and you arrive at a solution they wrote but you agree with. You get the best of both worlds: they have ownership and are totally bought into the process; they've done the thinking and didn't outsource it, but you're totally on board with the things. The second change is around praise and criticism. From a separate thing I learned this acronym: PICS and NICS — P-I-C-S and N-I-C-S. - PICS is for positive feedback: Positive, Immediate, Certain, Specific. - NICS is for negative feedback: Negative, Immediate, Certain, Specific. How do people get feedback wrong? They try the feedback sandwich: say a positive thing, a negative thing, then another positive thing. The person ends up confused. Or they delay it: "If there's something negative, they let it slide; next one they let it slide; next one they let it slide." By the fourth one you're frustrated — you've seen four instances, they're unaware this was even a problem, and then you come at them with an avalanche. They think, "That came out of nowhere, what a jerk." But really you've had many attempts and it wasn't handled well. Nobody wins in that scenario. So you want to do feedback immediately — right after the meeting or right after the call. Say: "Hey, I really liked the way you did that. I noticed you did X, and that felt like an elevated version of what you were doing before. That's really awesome, keep it up." Also make feedback certain. Don't be wishy-washy. Say exactly which specific behavior produced which effect and therefore this conclusion: do more of this or do less of that. Be clear.
19:30	Sam Parr	"That's a, that's a nonviolent communication example."
19:33	Shaan Puri	Yeah—like a framework for how you could do that. I agreed with that, but was I actually doing it immediately? No. Was I doing it with high certainty and high conviction? No. So you just do those little things and you get better. These little things sort of stack up. You've probably read the story about the "theory of marginal gains"—the British cycling coach [Team GB]—the one that got popularized in Atomic Habits. The British cycling team was losing in the Tour de France, a new coach came in, and people expected big overhauls and huge swings in strategy. Instead he focused on small adjustments: tweak the bike seat, make it 7% thinner, grease certain parts—lots of minor changes that individually sounded inconsequential. His theory was that if you can stack 1% improvements across the board, those marginal gains accumulate and become substantial when added up. That's how you win in most areas of life: you start stacking a bunch of things that individually don't sound like game changers—there's no silver bullet—just keep stacking them until you overwhelm the situation with your success.
20:56	Sam Parr	And a lot of times you'll get guys like us who are saying this in a very tech-bro way, where you're like, "Yeah, this is how you give compliments," and some reasonable person listening is like, "Duh." The problem is that what got you... what gets you to the—the brute force that gets you to the stage where you start worrying about this is actually the opposite way of handling people. The way you start is the opposite of what you eventually need. So you get to this and you're like, "What do I do now?" I'll give you one last example for company values. I've actually taken a different stance on this than I had before. The different stance is: when I started my last company, I actually wrote the values out in advance and I failed to live up to them. My premise when getting Hampton working was, "I'm actually not going to write down values. I'm going to start this company and I'm going to see how it feels, then I'm going to name the values later on."
21:54	Shaan Puri	Jack Smith — baby naming
21:55	Sam Parr	My friend Jack did something that honestly changed my life. He did the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of, and I mocked him at the time. Jack had a baby and he refused to name her for the first year. I said, "Jack, why are you doing this?" He said, "I think I should get to know her first before we give her a name." I said, "Jack, that's absolutely insane. What are you doing?" But I started thinking about it more and more. I got to know the baby and we started calling her—her legal name was Baby for the first year. I thought, you know, Baby's kinda nice. This is kinda nice. Then they thought of all these names that represented her personality, and now I know her by her new name. I realized that's actually sort of brilliant. I did the same thing with my company: I purposely did not have values at first. I asked myself, what attributes bother me and what attributes do I particularly love when I see them? My company's weird: I started it, I had someone run it, and now I'm back running it again, so we're on a strange timeline. It still feels early for us, even though we're a couple years in. We're just now naming our values, and that has been 100% the better move. It feels great, honestly, to stick to these values. Before, when I named values it seemed kinda weak—kinda dumb. You're like, "We're gonna hire people according to these values that I actually made at..." In the case of The Hustle, I made them when I was 26. I'm now 28. I don't even align with them anymore, but I'm stuck with them. I didn't like that feeling; I felt like I was in a prison. I was worried I'd look soft by not following the things I said I was going to follow. We did things differently this time, and it's been so much better.
23:30	Shaan Puri	"What's an example of a value that emerged?"
23:32	Sam Parr	I can give you the three. The first... </FormattedResponse>
23:35	Shaan Puri	"You're, like, the first person to ever ask me about my company values, actually."
23:39	Sam Parr	So the first one is fun. I just value fun. In our copy, I want to do silly stuff just because. But I also don't want to follow data all of the time. Sometimes we're going to do stuff just because it's exciting or it's fun. I'm going to hire people who I have fun being around. The second one is speed. I realized I valued moving fast a lot more than I previously thought. The third one, which is actually kind of controversial—or it doesn't feel right at first, but I'll explain—is pride. What does pride mean? I told my company and they're like, "gay pride — what do you mean?" And I'm like, "No, guys, I mean you could have that, but that's not what I'm referring to."
24:16	Shaan Puri	Like, we're having fun. There we go.
24:18	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah. It's just a bunch of bros being dudes. By pride, I mean I want us to have pride in our personal lives and our work lives. What that meant for me: we started off virtually, and the data showed we could sell it and make money, but it didn't feel good. I didn't take pride in that. I took pride in saying, "We have in real life" — even though the data didn't exactly show we should have done that at the time — I'm doing it anyway. If we're going to lay people off, I'm going to go above and beyond and give them more severance than the market rate because it just makes me feel good. Or if a vendor submits their bill to us, even though we have a Net 90 [Net 90 payment terms], I'll pay them that day because it feels good to do the right thing, to treat people well, and to have this reputation as someone who does things a certain way. That gives me a lot of pride. I tested this: I told a couple people the value I'm aiming for, and someone showed me a text message we're sending to potential customers to remind them of something — like a reminder text. I said, "Show some pride." That's just a boring boilerplate message; make it something special. That actually changed behaviors. I told someone to "show some pride" and, in this really small thing, they did. We had a work event and a couple of the guys there dressed sloppy while some others looked really nice. I don't expect everyone to wear a suit or anything, but their beard was out of whack and they had kind of a dirty shirt on. I'm like, "Dude, have some fucking pride, man." You don't have to go buy new clothes, but show up a little bit better than you are now. So that's been it. The values are speed, pride, and fun.
26:01	Shaan Puri	That's interesting. Yeah, I'm curious how it's going to play out. I mean, I've never heard of someone doing that—where you do it later. Also, I think it's very rare for values to actually show up. I would say that, out of 100 companies that took the time to set values, what percentage would you say actually live by those values? I don't mean perfectly. I guess what I mean is: compared to a similar company, do they do things differently because they value it? What percentage would you say actually do that?
26:35	Sam Parr	Very few, but I think to be out. </FormattedResponse>
26:37	Shaan Puri	Of a hundred, what would...?
26:38	Sam Parr	You say 10%, but I think to be a 90th-percentile-plus company, I actually do think you have to do things like live by your values and think in what order to be.
26:49	Shaan Puri	Have you seen—do that? Have you seen anyone, like, have you kind of gone into a company and been like, "Wow, they actually..."?
26:55	Sam Parr	Well, like, the companies that I tend to admire—or the books about the people I admire—are kind of quirky and very different. I think Coinbase was a good example where they took a stand. I think they said "no politics." They also took a stand that they're going to be remote-first. But their offices... they just put this video out where their offices are going to be, like, the best. They want it to be beautiful and they want people to love working there. They didn't have to do that, but it just seemed important to the CEO and now to the rest of the company. Or with Jason Fried from Basecamp—he does things that are a little different than normal. I think what that does is it turns off a lot of people, but the people who truly love it absolutely love it. I think that's what's going to happen at my company by value. The values that we have are going to turn some people off, and eventually they're just not going to work here anymore.
27:38	Shaan Puri	Which one do you think is going to turn people off? Because those all sound pretty uncontroversial to me. "I want to not have fun. I want to take no pride. I want to move slow." I don't think anybody would say that.
27:47	Sam Parr	Dude, everyone wants to move slow... like, moving.
27:49	Shaan Puri	Fast. Nobody is so... states that. Yeah, so...
27:52	Sam Parr	Yeah, but you can tell when someone says, "This is gonna take six weeks," and you say, "Well, what would it look like if it took two weeks?" That makes so many people uncomfortable.</FormattedResponse>
28:00	Shaan Puri	So we've talked about this before. I'm surprised you didn't do it. Zuck had this thing back in the day where he said one of the great lessons he got when he was a young CEO — I think he was, yeah, 18. He said you need to acknowledge the trade-off in the value itself. So, instead of saying speed — because everybody says, "Yeah, of course we all want to move fast" — he would say: > "Move fast and break things." That was the value. Because he said "move fast and break things," you would explicitly acknowledge the trade-off: when you move really fast, not everything is going to be done perfectly, neat, and orderly. Things are going to break. Things are going to happen. By putting it in the value, it made it real. It made it something that not every company would agree with. It made something that you could be criticized on. It acknowledged what will be uncomfortable about doing this. So I'm surprised you didn't do that.
28:47	Sam Parr	I'm still working on wordsmithing, if I'm being honest. But I think that speed and pride can be inverse — they can be opposites. I don't have a cute phrase yet, like "move fast and break things," but I don't think most people are comfortable when you say "move fast." At my company, I've noticed that someone will say, "This is going to take a quarter [three months]." I will pose the question: "What do I have to do to see results for this in two weeks? What's that look like?" That actually rubs a huge percentage of people the wrong way. The type of people who kick ass at my company say, "Oh, you know, that's kind of an interesting question. I guess if we do this, this, and this, maybe that would be exciting — we could actually pull that off." But a huge percentage of people, I think, are very nervous about speed. They're very nervous about moving fast. I mean, have you not experienced that?
29:35	Shaan Puri	No — 100%. I just don't think that if you say the phrase "my value is speed"... when you ask, "Who agrees with this?" 100% of people raise their hand, and nobody will say, "I disagree — I think we should be moving slow." I think 0% of people do that. So that's why I'm like: in practice, what you're saying is actually more like uncomfortably fast, right? Or, you know, "break the speed bar." What we do is whatever would be normal for this project, we're going to cut that in half as a default. We're going to have a different speed bar than everybody else, or than whatever your default is. And so I think I would have pushed you to be like, "Hey, I think you should make that actually say what you're trying to say."
30:15	Sam Parr	Yeah, admittedly, I'm still wordsmithing a lot of this stuff. But I'll give you an example for speed: it's like if you go to joinhampton.com and you sign up or you submit [unclear: "is this trick it from me"].
30:26	Shaan Puri	No, no.
30:29	Sam Parr	If you apply and you fit our criteria — meaning you have a company that does at least $3,000,000 in revenue and you're in one of our 13 chapters — Helen, who works at the company, is going to call you right now. It's 60 minutes, but we're trying to reduce it to 15 minutes. You're going to get a phone call from someone who works at the company and all they're going to do is say: > "I see you. Thank you for applying. We have to review the application, but I'm here, and you can text me if you need anything. Thank you." So that's an example of moving fast.
30:59	Shaan Puri	"I think you should make... know some companies have." [Sentence incomplete]
31:00	Sam Parr	A wall of love.
31:01	Shaan Puri	I think you should make a public—or at least internal—list that states the value at the top. So you write whatever your value is, like "Move uncomfortably fast." That's the value. Then have a running list of concrete anecdotes where that's true. See how long you can make that list and how much is being added to it. You can also see who's adding to it, because that's the person who's actually living by the values. When you actually write it down, you'll realize, "Damn, we say that, but what do we actually do that's fast?" Or, if we say "Take pride," what's an example of something we do with pride that others wouldn't—something we weren't doing before we actually did it? I think when you do that, it actually becomes real.
31:44	Sam Parr	"That's a good idea."
31:45	Shaan Puri	"I think most values just are... I think that the percentage of companies who actually live their values—in a way that's different than Company A versus Company B—is so small. I think 10% is extremely generous. I think that number's probably closer to 1%."
31:58	Sam Parr	"Who have you seen?"
31:59	Shaan Puri	You well know the hard part when you're an entrepreneur is that you don't really work in many other companies. You only hear secondhand information. We got acquired... Twitch. I don't even know what the Twitch values were, but whatever they were, they were not very powerful and we weren't doing them — or at least I didn't see anybody doing them. Nobody talked about them. I think the couple times that I've been in other people's companies, I haven't felt it. I think it's quite rare. I think Elon does this really well, where he drives a hardcore "sleep on the factory floor" mentality. You see it in stories about him — literally sleeping on the factory floor — and you see it in his company culture. Right now, if you look at xAI, Zuck is throwing huge pay packages at people. OpenAI has the most popular product. Why would I, if I'm a top researcher, go work at Grok? That's the question they have to answer. What they do in their propaganda is basically show how "hardcore" the team is — how committed they are to what they're doing, the culture, and taking pride in overworking. There's a story in the Walter Isaacson book that Jason Fried actually told on the podcast. It's basically this: they were ready to launch — they were doing a project with NASA. Half the NASA team was there to watch, and then there was the SpaceX team. They discovered a crack in the skirt of the rocket. Someone said, "Oh shoot... we're going to need to delay the launch. There's a crack in the rocket." He (Elon) goes and looks at it and says, "Why do we need the skirt of the rocket anyway?" They reply, "Well, it's for additional thrust." He asks, "Will we have enough? What happens if we take the skirt off? What if we just cut this? What if we removed it?" He points to a set of shears and says, "What if we just cut it off?" They say, "Well, you'll lose thrust." He does some calculations on the side, comes back, and says, "We'll still have enough thrust. Let's do it." He himself takes the shears, cuts around the crack, and basically removes the skirt.
34:12	Sam Parr	And then that's the rocket that crashed, yeah.
34:15	Shaan Puri	And he totally didn't have enough thrust. It was insane. No — actually the launch went well, and the NASA director wrote about this afterwards. She was standing there and she said: > "I've never seen anything like this. The NASA engineers — all we could do is stand there and watch. This would never be the way that we would do a launch." This was unfathomable, but that's what they did. So those are the concrete anecdotes where you're like company A versus company B — company A does something different. There's another story: they needed to get a rocket from one place to another. Normally you'd put a huge rocket on a ship and take it from A to B, but it was going to take about three months. So he asked, "Could we drive it there? Drive the rocket piece — you know, drive that thing there?"
34:58	Sam Parr	I saw that. Wasn't it? They put it on a bunch of trucks, and the car went five miles an hour.
35:03	Shaan Puri	They had a car in front that was basically clearing the way. Literally, when there were power lines, the guy would stand up in the front of the truck and, with a stick, push the power lines up so that the truck with the rocket could go under. And they now...
35:18	Sam Parr	"Need, basically, like a redneck."
35:20	Shaan Puri	Elon's a hill building overpasses. They were like, "Oh, we're gonna have to drive around here, go that way to get there," and they did it there, right? But like...
35:26	Sam Parr	"That's like the equivalent of people saying, 'It's like, I got a guy. You need the headlight? You need the wire removed? I got a guy.' Yeah — 'Just grab that old broom over there. I got a guy.'"
35:37	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So I just think pretty broadly: whatever percentage of energy you're going to—great. You've got the three values. I would just be like, "It's not what we say; it's what we do." So we're going to track what we do that's in line with these, and... you know, who—yeah. That's what I'm calculating. Every week, every month, I'm going to see how much we add to this list.
35:54	Sam Parr	That's a great idea. I didn't think of that. So we have a thing where we give examples—we celebrate them. We're like, "You know who moved fast?" And even if it was a bad thing, let's talk about it. You do that with sales calls. You're like, "Alright, let's look at the blunder of the week." Alright—here: does everyone know why? </FormattedResponse>
36:09	Shaan Puri	That's... yeah, yeah.
36:11	Sam Parr	"Like, good job trying — let's improve this way."
36:14	Shaan Puri	So I used to give out—this is not what they teach you at Harvard Business School—but here's what I did. I bought this replica WWE championship belt and every Friday I would call the team over. We’d all step away from our computers, grab a beer or a drink, and stand in a little huddle. At that time we had about twelve to fifteen people at the company. I would give the belt to somebody and they got to keep it—like, on their shoulder or on their desk—for that week. The belt holder got small perks, like “you got dessert first at lunch.” Whoever had the belt that week received those perks. That was my opportunity to shout out the person who did the thing—the behavior that was in line with the values. It was never about giving it to the person in charge. It went to someone who did something above and beyond the call of duty or something clearly in line with one of the values. I would tell the value story and describe what the person did that was out of the ordinary and aligned with that value. Then I’d hand them the belt. Do that 52 in a row and people start to get it. It’s no different than a second-grade class—people start to understand what gets rewarded around here, what the benefits are. What I did next was assign a prize to it. I’d give cash—I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was $1,000 in cash—and the rule was: you can only spend that $1,000 on something that becomes a story you’re going to tell us the following week. So the belt holder would say, “Yeah, I got the thousand bucks,” but they couldn’t just say, “I paid my rent” or “I bought groceries.” It had to be something story-worthy. Then that person got to stand up with pride. They’d go home that day and tell their partner, “Hey, I won a thousand bucks, I got the belt, I did this thing.” That’s how you make values sink deep inside a company: reinforce them on a weekly basis and almost productize the recognition.
38:04	Sam Parr	Alex Ramosy said something cool. He's like: > Most of your team don't need to be taught; they need to be reminded. For the majority of things, you teach them once and then you just have to constantly remind them. It's almost always a lack of reminding, not a lack of teaching, right? I thought that was really good.
38:19	Shaan Puri	"That's true. I mean, it's true for myself too. The most valuable lessons are the ones I keep having to learn again and again, right?"
38:26	Sam Parr	"Yeah. I've learned this: I don't need knowledge; I need wisdom. And, like Yudia reminded me, in order to make this wisdom stick..."
38:32	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly.
38:33	Sam Parr	Can I ask you about this thing that you have on here about wanna? I want to tell you about something, but I first want to hear about this: "edge founders who go all in the second time on edge talents that they have."
38:44	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Basically, I'm the type of entrepreneur who seeks variety — I'm excited by new things. I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have that same... that's the kind of guy they are, right? That's the kind of gal they are. They're into that.
38:57	Sam Parr	"I think everyone has that. Everyone has it a little bit."
38:59	Shaan Puri	And there's some—I don't know if these other people are just better at resisting it or if they have the opposite urge. We had the founder of RXBAR on the podcast, Peter. He came on and said he built RXBAR from his parents' kitchen table. He built it into the number-one, or one of the top, protein bars, basically, and sold it for, what was it, $500 million-ish.
39:21	Sam Parr	Or more.
39:21	Shaan Puri	Ballpark, about $600 million, something like that. We were talking to him a couple years later and we're like, "Peter, what's up, man? What are you excited about? What are you interested in? What are you doing now? What are you going to do next? What's the next move?" He's like, "I'm launching a protein bar." I'm like, "What?" He basically was going back to the market that he knew better than anyone else with a new product, David Barr, which is, by the way, already a multi-$100 million company—faster than RXBAR ever was, because he...
39:47	Sam Parr	In terms of revenue, right?
39:48	Shaan Puri	Because he's—yeah—he's playing. I think we talked about this. I think they said they're over $100,000,000 in revenue, and he's—what—less than two years post-launch. So, incredible success. It kind of makes sense. It's like when you see people playing a video game and those guys—they're not buying the next game and starting it. They basically speed-run a video game. If you've seen people speed-run Mario or something, they just know the level like the back of their hand. They're able to do it with a level of mastery that even a newcomer, including themselves earlier on, would not have been able to do. This fascinates me because I'm so opposite. If I have success in something, the last thing I want to do is go do that again—boring. Not interested. Yet there's this group of people that do this. The reason this came up for me was I was looking at Carbone pasta sauce. Do you know this story? </FormattedResponse>
40:36	Sam Parr	Yes. Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. </FormattedResponse>
40:39	Shaan Puri	"You want to tell a little bit of it, and I'll fill in some gaps."
40:41	Sam Parr	Okay, so I believe Rao's is a restaurant in Manhattan. I think it's actually only one restaurant—a small family Italian restaurant. It isn't even in a particularly popular area of Manhattan, but it was still a very popular spot. Now a lot of people know Rao's tomato sauce—the pasta sauce. It's not gourmet-level, but it's a significantly elevated ragù: about $8 a bottle versus $4 a bottle. It's approachable but definitely elevated, and it's crushed it. It basically took this very small, one-store Manhattan restaurant and made it into a massive, potentially multibillion-dollar brand. Now this other place, Carbone, is a little less of a family restaurant—maybe family-owned, but a bit flashier. I think it had an amazing leader. Basically, the CEO of Rao's has done the same thing with Carbone, so now you can buy Carbone sauce. It's the same thing: slightly elevated but still approachable and just crushing it. Is that right?
41:41	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you nailed it. So, just to fill in some of the details: Rao's scaled up and sold for $415,000,000 in 2017. Since then it has had one or two private-equity sales, and then sold one or two more times, the last one at $2,000,000,000. So here's this $2,000,000,000 pasta brand, and the CEO runs and scales that company. Separately, Carbone basically goes through a similar model. When the pandemic hit, Carbone—the restaurant, which had this incredible reputation—tries to figure out, "Okay, well now people are at home, our business took a hit." It became this incredible forcing function. Sometimes you turn your disadvantage into your advantage if you're a great entrepreneur. That's the key. You look at this situation and you're like, "Alright, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna flip this on its head and not just survive this, but can I do something with this?" So they decide, "Hey, we're gonna come up with a jar version of it. We'll sell it direct to consumer on our website." Okay, great. They go through dozens of trials, getting the flavors right. They launch and it does okay—not great. This guy Eric comes in; he comes over from Rouse. He had a non-compete; his non-compete expires. He says, "Alright, great, I'm gonna do this," and they spend about four months just working on recipes and flavors, trying to figure it out.
42:56	Sam Parr	They're in the lab.
42:57	Shaan Puri	They're in the lab. They're grinding—grinding with the sauce flavors.
43:01	Sam Parr	They're grinding garlic. Yeah, they're in the lab.
43:03	Shaan Puri	The problem is, it's a pretty competitive category — pasta sauce is obviously not a new category. He thought, with his reputation and connections, he'd be able to get into retail. He knocked on all the doors, but there was no interest. For basically eighteen months he was struggling. People wouldn't call him back and he could not get his foot in the door. So he had to think: we need a value proposition, a position that's different enough so retailers want to carry us. He put on two hats: a "Don Draper" hat and an economic hat. The Don Draper hat was, "We need to market this differently: this is restaurant-quality sauce. We use San Marzano tomatoes. We cook them in an open-kettle fire." He started to build that story, and because it's so premium he decided to price it at twice the price of the other sauces. > "What's their price? Double it — that's our price." So now it's priced at $7 to $11. It's a very expensive item, but that pricing changes the retailer economics. Instead of making $0.50 on a sauce, they're now making $2.50. They have a big incentive to carry it because if it sells, they make way more per jar than they would otherwise. That became the pitch, and it started to work. It took off. Now they're north of $100,000,000 in sales and in 27,000 stores. It's fascinating that this guy is just running this "pasta playbook" again and again. I started to think about who else is doing that. We talked about RXBAR — and a friend of the pod, Nikita Beer, did the same thing. He basically made these viral teen apps where teens can send each other prompts like, "Who's most likely to..." and then it sends a message: "Somebody said you're the blah blah — click this to see who said that about you." For a teenager in high school, that's an irresistible text. It goes viral. He's done this a couple of times and has parlayed that into, like, now he runs product for X and works with... [transcription cuts off]
45:28	Sam Parr	Is which?
45:29	Shaan Puri	It's an insane career leap that should be studied. Okay, but we have other friends. There's a friend of the pod [we can't name them] in the DTC [direct-to-consumer] space, similar to RXBARs. They built a brand, and we have one friend who has now built four different $100,000,000 brands using the same e-commerce playbook. Two of their brands literally compete head-to-head against each other. If you search in this category on Amazon, the number one product is theirs and the number two product is theirs. They look like two totally different competing brands—he owns both of them. I was looking at the revenue of these companies and it was like, "Oh yeah, this one did a little better this month — it did $8,000,000 this month and the other one did $7,500,000 this month." I can't believe it. This is almost like full self-driving for him—he's on autopilot. He knows what to do with these companies.
46:17	Sam Parr	I don't exactly know who you're talking about, but I think I do. And to answer this question: is there a chance that the websites of the two are the exact same—like the same website template?
46:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah, why not?
46:27	Sam Parr	Right, because I think—I think I know who you're talking about. If I know who you're talking about, I think they owned one thing and then they sold it. They just... basically, it looked like they said, "so, let's just say hypothetical."
46:37	Shaan Puri	"No more clues. We can't do any more clues."
46:39	Sam Parr	We—no, no. Hypothetically, just like a pen. They were like, "Alright, this worked for pens. Now let's do the exact export upload. Now we're gonna do the same thing for lighters, but, like, same branding."
46:49	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. So, again—if this sort of mindset of going back and speed-running the level again is so different to me. I mean, what do you think about this? Do you know—do you have any examples of this? What do you think of this model?
47:01	Sam Parr	"It's 100% the way to go, I think."
47:03	Shaan Puri	But you don't do that.
47:05	Sam Parr	I think I did. Yeah—the reason I started Hampton was because, at The Hustle, we owned a community called Trends. I realized all the mistakes I made, so I think it's the same thing. Yeah. I mean, my career started—it felt like—as a blogger when I was 20 years old, and frankly I feel like I've been doing the same thing for now 15 or 16 years. So yeah, I do think it's the same thing where...
47:25	Shaan Puri	"It's 'explain your thing.' When you say 'doing the same thing', what's the 'thing' for you?" </FormattedResponse>
47:30	Sam Parr	It's all been centered around content and community. When I moved to San Francisco, I had a book club, and that's actually how I met some of my best friends. Two of the guys who were in my wedding — of the six guys, two of them I met via my book club — where we would have a monthly meetup in real life. From there, I hosted a handful of events called Bootstrap Live. In order to make these events popular, I started blogging and creating a newsletter that turned into a huge conference called HustleCon. I actually just looked at the numbers last night because we were thinking about doing some more events at Hampton, and we had 10,000 people in one year — in 2018 — come to our event. So I've been doing events and community for 15 years now. It's been actually quite consistent.
48:11	Shaan Puri	Even more specifically, you're like, "I want to have this community—either personally be a part of it or attract this community." Then you're like, "Cool. How am I going to do that? I'll use content as this magnet to bring people in." Whether it's the podcast, the blog, or the newsletter, it didn't really matter. It's like, "I'm going to go talk; that's going to attract these types of people, and then my business is the community." Then, you know: HustleCon was like, "I'm going to charge you $300 once." Trends was like, "I'm going to charge you $300 once a year." Hampton's was like, "I'm going to charge you whatever—$8,000 once a year." And you've just been doing that same playbook, but smarter and better each time.
48:47	Sam Parr	Yeah. I basically am trying to make up for the mistakes I've made in the previous thing. Right? You know... I think that when I started The Hustle — I think I told you this — my goal was to get to $100,000,000 in revenue with a newsletter. At the time, that was considered laughable. Frankly, I didn't entirely believe it, but I was like, "I don't know."
49:05	Shaan Puri	Frankly, I was the one laughing.
49:07	Sam Parr	Yeah, I laughed at myself. I was like, I know for sure it can get to 30,000,000, but I have a feeling that if something can get to 30,000,000 it could probably get to 100,000,000. There was no math behind it — I was just guessing — and I was proven right. I unfortunately didn't do it; I sold too early. My competitor, now one of my best friends, Austin Reef, actually did do it. So the idea is that I've basically looked at either content or community, and oftentimes they're married. I'm like, "I want to get this to 100,000,000 in revenue." I have never built a business to $100,000,000 in revenue, and that's the one thing I've been trying to do now for 16 years, and I hope I can pull this off. It's been content and community the whole time. Frankly, I didn't do it on purpose. I was just trying things. When something comes easy, I just do it. I wish I were more reflective and able to say, "Oh, I made this mistake before; I can avoid it." Oftentimes I actually continue to make the same mistake over and over again. Guys like Peter, the person you're talking about, and some of our other friends who are two-time founders in the same industry do a much better job than I have at using the same contacts, the same group of people, and just rinsing and repeating. By the time this goes live, I think the Eric Ryan podcast will have gone live. Eric Ryan, if he hasn't, has founded, I think, four companies that — if I had to guess — each had a nine-figure valuation, and he just did the same thing over and over with the same people. I definitely think that's the way to go, and it could be way more fun.
50:27	Shaan Puri	And so you go back and you commit the same crime again and again and again. I kinda love this model. I don't do it myself — that's not my wiring — but I find it fascinating. Another example of this is the guys who started Money 2020. I don't remember the name.
50:44	Sam Parr	Oh my God, dude. I've been begging him every month. I sent him an email; I said, "Will you come on MFM?" He has told me now that he's going to come this November, so I'm putting that in.
50:52	Shaan Puri	The record—it's happening. So what was the guy's name again? Jonathan. Jonathan. Alright. So what these guys did, which is amazing, is they basically figured out a model—a blueprint. Like a home builder who has blueprints for a house that they can just copy-paste and build again and again and again. They've basically been doing that for, I don't know, industry conferences. I don't know what you would call it— is there a different term for that?
51:14	Sam Parr	So, if you want to figure out and follow along, everyone should Google this guy's name: his name is Jonathan Weiner. Go to his LinkedIn. He originally started a conference business—I think in 1996. I think that was his first event. If you go to his website you'll see the names of something like six different events. Go to the website of each event: it's the exact same website but in a different niche. He had Money20/20, which was a payments conference. There was a shtick to all of his conferences. I think you get a $2,000 ticket, but if you're a vendor you're obligated to go to three different meetings with different people. I think that's part of the whole thing. So he did Money20/20 (payments). He did Shoptalk, which was an e‑commerce conference. He did Grocery (or GroceryTalk), which was in the food business, I guess. Now he has HumanX, which is for artificial intelligence, and he also has Health, which is for health innovation. He's done this where I think he's had a fifth or a sixth one, but the previous four collectively, if you add it all up, I think the public price is $600–$700 million. It was like one was $125 million, another was $200 million, and he's done that four times, so it adds up to something like $600 million.
52:33	Shaan Puri	Yeah, actually, it's not even the adding up that's most impressive — it's the fact that each one succeeded and became a nine-figure, so over $100,000,000, business. Again and again. It's literally like having a money printer. I like these people who have these blueprints and then go back to the well — they are these sort of repeat offenders. I think it's pretty fascinating. The problem, of course, with this is the psychology. One thing a lot of founders struggle with is knowing too much, and knowing too much hurts you in two different ways. First: if you've been in a space for a number of years, you've met all the right people, learned all the hard lessons, and you know the nuances of that space. You're the most equipped to do it, but you also have the most scar tissue. Some people literally can't get past that scar tissue and the trauma of it; emotionally, they don't want to go back into that space again. They want to go into a new space and get new scar tissue from new spaces. That's a very, very common thing. What happens when it works is sometimes you then get a different problem. You know a lot — you know how to do it — but you're bored of it. It's like sitting on a seesaw that's balanced: you kind of want to go up and down, right? Like that's kinda the...
53:44	Shaan Puri	So a lot of people who are in the game of entrepreneurship — once you succeed, your money problems are maybe solved. Now, if you're playing, you're not playing for the money as your top priority anymore. You're playing because you like the sport of business. The question is: if you're going to play in the sport of business, where are you going to get more kicks? Are you going to get them from going back and dominating and doing that again? Some people do. Others need something new. I've always been in the need-something-new category; I didn't really even question it. Over time, I've met a handful of people who do this. I know one guy who did this with sports betting. He built one of the most popular blogs in sports betting and then sold the leads to sports betting companies — websites like FanDuel or DraftKings. He dominated the lead flow and then sold the leads. He sold one company for about $40,000,000. He's told the story on the podcast. If you go listen to when I sold the Milk Road, go listen to Kendall's part on this. Basically, he did it — I want to say — in New Jersey, the first state where it was legal. At the time, only New Jersey was legal, and all his competitors were like, "US market shut down — only one state out of 50 is available, it's a dead market, we gotta go international." He had the opposite takeaway: "Oh, so I could just dominate New Jersey." He created a site like newjerseysportsbettinginfo.com and owned all of the New Jersey sports betting traffic. He sold it to one of the companies for, I think, $40-something million. Then he did the exact same thing again: Minnesota opened up, and he literally repeated the strategy. He sold that site again to the same company for another $45,000,000, but faster this time. After the second sale, the company was like, "Oh, shit — okay. In the contract, any other state you can't do this again. We didn't put that 'noncompete' in the first one; we didn't realize you'd just do this again and do it better than we would." So he had sold to the same company essentially twice for about $40,000,000 each. By the way, I just caught up with him recently. Guess what he's doing?
55:42	Sam Parr	"He did it again."
55:43	Shaan Puri	He's selling leads to the same thing, in the same playbook. I couldn't believe it. And so, actually, I totally could believe it — it's actually the most believable thing in the world.
55:53	Sam Parr	"Alright. Is that it?"
55:54	Shaan Puri	That's it. That's the pod. Hope that stuff helps people... I don't know, run their companies better.
55:59	Sam Parr	Alright, talk soon.

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How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)

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