Shaan Puri
Entrepreneur and investor, co-host of My First Million podcast.
“The point I want to make is that I think that that is super underrated and not enough people do it. And brands could benefit from doing it a lot more than they currently are.”
Source→“His whole career is taking messy data and organizing it... take data that exists that is just not transparently, easily structured and available and make it transparent, easily structured and available.”
Source→“He is probably going to make every single mistake, the same mistake that an 18 year old degenerate Robinhood trader is going to make... There's a behavioral side to that.”
Source→“He puts her at four. And so immediately she's like, what? Who are the three people that beat me?... He goes, I intentionally would place people at certain parts of the list to maximize the controversy.”
Source→“You basically can go into any industry, any social circle, and simply by making the winners list, by making the awards, by making the list, you can insert yourself at the center of any network or any market.”
Source→“He's so lovable. He's like super thoughtful, super well-meaning, really smart, obviously just like a killer... not only this killer business, but other killer businesses too in their portfolio.”
Source→“The first slide on the Anduril pitch deck and our seed investment said, we are going to save the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And we are going to make hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Source→“Oh wait, Chipotle has a 300 person real estate team. Why don't we just go next to wherever there's a Chipotle? Like they did all the work and it turns out that's actually what Burger King does. They just go, if McDonald's does the research, they just go piggyback off McDonald's.”
Source→“What he would ask is basically what is the cost of the raw ingredients on the London metals stock exchange for the valve? And then what is the markup relative to the actual raw materials costs? That's the idiot index... He found that the space industry had essentially the worst idiot index of all the industries that he had seen.”
Source→“Bezos has this quote which is that advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”
Source→“He crushed it so hard for a very long period of time, made so much money for himself and his investors that just like... basically just shut down the fund. It was just like, we won.”
Source→“Othership... Dana White, the president of the UFC, did one. He went to one. He didn't know anything about it. He went to one. He's like standing up. He's like, I don't know what like this is the most amazing place I've ever been to.”
Source→“CNN recently did the best ad campaign ever for this company... They gave them this phone for two weeks. And then they had them redo the test. And his capacity to focus and his capacity to remember went up significantly.”
Source→“My opinion is that this, to all the big companies out there, this appears to be a very niche, silly thing. My prediction is that in 10 years, this will not be.”
Source→“She sold $800,000 worth of this product in five months. Now in 2026, she's tracking or she says the goal and it's early in the year, but tracking towards $5 million a year in revenue.”
Source→“I read this article in the Wall Street Journal how there's this crossing... The headline is, The Crossing Guard Making $14,000 a Month Mailing Out Her Musings from Her Job.”
Source→“I've been writing this newsletter for 20 years for farmers. Half of the thing is just memes, just funny jokes because the farmers just want to laugh in the morning.”
Source→“In one year we built the largest crypto newsletter in the world and selling it for millions.”
Source→“We decided to clone... what if we created a newsletter for crypto, just like this guy's done for farming... In one year we built the largest crypto newsletter in the world.”
Source→“He invested in, I think Uber and Pinterest in the same couple of weeks, both at a three and a half million dollar valuation... he had like 75 grand in personal savings and I put 25 in each of those companies.”
Source→“I've listened to Arthur Brooks. You know who that is? Yeah. Like I would love to talk to people like that...they've done some cool research paper or some like data driven way to like raise better children or be happier or find your passion.”
Source→“I noticed that I dislike those the most. And then I noticed there are so many times like when you will tell me a story or we will have a guest like Graham Weaver...where we do these podcasts and I leave with more energy than I came in on. And almost always that happens when it's not data driven and it's simply what am I curious about?”
Source→“When we had Graham Weaver on, that was baller...to me, he's an inspirational guy who has all these cool ways to live a wonderful life. And it just so happens to be that he was really successful at business.”
Source→“Sarah Moore, who you did a podcast with, where we do these podcasts and I leave with more energy than I came in on.”
Source→“Goalie was giving creators... the top thing was a condo in Miami. The next thing was a Lambo... several hundreds of brands have aggressively used this strategy.”
Source→“Dan would have to follow the treasure map for a trail of clues all over the house and sometimes all over the neighborhood until he finally found the present. This sparked a deep love of solving puzzles, cracking codes, and hunting treasures.”
Source→“He would collect all the discarded betting slips... most of them are rubbish. But if even five, ten percent, he could make some money... that's not that different than what value investing is.”
Source→“Bill Gates, when he was coding or Mark Zuckerberg, when he picked up programming or Mr. Beast, when he started doing YouTube videos at age 12...”
Source→“My First Million — Podcast participants: Sam Parr, Shaan Puri”
Source→“There's a golden window between, I think he says the ages of eight to 18. So there's this 10 year window where a child's brain is developing in such a way that it can specialize and do some incredible things.”
Source→“He used to put deodorant on his armpits, run around the block, two different sticks, two different formulas, run around the block, have his brother smell each one and be like, which one's better. And that was his clinical trial.”
Source→“He created Anduril, the leading, the first kind of significant tech company that was doing defense stuff. It's worth like whatever, a hundred billion dollars.”
Source→“His theory is basically that a huge percentage of your personality is pretty hardwired and baked by the time you're five years old. And you don't want to spend your whole life fighting your nature.”
Source→“He was famous for hiring the best people. And at one point there was even in a congressional hearing of like, should we? Is there like a monopoly for creative talent?”
Source→“Shaan makes a specific and falsifiable prediction that OpenAI will eventually divest TBPN, similar to Barstool's double exit from Penn Gaming.”
Source→“With OpenAI, they already have a billion users. I don't understand how there's any growth related to this other than it's just a cool thing to own.”
Source→“It's still a prolific company and interesting story... Hearst now, they are a media company, but it's still family owned... they do something like $15 billion a year in revenue.”
Source→“Naval has talked about this — the true masters are people who can go back down the mountain and start again and take a new path. Because going back down the mountain, once you've climbed up once, is so hard.”
Source→“HubSpot buying The Hustle made sense because they could directly attribute customer acquisition to it. OpenAI has 900M+ MAUs — there's no growth attribution story here.”
Source→“Episode Summary: "This Opportunity Is Hidden In Plain Sight" — My First Million”
Source→“I feel like with the hustle, you spotted a couple of people, right? Like a lot of people now have seen Steph Smith on our podcast a bunch.”
Source→“Shaan Puri and Sam Parr hosted Chad Janis on My First Million”
Source→“Scott Belsky said, I'm going to invest in you and you need to be a steward of my capital... this idea that you need to be the vehicle that protects and passes on a little bit of greatness.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.