Sam Parr
Entrepreneur and co-host of My First Million podcast, formerly founder of The Hustle.
“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→“I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.”
Source→“I told it to explain it, to be like I'm Charlie Munger trying to understand the business.”
Source→“It's not about the price to earnings ratios. It's not about price to sales. It's about the price to Elon ratio.”
Source→“The Starlink business has like all of the wonderful characteristics of a business. There's no competitors. They have an extreme cost advantage. It's recurring revenue. It's extremely high margin.”
Source→“I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.”
Source→“You're not buying SpaceX. You're buying three different companies that are stapled together. You have the space launch business, the internet connectivity business, and the AI business.”
Source→“ButcherBox, the guy who started ButcherBox, he's pretty active on Twitter. It's a bootstrapped company that I believe is mid nine figures, I think like North of 500 or right around there million a year.”
Source→“You know, these like Japanese strawberries, like a $50 basket of strawberries. And you're like, ooh, I must know... We should talk about that company sometime. It's killing, there's a company behind it that's doing really well.”
Source→“She not only went through, I think all 200 or 300 of them, but she convinced them to send the website to their clients and they would give reviews.”
Source→“Institutional Investor, which is like a magazine. And they rank the best investors. And it's like a $200 million business.”
Source→“He ends up selling the company to McGraw-Hill for like $500 million. And then they sell it a few years later for a billion dollars.”
Source→“Omaha Steaks, I believe is north of a billion dollars a year in revenue because they were one of the first people to advertise on Google.”
Source→“I remember seeing this business get started, like it's only four or five years old... I think it's close to $200 million a year in revenue. And they have a small team, like 30, 40, 50 people.”
Source→“If you say an idea and everybody in the room nods, if 100% of the room nods and says that's a good idea, run away. You're about to waste three years of your life.”
Source→“Endpoint Arena CEO, Michael Fisher, who's a PhD, studied economics computer science at Stanford, became curious about the promise of prediction markets, and he created an app around this.”
Source→“He came on here when he was, I don't know, 17 years old or something. He was in high school. He like came on the podcast in between class periods. He like skipped class to come be on our podcast.”
Source→“The New York Times games-only product. So no news from the New York Times. It has a million paying subscribers at $5 a month. $60 million in ARR.”
Source→“Endpoint Arena created a polymarket essentially just for betting on... prediction markets, which are typically higher accuracy than individual experts because you get the wisdom of the crowds that have skin in the game.”
Source→“Barstool called it the hottest reservation in the country this winter. $165 a person covers your drinks, your steam, your cold plunge, and a full meal. Their phones are ringing off the hook with reservations at all hours.”
Source→“Interplay Learning in Austin, Texas. They're the leader. They have hundreds of hours of HVAC solar plumbing and electrical training. They can actually get you like certified as a technician or an associate just using Quest.”
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→“I think about that all the time, to be 21 or 22 and being offered to be a billionaire and just the gall that he had.”
Source→“The Hustle / HubSpot — Business newsletter founded by Sam Parr, sold to HubSpot.”
Source→“Bob Pittman had this thing called the Pilot Group where he would fund newsletter companies, one of them being Daily Candy, which sold for $100 million. I heard about that story and I was like, I'm just going to copy that and do it with business news.”
Source→“He goes, it's just the difference between short-term greedy and long-term greedy... one of the beautiful things about Silicon Valley is you learn the virtue of long-term, long-term greedy people.”
Source→“He was the founding CRO of HubSpot. And he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart.”
Source→“When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal.”
Source→“The guy who had the most viral clips ended up creating a company doing short form content, sold it to Morning Brew and like, you know, had a sort of successful business come out of the whole thing.”
Source→“We want to use money to incentivize these like 16 to 22 year old kids who are just awesome at editing and making clips to post clips about our stuff on social...be stupidly aggressive for 90 days.”
Source→“The best way to serve your audience is to ignore them completely.”
Source→“Diego, who's my head of content, was my lead writer for Milk Road. So like, you know, I basically trained him how to write my style. He did it for two years for Milk Road and was excellent.”
Source→“My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way.”
Source→“With 3 million pounds in equity, they buy an $80 million company that is a spinoff of BP... by 1997 it works. This $80 million company is now worth like a billion and a half.”
Source→“My First Million — Podcast participants: Sam Parr, Shaan Puri”
Source→“The dirty secret of all e-commerce and D2C businesses is that they are world class at just marketing funnels... Facebook, TikTok, Google ad game... They're not just good. They're world class at that.”
Source→“Walking away from that, and then not just walking away from that and trying to build back up to that... when you're doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing, you'll sustain even in the face of bad results.”
Source→“Elgato, which sells accessories for streaming that now has become even more popular with podcasting as well. Like they got both of those waves.”
Source→“They figured out that Twitch streamers were undervalued assets... the depth of trust was insane... They went zero to 100 million in sales and guys like you and I had never heard of them.”
Source→“The things I was working on was the last waves opportunity... what has already worked is now done in the game of winner take all.”
Source→“The live show is there to produce the clips and the clips is the product. We do this four hour live stream as a farming exercise to just farm 20 great clips a day.”
Source→“"Trung has become a famous person on Twitter. And like you found these people as diamonds in the rough." — Sam Parr”
Source→“Steph Smith — Writer/creator discovered and hired by Sam at The Hustle. Called out as a talent-spotting success — a diamond in the rough who became well-known after her time at the company.”
Source→“He tried to buy Substack. They didn't cut the deal. And then the next day, all traffic to Substack from X goes to zero... It is not beyond Mr. Free Speech Elon Musk to put his thumb on the scales.”
Source→“When GTA 5 came out, these guys made this thing called NoPixel. They created their own mod version of the game and they ended up selling it back to the company after it got really mega popular — it got more popular than the real game on Twitch.”
Source→“GTA 5 did $1B in 3 days, still generates $500M/year 12 years later, 500M copies sold, ~$20B lifetime revenue, and the new title is projected to do $3B in year one with $1B in pre-orders.”
Source→“He compares it unfavorably to HubSpot's acquisition of The Hustle, where there was clear customer attribution.”
Source→“Episode Summary: "This Opportunity Is Hidden In Plain Sight" — My First Million”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.