Shaan Puri

“Somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you're, when you need to be in each mode, that's sort of …”

“So last week, I'm having breakfast with him, and I've now invested in his new company, Passage, which is doing some amazing things.”

“He goes, if you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you were 90%, meaning the jump from 80% focus to 90% focus will double your impact. And so you really want this, the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your f…”

“The first filter is just evidence of exceptional ability... And if you really haven't done anything exceptional, the odds of this being the place where you have the final, the, you know, the first exceptional thing of your career is not really a bet I'm excite…”

“They put seven and a half in that round... At thirty eight million post money. In that round, we raised about 10, so they put in seven and a half, then our ProRata investors put in some money. We brought in a bunch of angels in that round, and those were, like…”

“Getting wealthy through the money game and investing is Far less about strategy and far more about behavior. And it's your own poor behavior that leads to poor financial results, not poor strategy.”

“Who cares what's true? It's what's useful is what matters. And so I try to find what are the beliefs that I need to stuff in my brain that is going to lead to me doing the things I want to do to have the life I want to have.”

“My net worth is up 40 times or something since we sold raises up a lot. But the problem is a huge percentage that probably 70% of that came from companies we started or we own and not like, oh, I'm a good investor in the public stock market.”

“Why I think that follow your passion is terrible advice and what you should do instead.”

“And so if you find evidence where you suffer pain willingly, That's probably a very good signal. You are so drawn to doing it that you're even willing to endure the hardships that come along the way. That is ultimately what you're looking for.”

“And we both invested in Hone Health, which is now, you know, over nine figures run rate.”

“Part of making it grow is the product, but that's only a small part. Minority percentage, not more than 50%. I would say more closer to 15% than 50. Most of your time is gonna be spent on building the team, managing the team, and working on core growth and sal…”

“I don't need to pick an industry I love, or a product I love. I need to pick a sales motion that I love. Because guess what? Like, if you have a product, Doesn't matter what the niche is. If it's grown via enterprise sales, most of your time is going to be spe…”

“You need all this generic cliche goddamn advice, because it's the equivalent of the pole to hold on to. If you don't have it, you're gonna go, you're just gonna get whiplashed by the world. You're just gonna constantly be whiplashed.”

“It's the blisters that decide whether you're gonna like it or not, much more so than the rewards.”

“I'm trying to figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of business where you have the success, but you don't have the, like, grind culture suffering mindset, right? Like the Goggins, Hormozzi, like, it's just about pain, and that's what it is, and you need t…”

“And I kind of, my prediction is that in the next, I don't know, 15 years, we're gonna have a ChatGPT moment for life extension, and that you're gonna get some breakthrough In this longevity and life extension that's gonna make it where it went from this, like,…”

“It's why I have a huge chunk of my net worth in Tesla right now is because that's obviously the biggest product in going to the biggest market in the world.”

“As an entrepreneur, if your life gets too comfortable, you lose your ability to spot problems. It's like comedians. When comedians get too rich, they fall off a cliff because they don't have relatable jokes anymore because their life is completely unrelatable …”

“If there was one company that I could kind of empty the tank of my life savings into, I would be pouring it into this, which means it's a contender for Sarah's list for me.”

“There's a long running joke, which is like in San Francisco, like it's one of the highest status. It's one of the highest status things you could have.”

“Yeah, I think it's sort of a, like long-term patience, as in you're not gonna give up, and you're gonna stay at it. I think short-term maniacal sense of urgency is, you know, on the task. So it's like patient with the mission and maniacal about the task is, is…”

“And I think the one big sign of one big source of waste in companies is when everybody wants to do their pet projects or everybody wants to do their generically good ideas, rather than the specifically effective ideas that are going to solve the current bottle…”

“What I've found is pretty effective is to address it in the call. So what I'll do is I'll address the trade-off. So I'll say, so here's what that means. By focusing on this, what that means is that this area, where we actually know how to improve it, and we ha…”

“Intensity, concentration, the ability to be maximally present, these are not just kind of nice, nice to have, like, soft things. They're hard skills, and you actually need to practice them and get better at them, and like what you're saying is, if it's a skill…”

“Cause if it is a big problem, then I'll just keep showing up and saying, okay, now what? Okay. Now what? And okay. And if you just do that for three days, The, like, all of the excuses get squeezed away is what I found. Like, all the excuses suddenly disappear…”

“You wanna sell things ideally that people don't have extreme, like, preference and emotional attachment to because you're, the bar for delivery is so much higher than it is for boring things that they don't really care about.”

“The book will probably have more, you know, it's not going to be fully sufficient, but if you can't do, if you can't give a good talk, you probably don't have a good book.”

“My entry level sales type of job would have made me like twenty million dollars if I held. And that was then it's probably doubled since then.”

“The portfolio of the companies where I own either majority or just a huge chunk is probably close to a hundred million in revenue now, and I think it's seventy-five million in revenue”

“I think I'm just gonna be doing creative projects. I think I'm gonna be writing books, and making movies, and doing this, doing content, and I'm gonna just be all in as a creative person, and like, business will be secondary to me.”

“In your twenties, if you're smart and ambitious, just prioritize getting around the smartest and most ambitious people you can, that you like to hang out with, right? You gotta like them too. Prioritize things that sound more interesting rather than things tha…”

“It's very hard to predict if you're gonna get your first business idea to work, or get rich when you're 24 years old. But if you commit and you're going to iterate and you're going to be good at learning, you will probably get there. You flip your odds from li…”

“People think that entrepreneurs take a lot of risk. But I actually think that you are a good example of what most entrepreneurs really do, which is they're actual risk minimizers. It's like, how do I win while taking the least amount of risk necessary to win?”

“Took, it takes me like 15 months to love a baby. I care for the baby before then. I wish the baby well. I want no harm to be done to the baby, but do I crave, like, holding and touching and, like, you know, doing the things my wife loves about a baby?”

“What I actually think is useful, take the week off before birth to, like, do little stuff around the house, just be there, be a calming presence, and like, kind of like, I don't know, take the load of everyday life off of, you know, your partner before birth. …”

“Aaron Sorkin, who wrote, you know, West wing and the social network, like this great, you know, Hollywood script writer or whatever, when he's writing a script, he takes eight showers a day.”

“And so I decided to create this series called One Hour Books, and the idea is, can I create books that are, you know, if you read it, it's a life-changing book, but you can read it in one hour, a single sitting.”

“If I had to bet this is going to be the most successful thing you've ever done, because my instinct, and I don't want to do this right now, but is to like, oh, can you just tell me all of the things that you learned from Rick Rubin and all these people?”

“People will rise to your assumption if they don't have a strong assumption about themselves and kids don't have strong assumptions about themselves yet. And so you can give them a stronger frame that they will live up to.”

“The bottleneck of any business is the psychology of the founder.”

“And so, you define that at the beginning, and that's how you prevent the like, I threw the ball, there's seven people there, and somehow, when there's seven people, the ball hits the floor more often than it did when there was one. Which is like the common dyn…”

“I would have started five more companies if I didn't have people problems.”

“A one-minute plan essentially creating, like, a one-pager where the employee writes what they think they should focus on and what they're going to do, and there's, like, a revision process where the manager basically gives some feedback, and then the employee …”

“Your mood is essentially, you want the Louis Vuitton of moods. You want it to be so premium. Like, for somebody to affect your mood, to take your mood away from you it should come with a very, very high price, and so I started to reframe, like, when something …”

“Those chips are not gonna kill you, but being the guy who breaks his word to himself all the time, like, that actually will kill you. You know, you will let yourself down and not even trust yourself because you don't believe what you say.”

“What I did To go from broke to ended up making my first million at age 30 and then being worth thirty million dollars a few years later.”

“So you want to master one of those four money-making skills, and that's a path to millions. If you master two of them, that's a path to billions.”

“So if you want to be a tech founder, you need to move to San Francisco. If you want to make movies, you go to LA. Now it's not that you had to do it, but if you want to increase your odds and you want to go faster, that's what you would do because proximity is…”

“Especially whenever I was in the process of either raising money or selling my company, it was these very brief periods of time, maybe three weeks, four weeks, six, six weeks, where the value of my years of effort would swing by 50%, depending on how good I wa…”

“If it's a key asset that locks down, you know, a certain competitive advantage, don't quibble on price. In fact, come in over so that you make sure you secure that asset and you develop a reputation.”

“On Christmas Eve this last year, the Mexican president blocked all imports. So like, hey, that's cool. Our warehouse is in Mexico, and on Christmas Eve all imports are blocked with no notice and no, there's no other thing you could do at the port.”

“Three months later, I'm like looking at the P&L, our margin has dropped to three percent. We have a three percent EBITDA margin, five percent or something like that, and you know, I want it to be 15 or 20%, and I'm like, ah, how do we fix this? And it's like, …”

“There's another guy that's got this story where he his USB or his hard drive, his Bitcoin hard drive was in the landfill. And he was trying to search for it. They wouldn't let him. He's like, I will buy the whole landfill. And he tried to purchase the landfill…”

“The team bus rides, the locker room, the it's all of the like camaraderie stuff that happens along the way. It's like the kind of the buildup is the stuff that they miss the most. And I think there's that for entrepreneurship too. I think there's that, that's …”

“I think any idea that ends with that, like genuinely you would be like, ha, like if that's your genuine field to end of it, there's a lot of potential in those types of ideas.”

“I think they do extremely well. I think they're like north of a hundred million in revenue in targeting the American market.”

“If you break your speed bar in one area, you realize that like in all areas, speed is negotiable, that you can change the rate at which something's going to happen in your business or in your personal life.”

“What's something you could give a one-hour talk on right now unprepared? Like, you just know it so well, you spent so much time on it, that if I gave you know, 45 minutes to an hour, you could actually, like, give me a crash course in this thing, because you h…”

“My buddy James career has this great phrase. He goes, you want to turn yourself into an API. And what he means by that, he goes, you know, like a website has an API, which basically says, here's what I can offer you. I can give you location data. So you ping m…”