Shaan Puri
545 statements across 170 episodes · 259 bullish · 49 bearish · 5 people on the record · first statement Mar 13, 2020 by Shaan Puri · said 73 times in 19 episodes since 2021 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Shaan Puri's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Sam Parr (47), Ben Wilson (11), Jason Yanowitz (7), Andrew Wilkinson (5), Val Katayev (2), Greg Isenberg (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2024 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- He Turned A $300/Mo Gardening Side Hustle Into $45 Million/Year | Kevin Espiritu Interview
- EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea | Brett Adcock Interview
- He Got Fired By His DAD… So He Built a $60M/yr Empire ft. Craig Fuller
- 25 Years Of Founder WISDOM In 55 Minutes (ft. Jason Fried)
- How This Ex-Navy SEAL Turned A Book Into A $1M+ Empire | Jack Carr Interview
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 9 mentions in 1 episode
2022 30 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- Controversial Business Lessons From Napoleon, Edison, & Hitler (#369)
- Brainstorming The Best Business Ideas To Start In 2022 with Noah Kagan
- Saas Companies that Anyone Can Start with Rob Walling
- $1M By 19, $100M+ By 35 -- Here's How He Did It
- Ryan Holiday Reveals How Much Best Selling Authors Make, Crazy Peter Thiel Stories & More (#370)
- Behind The Scenes Of The Billionaires' Mastermind (TIGER 21) | Michael Sonnenfeldt Interview
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 23 mentions in 4 episodes 6 per episode
- MFM #169: How One Man Has Built 5, Billion Dollar Companies
- Andrew Wilkinson On The Secretive Billionaire Who Acquired Burger King | My First Million #185
- How to Network with Billionaires with Andrew Wilkinson | My First Million Ep. #174
- The Story of Dark Web Kingpin Ross Ulbricht
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
Everything said about Shaan Puri, oldest first
Mar 13, 2020 positive
Shaan Puri's viral charity campaign hit five million signups in two weeks
“We made a story, a website that was just telling a story of this boy, John Bosco with no water. And then we said, can we get this to go viral? And so we did the same thing. Import. Import emails, get people to send the story to their friends and raise money fo…”
Mar 13, 2020 neutral
Mar 13, 2020 positive
Renaming products with sophisticated language enables businesses to command higher prices
“We realized that if we just described things better or differently with better words people would buy more and we could charge more because people wanted to have sushi that was more sophisticated. So when we called it, you know, whatever you know, Atlantic sal…”
Apr 3, 2020 negative
Apr 3, 2020 positive
Apr 3, 2020 neutral
Apr 3, 2020 positive
Apr 3, 2020 positive
Puri: Karat loaned $1M in six months with 40% annualized return
“They've loaned out a million dollars in the last six months. The average payback period is 45 days, so extremely fast payback. That, the APR is very high because of that, so even on a low APR, because of the fast payback, it annualizes at 40%, and now they're …”
Apr 3, 2020 neutral
Puri: Passed on Linear's early funding over enterprise security concerns
“I didn't end up, it was like a, it was a bit of a competitive round, and then I could have got in at the end, but I sort of, ah, cooled on it, because when I tried to bring it into our company, there was a lot of security concerns.”
Apr 3, 2020 positive
Puri: Unbundling Excel's calculation engine is a massive startup opportunity
“What Airtable did was Airtable took the part of Excel that's just rows of information, and they made that sexy. But what they didn't do is calculation. People use Excel for calculation and charting, and Airtable doesn't do that. So if you did the calculation a…”
Mar 3, 2021 positive
Puri: Pre-made proof of work beats traditional resume job applications
“This is like, this is, you know, like, it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally you get a job app. You put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do X and then some people apply. And then you're like, are you kind of squinting? You're like, do…”
Mar 3, 2021
Shaan Puri: Market selection matters more than execution excellence
“It's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game. Because if you pick the wrong game, even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path. But if you pick the right game to play…”
Mar 19, 2021 positive
Mar 19, 2021 negative
Mar 19, 2021
Shaan Puri: Articulating an unspoken consensus is the true secret to virality
“If you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them.”
Mar 24, 2021
Puri: Interviewers must break guests out of repetitive PR talking points
“More times than not, it's better to get somebody feeling loose and comfortable and laughing and talking about something that they're genuinely like something about themselves than them just showing up for their, you know, Eighth interview of the last week and …”
Mar 24, 2021 positive
Puri: Making content forces people to become more interesting
“Like make content. You'll learn a lot of shit, making content. You'll learn a lot about yourself. You'll learn a lot about what makes other people like resonate with something and not. And you have to like come up with interesting things to say, which means yo…”
Mar 26, 2021 positive
Mar 26, 2021 bullish
Mar 26, 2021
Mar 26, 2021
Mar 26, 2021
Mar 31, 2021 bullish
Mar 31, 2021 bullish
Mar 31, 2021 bearish
Shaan Puri estimates a less than 2% chance BitClout succeeds
“I would say in the long run, this working in the long run, I think there's like a less than two percent chance this works in the long run. If it does work, my 100,000 dollars is going to be worth tens of millions of dollars, but that's the long run.”
Mar 31, 2021 neutral
Mar 31, 2021 positive
Apr 5, 2021
Apr 5, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: Tech investors should place small initial bets then double down
“So what I've seen is in technology, The winners get really, really big. And so you kind of want to like play small bets initially and then follow on really hard. And like when you see something that actually works, be really bold in the way you approach it.”
Apr 5, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: Hiring friends works if they are competent and expectations are clear
“The saving grace for me has always been, I only have hired my competent friends and competent friends do two things. One is they perform. So you don't have this, you're not just hiring a buddy because you're your buddy. You're hiring this person because they'r…”
Apr 5, 2021
Shaan Puri plans to build a company to compound for 40 years
“My thirties are about building a family and then it's building a project I don't want to sell, which is basically like, I totally agree. How do I build my next thing? Same thing you said that this is something I want to do. I'm not doing it because it's the be…”
Apr 5, 2021
Apr 7, 2021
Puri: Prince Andrew fell asleep during startup pitch
“So he sits down on one of our couches and is just flanked by security guards. And I fire up the first slide on the big projector and I start talking and I see that he's asleep. He is passed out by the, before the first slide even starts. He has fallen asleep i…”
Apr 7, 2021 bullish
Puri: Market will see rise in mechanical AI and engineered pets
“I think that we will see more and more either genetically engineered pets or just straight up kind of like mechanical AI
Pets, because if you can get 60% of the benefits with zero percent of the work and maintenance, I think there's a whole class of people who…”
Apr 7, 2021 neutral
Shaan: Fear of permanent career blacklisting deters corporate bribery
“If I actually got caught doing this, I would basically not be able to have a career anymore. So you kind of have to pay me so much that I'm willing to risk the odds of me getting completely blacklisted from my profession where I've worked so hard to become a V…”
Apr 7, 2021 positive
Apr 7, 2021 neutral
Shaan Puri: Twitch leadership never asked for competitor intel post-acquisition
“When we got acquired, we had talked to five other companies while we got acquired. And for each of them, they're laying out their map, you know, how, what's their strategy, how they're going to win, how we fit into that strategy, you know, where they're strong…”
Apr 7, 2021 positive
Puri: Louis-Dreyfus turned Adidas around by offshoring, job cuts, and heavy marketing
“He basically is like, all right, we're doing three things. We're moving the factory to Asia. We're cutting the payroll. We're cutting jobs, cutting two thirds of the jobs in this company so we can get profitable. And lastly, we're going to take that money we w…”
Apr 21, 2021 neutral
Puri: Ryan Hoover was rejected by Monkey Inferno before founding Product Hunt
“Basically, Ryan was interviewing to come work at Monkey Inferno, where I was the CEO at the time. I was trying to recruit Ryan, because I loved his blog posts, and he was interviewing with us, and he got to the final interview and didn't make it.”
Apr 21, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri will focus on monetizing curiosity over operating companies
“I basically decided, all right, I want my life to be where I wake up and whatever I'm most curious about, I go do because I have a way to monetize my own curiosity. I have a way to monetize my own learnings. Okay, so how do I, that's what I've decided is my th…”
Apr 21, 2021 bullish
Apr 28, 2021
Shaan Puri: Mentorship requires asking specific advice and following up
“The way you actually do form a mentorship bond is you ask somebody for a specific situational piece of advice. So not just what should I do, but like, Hey, I'm debating between these two options. How would you think about this? Or here's how I'm thinking about…”
Apr 28, 2021
Apr 28, 2021 positive
Apr 30, 2021 bullish
May 13, 2021 positive
Puri achieved outsized returns at Twitch by avoiding the rat race
“So I've done a couple things since joining Twitch that I think allowed me to, I just like didn't do the rat race. And instead I made, I did, I just put a little effort into these like four or five other things that nobody else in the company does. And because …”
May 14, 2021 positive
May 14, 2021
May 14, 2021 bullish
May 26, 2021 bullish
Shaan Puri: Founders with moderate exits are the most dangerous entrepreneurs
“That entrepreneur who's done that is the most dangerous entrepreneur because they have enough money where the next thing they chase, they're going to go bigger. But they didn't get enough where they're just satisfied and going to go chill on the couch or on an…”
Jun 11, 2021
Jun 11, 2021
Jun 25, 2021 neutral
Puri: Most business operators and content creators rarely excel at both disciplines
“People are good at one of the, I know a bunch of amazing business people who don't want to or suck at creating content. And I know some great content people that I'm like, once I meet them, I'm like, oh, you've, this is what, this is your business. You've neve…”
Jun 25, 2021 neutral
Puri: Investors judge multi-company CEOs purely through outcome-based resulting bias
“It's like Elon can run Tesla and SpaceX and everyone's like, wow, he's amazing. And those businesses are amazing. And then Jack does the same thing with Twitter and square. And if Twitter's misses its earnings, it's like off with his head. How dare he, you kno…”
Jun 25, 2021 positive
Puri: Waist trainer business made $1M annual profit via YouTube search
“So she just created like the YouTube channel to be the answer to every search question about waist trainers on YouTube. And you can go, if you just go search waist trainers right now on YouTube, you'll find all her videos. And so all her sales just come just f…”
Jun 30, 2021 bullish
Jun 30, 2021 bullish
Jun 30, 2021 bullish
Jun 30, 2021
Jun 30, 2021 bullish
Jun 30, 2021 bullish
Jun 30, 2021 neutral
Jun 30, 2021 positive
Jul 9, 2021 bullish
Puri: Healthy vending machines can win via hospital and airport placements
“If you just take hospitals, And airports and things like that. Like they kind of, they're in sort of incented to have like another option and a kind of a better option, even just from optics point of view. And so I think you could do pretty well just by gettin…”
Jul 14, 2021 positive
Puri: A home is the only material luxury worth splurging on
“A yacht or like cars, those are like low use, high maintenance, whereas a house is like tremendously high use and actually quite low maintenance for most homes, because for, you know, they have a cleaning staff, they have like people that can come take care of…”
Jul 14, 2021 bullish
Jul 14, 2021
Jul 14, 2021
Michael Birch killed Shaan Puri's early crypto exchange over SEC fears
“Our idea lab was backed by this couple, Michael and Xochitl Birch. It's basically an individual couple who's, you know, independently very wealthy. And so he come, Michael comes by for lunch the next day. He's like, Hey, the lawyer, like our lawyer, Susan told…”
Jul 21, 2021 positive
Jul 29, 2021 positive
Aug 5, 2021 neutral
Puri: EdTech Fails by Fixing Coursework Instead of Credentials and Community
“The problem is that people don't choose to go to college for the classes. They don't choose to go to college for the information they go because they want the stamp and they want the social experience. And then they want, you know, the parents need that as an …”
Aug 5, 2021 bullish
Shaan Puri: Wants to invest in automated deepfake customer video software
“I want to invest in this company. I saw it. I haven't even had a chance to talk to them yet, but what they're doing is they basically made a version of deep fake that you can do for yourself. So you can thank customers personally for a purchase or for anything…”
Aug 12, 2021 neutral
Puri: One-million-person app waitlist converted only 10K to 20K active users
“At one point I had a million person waitlist for an app that we were building. And cause I had this viral video, blah, blah, blah, blah. So one million people on the list, by the time we actually went and hit them up, it's like, you know, I don't even remember…”
Aug 18, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: High-end virtual shooting ranges are an untapped business opportunity.
“So I was thinking somebody could probably build a high end version of this niche business, which is basically virtual shooting ranges. So you have a, either a screen, like a green screen or like a plasma, like a big flat screen TV. And then you give them like …”
Aug 18, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: Distributing wealth while alive creates vastly more impact than inheritances.
“And basically you hook up the people who have helped you, and it mattered to you, and you help their lives today, because why wait 40 years and let them have more discomfort or suffering along the way when you could, if you're trying to give to make an impact,…”
Sep 1, 2021 bullish
Puri: Synthetic data is riding megatrends in privacy and machine learning
“I'm like super bullish on this idea. And I love this. I love this. And especially now with machine learning, you need a lot of input data to make recommendation engines better. Well, how do you do that? How do you get more data? Well, you can simulate or creat…”
Sep 1, 2021
Puri: Answer vulnerability questions with endearing mistakes rather than damaging admissions
“You don't want to answer all questions accurately if it's going to make you look bad. So there's a way to answer something. There's a way to do the game, to play the game, but still look good in the process.”
Sep 8, 2021
Puri: Outsized Returns Require Making Non-Consensus Bets
“If everybody agrees it's a great investment, then the price is baked in, right? So ultimately, if you want to have any kind of outsized return, you have to be betting on something that not everybody is agreeing with you is a is a good investment.”
Sep 8, 2021 positive
Sep 8, 2021 positive
Puri: Strong skepticism toward a trend is a signal to lean in
“When I have this strong of an emotion, it's a signal to me that that's where I need to go lean in and learn. Now I don't go crazy with it. I will make small bets. I'll talk to people. I will be open-minded because I've felt this way many times before and been …”
Sep 16, 2021 positive
Sep 16, 2021 bullish
Sep 16, 2021 bullish
Sep 16, 2021
Shaan Puri: Money is essentially frozen blocks of time
“What we're doing is we're basically saying, look, money has always been like a frozen block of time, right? I go do a bunch of work, I put in time, I get money. I go give that money to a restaurant, I say, hey, thaw this frozen block of time out, and you go wo…”
Sep 16, 2021 bullish
Sep 29, 2021
Sep 29, 2021
Sep 29, 2021 negative
Sep 29, 2021 negative
Oct 5, 2021 positive
Puri: Interviewing at competitors is an effective competitive intelligence tactic
“Go interview at a competitor's company to find out their data, because during the interview process, you'll find out a lot about the company's strategy, about their numbers, things like that, and that's one way to get competitive intel that I've heard some peo…”
Oct 5, 2021 positive
Puri: Copy early startup marketing instead of mature brands' current ads
“And so if you wanted to be the next them, don't copy what they say now, now that they have a ton of brand equity and that they have a sales force and all these other things, go copy what they did at the beginning. When they had zero brand awareness, and they h…”
Oct 22, 2021 positive
Puri: Scaling From Zero to $10M Is Harder Than Reaching $100M
“I think that once you can get a business to ten million dollars, I think the odds of you being able to get it to 50 or a hundred are quite high. I think zero to 10 is a lot harder or more likely to round down to zero than 10 will stay at 10.”
Oct 22, 2021
Puri: A Viral Social Hook Requires a Frame, Curiosity Gap, and Promise
“It has all three elements, right? So it has the, what I call the frame. I bought it for 300 K and I've sold thirty five million, so that's the wow factor. Why should I pay attention to this and why do I stop scrolling, right? So you have a scroll stopping Numb…”
Oct 22, 2021 positive
Puri: The Best Founders to Back Had Modest Initial Exits
“My favorite people to fund are people who have created a company and like made all the mistakes, ended up with a small win where they got a taste of winning, but you know, not, not, not enough to go retire on a yacht because the next time they start, they're l…”
Oct 22, 2021 neutral
Oct 27, 2021 positive
Oct 27, 2021 positive
Oct 27, 2021
Oct 27, 2021 bearish
Oct 29, 2021 positive
Oct 29, 2021 positive
Nov 5, 2021
Nov 5, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: High Execution Intensity Forces Teams to Find Optimal Strategies
“When you put a nine, nine or a nine and a half intensity, you kind of like want to figure out the right plan, right? It's like, if I'm going to put in this intensity, it better be on the right thing and your brain will solve the which path should I choose prob…”
Nov 11, 2021
Nov 11, 2021 positive
Nov 11, 2021 neutral
Nov 11, 2021
Puri: One memorable public creation builds instant, lasting trust
“In a world where it's so noisy, there's so many people. If you do one memorable thing that people respect and like It's like, that's the shortcut in their brain that says, okay, I like this person. Yeah, I trust this person. Yeah, they're cool.”
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Shaan Puri: Conferences are worth it for one great idea and one person
“I kind of have in my head. I'm here to learn one thing. Like I want to have one great idea. Like a truly great idea. Maybe it's a tactic, a marketing idea, a realization of something I need to change or a new business idea, a new, whatever. So one great idea i…”
Nov 15, 2021 negative
Nov 19, 2021 bullish
Puri: Cryptocurrency likely makes up over 50% of his total net worth
“Probably, yeah, probably, because, you know, I basically started it, my goal was to put in 25%, I think, put, I put 20 in, and then it started going up so much, I just, I stopped at 20, and you know, I should have just gone all in, I should have gone all in li…”
Nov 19, 2021 neutral
Puri: Creators only raise VC funds when famous but not yet rich
“When I was famous but not rich, it was great to raise a fund, and that was the only way I could invest a bunch of money. But now I'm rich and famous, and so I don't need your money anymore, because it comes with problems, right? Like it comes with work and eff…”
Nov 23, 2021 bullish
Nov 30, 2021 bullish
Nov 30, 2021 neutral
Puri: Swinging and drug use are common among successful Silicon Valley elites
“I didn't know how common that was like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs like, you know, my either micro dosing or normal dosing of certain drugs.”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Nov 30, 2021
Puri: Publicly declaring goals enforces consistency through the fear of humiliation
“I took an approach, which was like, I wanted to leave myself no outs. So I took a like burn the boat strategy. So first I talked about it publicly. And I talked about it publicly because if I talk about it publicly, I'm going to be humiliated if you know, I'd …”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Puri: You cannot feel grateful and stressed or angry at the same time
“Basically the more grateful you are, the less stressed you are. You cannot be grateful and stressed at the same time. You cannot be grateful and afraid at the same time. You cannot be grateful and angry at the same time. So if you just want to not be any of th…”
Nov 30, 2021
Puri: Founders must build operational buffer during critical business periods
“Sometimes you got to create space because you just want to be available. You want to have buffer. You don't want to be fully booked in case you need to do it. Maybe you have an idea that something you could do to drive sales or in this case, What if shit absol…”
Nov 30, 2021
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Puri: Craig Clemens' holding company Golden Hippo generates over $100M in sales
“Cause he's got golden hippo. They've sold like over, you know, I think he sold over a 1,000,000,001 billion dollars worth of product in his lifetime. And golden hippo will do, you know, over a hundred million dollars in sales”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Puri: Entrepreneurial wealth is 'slowly then suddenly,' judge outcomes over a decade
“If you take the non-traditional path, you go try to be a content creator, entrepreneur, or something else. It's gonna be this slowly then suddenly path, and don't, if you're 22, don't count your earnings at 22 or 23 or 24. You're gonna check the scoreboard at …”
Nov 30, 2021 positive
Puri: Use sarcastic positive reframing to protect your mood from inconveniences
“It's such a hack, dude. It's such a hack to just, instead of just letting this little inconvenience, this little thing that went wrong, F up your mood, just like rewire the response to something that's almost, it's like sarcastic, but it actually becomes real …”
Nov 30, 2021
Dec 7, 2021
Puri: Living within four minutes of friends changes relationship frequency
“This is my rule with friends and family also, which is you want to live so close to your best friends or family that you could go unplanned to their house. Like you don't need to pack a bag and think about, okay, well then how will I get, what, you know, when …”
Dec 15, 2021
Puri: High-stakes performance relies on mental state priming over last-minute cramming
“The performance is gonna be based on all the hard work I've done over a decade about whatever I'm doing. So I don't try to like cram for the exam. I just try to put myself in the right state of mind. So I just performed the way that the things I already know h…”
Dec 15, 2021
Shaan Puri dedicates 80% of his media time to creating, 20% consuming
“What I do is, like, I know it's very addictive to just sit there and scroll the feeds. I do it from time to time, but I try to say, alright, I need to be creating 80% of the content. I'll consume 20%, but of my time that I'm thinking about content, that's, lik…”
Dec 15, 2021 neutral
Puri: Hasan Minhaj succeeds through intense craftsmanship rather than natural humor
“You seem to me like somebody who isn't the naturalist, naturally isn't the funniest guy. Like, some comedians, you just see it, you're like, dude, they could just be doing this at their dinner room, dinner table, and they're just probably slaying whatever room…”
Dec 15, 2021
Dec 15, 2021 negative
Minhaj: Anonymous online trolls can impose real economic sanctions on public figures
“For the first time in history,
There are people that stand on stage that stand on the stage of business or life or comedy or art, and they use their actual government name and then pseudonymous trolls who don't use their government name can launch digital dron…”
Dec 15, 2021
Dec 15, 2021 neutral
Dec 15, 2021
Dec 15, 2021
Puri hired a personal chef before he could strictly afford it
“In the things that matter, like I hired a personal chef. That's something that really the only, like, the old true wealthy typically do. I was like, no, I, this matters to me. I want, this is the number one want I have. I think it helps me and my family be hea…”
Dec 15, 2021
Puri: Digital accountability requires a consistent identity, not a real legal name
“It doesn't matter if that name was Mr. Gubapel or it was Hasan. It doesn't really matter what's a real name. It's wherever you're, whatever you're gonna make accountable, you're gonna say, hey, if you like me, if you trust me, put my reputation on this name. A…”
Dec 15, 2021 neutral
Dec 15, 2021 positive
Puri: Entertainers should optimize their careers like Silicon Valley product funnels
“Just like any product in Silicon Valley, you create a funnel. Top of funnel is new fans, new eyeballs. How are you gonna go get them? You need a strategy. Middle of the funnel. How are you gonna get them to get their first taste of you, their first real experi…”
Dec 15, 2021
Dec 17, 2021 positive
Dec 17, 2021 positive
Dec 21, 2021
Jan 4, 2022
Jan 4, 2022
Puri: Haters react negatively because success reminds them of failure
“You'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure, and they're not focused on your success, they're focused on their failure, your success has reminded them of their failure, or your abundance has reminded them of their…”
Jan 4, 2022 neutral
Jan 4, 2022 bullish
Jan 4, 2022 bullish
Puri: Crypto talent influx will inevitably create real use cases
“There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases. And actually it's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this…”
Jan 4, 2022 positive
Jan 4, 2022 bullish
Jan 28, 2022 bearish
Puri: Group Video Apps Boom With Carless Teens But Suffer College Churn
“There's a sweet spot in age where they have friends, but they don't have a car. And so they come home and they're like trapped. So they just want to group. They'll just like go home, go to the room and they'll just call their friend for like six hours straight…”
Jan 28, 2022 neutral
Jan 28, 2022 neutral
Puri: People Pursuing Mindfulness and Stoicism Are Usually Still Seeking Calmness
“Usually when I find people who are gravitating towards things like meditation and stoicism and you know, micro dosing psychedelics, they feel like they're still on the search for that calmness. He felt like he found the calmness, and that was kind of the disti…”
Mar 8, 2022 neutral
Luck determines the magnitude of founder success, not the baseline probability
“I think luck plays a part in the magnitude of the success, but not the probability of success. So I think all of them, the probability of success for them is all at 90 plus percent. They would all be good at what they do, Positive impact, you know, make millio…”
Mar 22, 2022 positive
Mar 22, 2022 bullish
Puri: Endpoint 3D printing will eventually replace global factory supply chains
“Realizing that that's not going to be the way that's not going to be the way forever. And like this kind of like three D printing, you know, like sort of basically manufacturing just in time at the end point and cutting out a whole bunch of these like factorie…”
Mar 26, 2022 positive
Mar 26, 2022 bullish
Mar 31, 2022 positive
Apr 22, 2022 positive
Apr 22, 2022 positive
Shaan Puri: I optimize for enjoyment rather than enterprise scale
“I'm just optimizing for like a different thing rather than a bigness. I'm optimizing for like, you know, my own enjoyment. And so that's why I'm not going after that. So I need things that are sufficiently interesting so that I'm interested and big enough. So …”
Apr 22, 2022 positive
Apr 22, 2022
Jun 14, 2022 bullish
Podcast Clipping Agency Founded via Contest Hits $1 Million in Revenue
“The first, first winner, they Had a few million views on their like TikTok channel or whatever, and we paid them the five grand, you know, prize for our thing, but they've actually turned that into a business for other podcasts and that business will do like a…”
Jul 19, 2022 positive
Jul 19, 2022 positive
Sam Parr: Immigrant founders succeed because foundational hardships reframe business risk
“What you notice talking to these people and a lot of you and I are friends with a lot of immigrant entrepreneurs or children of immigrant grants and their entrepreneurs. And you like, I often wonder, I'm like, how are these people succeeding when there's. It's…”
Jul 19, 2022
Shaan Puri: Two conversation tests reveal if someone is truly fulfilled
“There's two tests. One is what percent of a conversation do you talk about yourself? Versus you ask questions or interested or curious about other things, other people, other things. And then the second is when you talk about yourself, what percent is talking …”
Jul 28, 2022 bullish
A membership-based basic apparel model beats 99 percent of e-commerce ideas
“If I was going to work in e-commerce, I think an idea like this is a better idea than 99% of e-commerce ideas. Because I think you'll end up with subscription revenue. I think you're differentiated and I think you appeal to the lowest common denominator.”
Jul 28, 2022 positive
Aug 31, 2022 bullish
Shaan Puri: Cheap Mobile Data Created A Golden Cohort Of Indian Startups
“Like now is a, it's a golden cohort of companies. Cause they're all riding the back of this thing where one company basically gave away for the internet essentially a dirt dirt cheap cost cheaper than in America. So a lot of people got online.”
Aug 31, 2022 negative
Shaan Puri: Blindly Copying Smart Investors Leads To Terrible Decisions
“My, some of my worst investments came from, well, all these other smart people are doing it and I don't know why they did it. I don't know if they're actually smart. I don't know if they you know, what their assumptions are, what their context is, what they ca…”
Aug 31, 2022
Shaan Puri: Founders Must Explain Their Bottom-Up Unit Economics
“So that's what I'm always looking for with founders is
Can you, from a bottoms up way, explain how the money machine of your business works?
I put a dollar in here, then it generates, you know, three dollars on the way out.
and I've done that at this scale.
A…”
Aug 31, 2022 bearish
Shaan Puri: Standalone Travel Extensions Fail Due To Infrequent Purchases
“I'm out as well.
like the guy, like the name, but I think that honey for travel, if it was going to be a thing, honey would do it.
And if it
You know, and I also think that the, and I think the reason they don't is because as a standalone thing, it's hard to…”
Aug 31, 2022 bearish
Aug 31, 2022 negative
Sep 23, 2022 positive
Sep 23, 2022 negative
Sep 23, 2022
Sep 23, 2022 positive
Puri: Starting the day with high-focus workouts eases daily cognitive strain
“If I could start the day with kind of like a, this, like, Very intense. Can't think about anything else type of workout, right? Like extreme focus is required. My mind is not going to be drifting around thinking about the to-do list and about this and about th…”
Sep 27, 2022
Puri: A $1M upfront bonus with clawback prevented him from leaving early
“I did a deal once where we got a million dollar signing bonus, but it was contingent that if we left before a year then we wouldn't get the million dollars, and I would, personally, I wouldn't get the million dollars if I left before a year, and I think if you…”
Sep 27, 2022 bullish
Shaan Puri: A $75K angel investment grew to $4M–$5M
“One of the startups that I invested in is just doing absolutely amazing. And I'm like, wow, that thing is going to make like our little investment. We put 75 K in. I was like, I think it's currently probably at like four or five million dollars value that 75 K…”
Oct 11, 2022 bullish
Oct 11, 2022
Oct 11, 2022 negative
Shaan: Professional branding is founder pride, unnecessary before 100k subscribers
“The brand will be important. I just don't think it's important for us to get our first 10,000 subscribers or even a 100,000 subscribers. So let's make a deal. If we can get to a 100,000 subscribers through our janky thing that will reward ourselves by investin…”
Oct 11, 2022
Puri: My First Million was started as an excuse to meet 50 SF founders
“When I originally started the pod, I literally wrote this in a doc. I've shared this before. I wrote most likely nobody's going to listen to this, but there's a hack really smart and interesting. Successful people are willing to go on a podcast. Even if it has…”
Oct 12, 2022
Oct 12, 2022 neutral
Puri: Audience building is a byproduct of pursuing professional curiosity
“Audience building and content was just a kind of a necessary means to an end or a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do, which was just be professionally curious, be able to wake up and just dive into the thing that's most on my mind that day and have no …”
Oct 12, 2022 neutral
Oct 12, 2022
Puri: Speaking from first person performs better than lecturing audiences
“It's much more powerful when you're like, you know I was feeling this way or I was going through this. I had this experience and it made me think this, but what I need to do differently is I need to do this. It's a much more, I think in general, it's good for …”
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Puri: Companies should use personal brands; creators should use corporate brands
“I think if you're a company, you should be using individual faces to grow. You'll go, you'll grow faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow like a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella, mostly because you can't ever sell you. S…”
Oct 12, 2022 negative
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Puri: Named Milk Road independently from himself to enable future sale
“When I created the milk road, it's intentionally not called Sean's crypto newsletter, which actually would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the Sean franchise... But instead I called it the milk road b…”
Oct 12, 2022 positive
Oct 12, 2022 neutral
Oct 12, 2022 negative
Oct 13, 2022 neutral
Puri: Passed on virtual brand startup over platform ban risks
“I didn't end up investing because I was like, I don't know where this goes. Like, this is, I feel like this could just get, like, banned or blocked in 1:02, but, like it was a fascinating idea, and that guy was really talented who was doing it.”
Oct 13, 2022 negative
Shaan Puri: Public revenue sharing is disadvantageous once businesses make substantial money
“I think you should privately with a group of trusted people share the, your numbers itself, but to publicly for everybody share how much you make, I think only is, is, is in your interest when you're not making that much, but it's growing. Then once you're mak…”
Oct 13, 2022 positive
Oct 13, 2022 bullish
Shaan Puri: Joining Stripe as an early employee would have yielded $10M-$30M
“I applied to Stripe, and I applied to a place called Monkey Inferno. Stripe, everybody knows, turned into, like, you know, whatever, a hundred billion dollar company. I would have been, like, employee, I don't know, like, 35, 40 at the time, so it would have b…”
Oct 13, 2022 positive
Shaan Puri: Co-hosts should react big and sell each other's jokes
“There are several things like that where you got to kind of sell the other person's thing and it's not fake. It's just like be expressive, laugh hard, react big. That stuff works when it comes to content and people are very shelled up about that sort of thing.”
Oct 13, 2022 positive
Shaan Puri: Internet personalities must amplify eccentricities instead of fitting in
“Most people are basically taking their own little volume knob and turning it down all the time because they want to fit in. And so the best thing you could do if you want to be a personality on the internet is like, you can't have that. I'm trying to fit in, t…”
Oct 18, 2022 positive
Puri: AI simulations of deceased people will be a net positive
“To me, this is an extension of that, which is like, now it's going to be somewhat interactive that you can kind of interact with these people or hear them talk about new things. And you know that it's not like the real thing, but it's, you know, there's a blac…”
Nov 1, 2022
Nov 1, 2022 bullish
Nov 1, 2022 positive
Shaan Puri: Willingness to Lose Money Signals What You Truly Want to Build
“I kind of want to go look at like what's something I would be willing to lose money doing because it's that fun to me or that intriguing to me because I think that that's probably a better signal of like what I really want to do and therefore we'll take an int…”
Nov 1, 2022 positive
Nov 17, 2022 negative
Dec 17, 2022 positive
Dec 17, 2022
Dec 17, 2022 bullish
Puri Predicts His Retained Milk Road Equity Will Surge In Value
“And they're people that I thought if I give them, you know, this company and I own, I still own a minority stake in it, that minority stake in five years is going to be worth a lot because I believe in these guys and what they've done.”
Dec 17, 2022
Dec 29, 2022 bearish
Feb 2, 2023
Puri: Networking with ambitious teenagers beats constantly networking upward
“Everybody wants to sort of climb up. They're like, oh, how do I meet the person who's done more than me, or is more successful than me, has more money than me, whatever, and they're focused constantly on, like, reaching up and trying to, like, pull themselves …”
Feb 10, 2023 positive
Feb 10, 2023 bullish
Shaan Puri: Invested $250,000 in Meta stock after the 2022 crash
“So I took I don't know, 250,000 dollars, like, I don't know, three or four months ago, and I bought meta because I was like, why is everybody down on meta? And I was like, did they forget the number one rule? You don't bet against Zuck.”
Mar 9, 2023
Mar 9, 2023
Puri: Business copycats fail because they replicate the surface, not the engine
“What I think people get wrong when they try to copy a business is that they only see the top, the five percent and they're like, okay, I'm going to copy that. But they don't know what goes on underneath. They don't know that basically the uncopyable thing is t…”
Mar 9, 2023 positive
Apr 25, 2023 positive
Apr 25, 2023 neutral
Shaan Puri: Holding company deal cadence is painfully slow for founders
“Having said that is probably the type of business where You make one good decision, one good deal a year or two good deals a year. And that was a great year. And that I think that speed is just very hard for most entrepreneurial people to go at.”
May 12, 2023
Puri: Podcasters should build a cult, not a community
“I think for a podcast, you don't really want to build a community as such. You want to build a cult. So, so basically you're like, what is it that we believe that not everybody believes, and let's put that on blast, and then a bunch of other people who believe…”
May 12, 2023
May 16, 2023 positive
Jun 20, 2023 neutral
Jul 4, 2023 positive
How Taylor Offer moved into Logan Paul's building to secure partnership
“So he hunts down, he finds a building, moves across the country, moves into the building, and he knows that they like to work out. So he starts just working out twice a day. He's like, this increases my odds of crossing paths with them. And they do cross paths…”
Jul 4, 2023
Jul 4, 2023
Puri: 'Intensity is the strategy' matters more than secret business formulas
“The way I say it is, intensity is the strategy. Most people want the magic strategy, the magic formula. But unfortunately, the hard thing to understand is actually intensity is the strategy. Most of the time, the strategy is pretty obvious. It's pretty cut and…”
Jul 4, 2023
Jul 4, 2023
Puri: Choosing what to work on matters more than hard work
“What you work on, the thing you actually choose to do, And who you work with will make a far bigger impact in your trajectory than just hard work. In fact, there is hard work does help, but it's maybe the fifth or sixth most important factor.”
Jul 4, 2023
Puri: Spend your first career decade working with elite talent
“The first 10 years of your career, you probably don't even know what a fat pitch looks like, even if it was to hit you in the face. So my advice for most people is the first 10 years, just go work with the smartest, highest energy, most resourceful people you …”
Jul 4, 2023 positive
How to get a mentor: ask advice, take action, follow up
“You want to find somebody who's already done it. You want to ask them on a specific question... Then whatever they say, you go take massive action on it. And then you follow up, you say, Hey, you told me that thing. Here's how, here's what happened. You know, …”
Jul 4, 2023 positive
Puri: If wealth were redistributed, it would return to the rich
“The rich aren't just lucky. So pretend we took all the money that existed and we redistributed it out. Everybody got the same, you know, let's say a 100,000 dollars to start with. 10 years later, I think that most of the rich people would be rich again because…”
Sep 4, 2023 positive
Sep 4, 2023 positive
Shaan Puri: 90% of persistent founders succeed over a 15-year arc
“It worked, in the end it worked, right, the 15 year arc, You get like a, then the odds flip from like, 90% of new businesses fail to actually like, 90% of you guys will succeed if you actually enjoy this enough, where you'll keep doing this even though you hav…”
Sep 4, 2023 positive
Puri: Best test of a project is whether you would regret failing
“The best test of a project is basically, would we regret doing it if it didn't work? Like, obviously we don't want it not to work, and we might be upset if it didn't work, but like, would we actually regret doing it if it didn't work? Because then it's like, o…”
Sep 4, 2023
Samir Chaudry: Strong co-host dynamic frees podcasts from guest reliance
“When you're building a show that's guest dependent Or all about the guest bookings. It's like some people will look at this and be like, I don't know who that is, so I'm not going to click on it. Some people will give it a chance because they trust you. But re…”
Sep 4, 2023
Puri: Creators should sell merchandise at cost unless profits are substantial
“My rule is like the Tim Ferriss rule is basically, if you're not going to make a ton of money on it should be free, or it should be like as, just sell it at cost, but like, and do like a limited run, so that it's more interesting. And just only, like, if you'r…”
Sep 4, 2023
Puri: Almost No High-Profile Creator Operates Solo Without a Key Partner
“Like there's a lot of popular, popular people, but almost all of them are not, nobody's solo. Everyone's got some kind of a team. And usually they have, like, their confidant, the person who's in the bunker with them, figuring things out, compliments them, doe…”
Sep 5, 2023 negative
Sep 5, 2023 positive
Shaan Puri: Entrepreneurs should build modern franchises in vacant church sanctuaries
“The big version of this idea is figure out how you're going to replace the value that churches gave people, but you can do it in a new way. And so like, for example, could you create a new brand in these same venues that's around, I don't know, like manifestat…”
Sep 5, 2023 positive
Shaan Puri outlines the 'import/export' framework for B2B startup ideation
“My import framework and export framework is if you're at a company and you wish something, you're like, dude, we would totally pay for this. That's a business idea you would want to import. You're better off going and starting that business. Cause it's probabl…”
Sep 5, 2023 positive
Shaan Puri outlines Emmett Shear's four-part one-on-one meeting framework
“You can come in and you can say one of three things. You can be like, Hey, I'm doing this. FYI. You know, here's my decision. FYI. Here's my, the second one is here's my, here's what I think we should do. Do I have your approval? Right? Maybe it's very risky. …”
Sep 5, 2023 positive
Puri: A 'Yelp for VCs' could solve chicken-and-egg data problems via brute-force outreach
“I think the Startup community is so insulated that you could actually overcome the chicken and egg problem through brute force. Cause there's not that many investors and you could find, you can quickly see who's worked with them just by looking at their portfo…”
Sep 7, 2023 neutral
Sep 7, 2023 positive
Sep 7, 2023 bullish
Sep 7, 2023 positive
Puri: Six viral tweets drove most of my first 400K followers
“I basically had like six viral tweets that grew me to like almost 400,000 followers. It was literally just six tweets, basically. The bulk of the growth. It's like the clubhouse one, the metaverse one, this one about Elon Musk, this other one.”
Sep 19, 2023 positive
Puri: My business goal is maximizing personal lifestyle, not world impact
“You said like, if you want to have maximum impact on the world, that is not my goal. And so it's very easy for me to just be like, oh, cool. I can rule that out. I'm trying to have the best lifestyle that I could have. That is my selfish and very transparent g…”
Sep 21, 2023 positive
Sep 21, 2023
Shaan: Creators must choose between selling consumables or collectibles
“If you're Logan Paul or you're Mr. Beast, you make consumables. Think prime energy drink. It's a consumable. I'm selling this to you. You're going to drink it, use it, whatever. And he goes Mr. Beast chocolate. He's going to, or even Mr. Beast merch his t-shir…”
Sep 21, 2023 bearish
Puri doubts Clear's expansion into stadium biometric verification
“I'm not sure I'm a believer in the rest of that vision, because like, I don't care like, the amount of effort it would take for the, you're at a ball game, and you want to buy a beer, and now each beer vendor is going to buy hardware, To scan my retinas and I …”
Sep 21, 2023
Shaan Puri: Viral product growth is passive, not intentional word-of-mouth recommendation
“Products that grow virally are not products that succeed through word of mouth. Like if you talk to a normal person, oh yeah, it's spread virally. People used to go tell their friends because they loved it so much. No, no, no. That's called word of mouth. Vira…”
Sep 22, 2023
Sep 22, 2023
Sep 22, 2023
Puri: Daily systems matter vastly more than motivational speeches
“I'm usually not believe it or not that big of a believer in like the effect of the pregame or halftime speech. Like that seems to be like probably overrated in terms of what a coach can do and vastly underrated is the systems and like habits and standards that…”
Oct 10, 2023 positive
Oct 10, 2023
Puri: Rich people email like texts, mega-rich email like letters
“So basically what I realized is that rich people and busy people treat email like texting. So their email is like lowercase on their phone, one line, totally fine. That's like their normal way of emailing. And then Mega rich people treat email like it's letter…”
Oct 10, 2023 positive
Puri: Paid work tests assess talent better than traditional interviews
“I'll spend three, four hours creating a paid test, so I create a doc that's, here's a brief, and I'll say, I'm gonna pay you, and depending on the role, it might be 200 bucks, it might be 2000 dollars. I'll pay you to spend a day on this because I want to see …”
Oct 10, 2023 neutral
Puri: Every company relies on two or three load-bearing people
“My experience is that every company there's like, you can look around the room and there's two or three people inevitably in every single company who like, they just have the team on their back. And you're just, you just look at them and you think, man, if we …”
Oct 10, 2023
Puri: Building a small business is just as hard as building big
“A big business and a small business both take the same amount of time. Why would you choose a small business? And that to me was the right advice for me for who I was. That's not the right advice for everybody, but like somebody out there needs to hear that ri…”
Oct 10, 2023
Puri: Great hires prove their excellence within three to four weeks
“The general rule is that the best people I've ever hired, it's pretty obvious within three, four weeks that they're amazing and that they just stay amazing. And of the people that were late bloomers, the key there was just the only consistent pattern I found w…”
Oct 10, 2023 positive
Oct 12, 2023 bullish
Puri: Deepfake detection and takedown services will become a no-brainer business
“So, so protection, so the takedown and protection and detection and monitoring service for all these celebrities to say, Hey, we are scouring the web to make sure your face is not showing up in Deep fake porn or in ads that you're not actually endorsing and th…”
Oct 12, 2023 bullish
Oct 12, 2023
Shaan Puri: Deepfake startups must prioritize rights biz dev over tech
“This is not a tech problem really right now. It's actually a rights problem. So what somebody needs to do, the move here is not to go all in on product, but to go all in on biz dev, which is a total narrative violation. Nobody says, hey, go all in on biz dev, …”
Oct 12, 2023
Puri: Startup ideas come from commercializing big tech's internal tools
“So my export business framework is basically, it's a way to generate business ideas, which is you look at any big company. And you see, what did they spend millions of dollars building a homebrew solution for something that works for them and made their life b…”
Oct 12, 2023 bullish
Shaan Puri: Celebrity commercial shoots will be replaced by API licenses
“And so, you know, in the future, when LeBron James does a McDonald's commercial, he's not gonna have to go fly to Georgia and film that commercial. They're just gonna set, put in an API request pay the money, Get the license to his face, his voice, his whateve…”
Oct 12, 2023 bullish
Oct 13, 2023 bullish
Oct 13, 2023 bullish
Oct 17, 2023
Pessimists are right more often, but optimists get rich
“Pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. And so one thing we'll see when we go through these, I think is that the times where we said, ah, it's not going to work. Those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate, right? Because pessimists nat…”
Oct 17, 2023 negative
Oct 17, 2023 positive
Strange and irrational user behavior often signals the biggest opportunities
“When you see that weird behavior that you don't understand, The thing is not to, the thing not to do is label it and write it off. It's to lean in and try to understand it. He's like, so I saw that people were like, why would you text out what you're eating ri…”
Oct 20, 2023 neutral
Puri: 'My First Million' was originally launched with Ishan Haque
“One thing that people don't know is this podcast was started actually not with me and Sam, me and you. I hit you up on Twitter DMs. And I saw that you were doing a, you were a podcast editor for somebody else I knew I think Corey or Angel List or something lik…”
Oct 20, 2023 positive
Puri: My First Million took three years to reach 100k downloads
“I remember thinking we're going to hit, let's get to a 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing, like per episode, I want a 100,000 downloads. By the end of the year. So it's like 12 months. Took me three years. So like, you know, now we do that, but…”
Oct 20, 2023 neutral
Oct 20, 2023 positive
Oct 20, 2023 positive
Puri: Early degenerate obsessions are the strongest startup hiring signal
“We noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate, like, obsession with something that wasn't, like, The thing your parents would reward you for where the school would reward you for. So for a lot of people was gaming. It's li…”
Oct 26, 2023 bullish
Oct 26, 2023 positive
Nov 24, 2023
Puri: Negotiators Must Leave Value on Table So Counterparties Want to Close
“You always want to kind of give back at the end where they feel like they have something to lose. He took it so far. He won the negotiations so badly that they had nothing to lose in the negotiation and closing the deal. They're like, well, what do I have to g…”
Nov 24, 2023
Shaan Puri: Always meet counterparts in person to close deals
“Never will I ever just stay at home when there's a deal to be closed. So this is the rule of just get on a plane. Go meet people in person. Don't do zoom calls, or if you're doing zoom calls, add in the in-person afterwards. The in-person meetings are so impor…”
Nov 24, 2023
Puri: Clean books and legitimate tax payments enable bigger exit valuations
“If you're building a company that you want to sell, you need to take some short-term pain of having clean, simple books that you pay, you know, legit taxes on, in order for you to have A big exit at the end because they're going to see a track record of multip…”
Nov 24, 2023
Puri: Founders should try selling for 30 days before shutting down
“Take 30 days and have, like, five conversations. Even if it doesn't go through, like, you owe it to yourself after, you know, nine months of hard work or a year of hard work and creativity on something. So never will I ever just shut it down.”
Nov 24, 2023
Shaan Puri: Leverage and Perceived Irrationality Beat Logic in Negotiations
“In any negotiation, it is not the side that has the better argument or the more, or more logic. It's whoever has more leverage, number one. And then within that, you're, that's like the substance. And then you have the style and the style is whoever's a little…”
Nov 24, 2023
Nov 24, 2023
Nov 24, 2023
Puri: Companies do not buy startups, individual executive champions do
“One of the most important things you got to figure out is who's actually buying this company. It's not a company that buys a company. There is a person in a company who needs something for their job. And you have to figure out who is that person and what is th…”
Nov 27, 2023 positive
Nov 27, 2023 neutral
Puri: Post-economic billionaires avoid talking business or investing at dinners
“If you want to stop making money the priority, hang out with people with a lot of money, because the conversation was not about business and money making and, you know, the markets or investing or hot deals, because these guys are, like, post-economic.”
Nov 30, 2023
Puri: We Sold The Milk Road to Quality Buyers Over Highest Bidder
“When we sold the milk road, I've said this before, but one of the reasons we sold to the guys we did was I really, really respected these guys. It was not the highest offer, but these were the highest quality people that we could sell to.”
Nov 30, 2023 negative
Puri: Strict Protocols for Your Final Marginal Decade Are Not Worth It
“The cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade, I personally was like, ah, not worth it. I'm going to find the eighty-twenty of like healthy things to do that are not so costly, like not so painful or hard to follow or like regi…”
Nov 30, 2023
Puri: I Create Annual One-Page Execution Plans For Every Business
“I make like a one page plan for what I'm trying to do next year, and it's basically like the big goal and then the breakdown of like how I'm going to do it. I have a method of how I get to that answer and you walk away with kind of like a clear one pager for y…”
Nov 30, 2023 positive
Puri: Avoiding Stupidity Produces Better Results Than Attempting to Be Brilliant
“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. And he says, other people spend their whole life trying to be so smart. All I'm trying to do is not be idiotic. It's harder than people think, but this is more important than trying to be brilliant.”
Dec 4, 2023 neutral
Shaan Puri conceived crypto newsletter The Milk Road at an agriculture conference
“I literally started a company While I was there, because I was, like, piecing together, like, two ideas, one from the tech world, and one from this, like, farmer that we had met, and, like, it, you know, that was you know, when we created the Milk Road, and we…”
Dec 11, 2023
Dec 18, 2023
Dec 18, 2023
Shaan Puri: Writing course generated $1M profit for 10 days of work
“I was teaching this, like, power writing course, and you know, I was only teaching it basically two to three weeks out of the years, you know, roughly 10 days on average a year, but it would generate, you know, whatever, a million bucks a year of profit.”
Dec 18, 2023
Dec 18, 2023 neutral
Jan 10, 2024 negative
Jan 15, 2024 neutral
Shaan Puri: Copyright trolls could extract $50K nuisance settlements from AI startups
“I am stunned that somebody is not just suing every AI company and being like, cool, I'll settle for 20 K, go ahead or 50 K settlement. But otherwise you're just going to be wrapped up in this. It's going to hurt your future fundraising. It's going to be an iss…”
Jan 22, 2024 bullish
Jan 24, 2024 positive
Founders Should Only Emulate Elon Musk 15% of the Time
“The trick with Elon Musk is you only want to be Elon Musk, like, 15% of the time in your company, right? When you're establishing the vision of, like, thinking big about what you're doing. He's amazing. You want to channel your inner Elon when you are You know…”
Jan 24, 2024 positive
Jan 24, 2024 positive
Jan 29, 2024 positive
Puri: Working trials evaluate potential co-founders better than alignment documents
“And I would always trade an experience for a belief. And if I can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks, that's going to be way better than me trying to put, take a leap of faith on a bunch of things you said, or you wrote down in a …”
Jan 29, 2024 positive
Puri: High personal energy is a non-negotiable requirement for business partners
“Energy is the easiest to spot, and it's the easiest one to try to write off if somebody doesn't have it. Meaning seems like a nice to have. It's actually not a nice to have for me. It's a must have for me. And so energy is the first one that shows up, and it's…”
Jan 29, 2024 bullish
Jan 29, 2024 bearish
Puri: Perplexity and secondary AI startups are overvalued hype bets
“I'm not really a believer in that. I think those get way ahead of the skis and I just seen that story many times. This happened in crypto. This happened in you know, when mobile was happening and you would get, you know, for every Instagram, you would then get…”
Feb 2, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia's sales formula is SW²+WC=MO
“So this is the Airbnb founders sales formula and it's SW squared plus WC equals MO. So I don't know if you can, if you've ever heard that, he's like, everybody heard this for like, no, he goes, no. So here's what it stands for. Some will, some won't. Who cares…”
Feb 5, 2024
Feb 5, 2024
Shaan Puri: Real workplace confidence is shown through questions, not answers
“Confidence comes through asking intelligent questions. Any leader knows that you could tell a person's quality of thinking by the quality of their questions, and it always stands out. If somebody asks you a question that's on point or Breaks the frame of how y…”
Feb 5, 2024 neutral
Feb 5, 2024
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: The 'What, Why, So What' framework creates clear executive updates
“There's, if you want to become a more clear communicator, use the what, why, so what framework. Emmett from Twitch taught me this. So basically it's what happened or what's going to happen. So, you know, if it's past looking, what happened? If it's forward loo…”
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Internal newsletters need just 20 high-influence subscribers
“The newsletter thing isn't just for external. So you know, you could have a 100,000 subscribers on a newsletter, but I, if you're inside of a company, what you really want is 20 subscribers, but they're the 20 most interesting people in the company.”
Feb 5, 2024
Feb 5, 2024
Shaan Puri: Employees should refuse projects that cannot move metrics by 5%
“This actually is also inside of a company. You need to put a price tag on your projects that you simply will not work on projects that can't move the needle for the action for the company. Cause if not, why am I here? What is the point? And if you carry yourse…”
Feb 5, 2024
Shaan Puri: Professionals should work with employers as partners, not subordinates
“You work with, you don't work for, and it's actually a pretty big mentality shift, which is working with somebody is a partnership. It's an agreement. It's a mutually beneficial thing versus I work for you is a, you know you know, there's a dominant person and…”
Feb 5, 2024
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Feb 5, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Twitch CEO Emmett Shear offered to invest in his startup
“He actually slacked me one time. He was like, Hey, I was out of the blue. He basically slacked me that exact same thing. He was like I wish we were gonna, I wish we'd be able to keep you forever. I don't think that's gonna happen. You know, if you ever do deci…”
Feb 16, 2024 positive
Feb 16, 2024 negative
Feb 16, 2024 bearish
Shaan Puri: Founders should avoid crowded AI markets and pursue overlooked opportunities
“That's what, you know, AI is today. Everybody agrees it's an incredible market, so they're all gonna go fight this battle over there. So you really have to, if you're gonna have something, you have to niche down and find some section of that that's underserved…”
Mar 18, 2024
Focus filters must explicitly target behaviors that go against your nature
“You don't want to write the things that you already say yes to that are already just you know, trivial for you. It's an, it's your nature to do that. It's here. You identify what's against your nature and write that down so that you're very clear in what you n…”
Mar 18, 2024
Puri commits to rejecting new startup CEO roles to maintain focus
“Well, I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week, and I come up with ideas for businesses. I got to say no to actually going and doing them, because if I now, I'm a CEO of a startup, I'm not going to be able to achieve this goal. …”
Mar 18, 2024
Set 'floor' and 'F-yeah' ranges instead of static binary goals
“I set kind of a range here because I don't like static, you know, single goals, binary goals. Cause you're, then you're like, should I just be super ambitious, but then I might be disappointed or should I be conservative? But then I feel like I didn't push mys…”
Mar 18, 2024
Mar 18, 2024
Puri: My company's true mission is to fund the owners' lifestyle
“With my company, we are building a company that is going to enable us to have an amazing lifestyle, us, the owners of the business to have an amazing lifestyle. We only have a couple of people in the business. It's all owners. And we want to have a lifestyle w…”
Mar 27, 2024 bullish
Mar 27, 2024
Mar 27, 2024 positive
Apr 3, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Barbell Relationship Strategy Outperforms 30-Minute Zoom Meetings
“That's the barbell strategy, a bunch of lightweight text messages, but then let's spend a full day, a weekend. Let me fly to you and let's hang out for the day. And then I'll fly back, like carve out time to go deep where you have a real experience with somebo…”
Apr 5, 2024
Apr 5, 2024 positive
Founders should vet branding agencies to poach their top talent in-house
“And actually the move is to go vet branding agencies or naming agencies, and then just pluck the most interesting person you have and be like, you're gonna run our whole brand. Come over and just come in house. You're gonna run our whole brand.”
Apr 12, 2024 positive
Apr 12, 2024 positive
Puri pledges $100K to fund a networking event for elite gamers
“I'll put up a hundred grand to like pay for all the event stuff. And I just really want to, for those people, I want to give them exposure to, Hey, here's 20 people who have the same background as you that then shifted their game and now do amazing things in t…”
Apr 12, 2024 positive
Puri: Podcasts and notes should maximize the 'rate of revelation'
“I'm not taking notes on what happened. I'm only taking notes on what are the new epiphanies? What are the new golden nuggets? What's the one phrase somebody said that I'm going to remember? And I'm looking for a high rate of revelation. I think that's also, by…”
Apr 30, 2024 bullish
Shaan Puri: Passed on Beehiiv but invested after becoming a customer
“So I did end up investing. I actually, I think I passed the first time. And so I, what I did was I passed the first time because I was like, ah, I don't know how big this can get. And then we started using it for the milk road and I use it for my personal news…”
Apr 30, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Shipping speed is a better investment signal than TAM
“Markets can trick you. Markets can look small and be bigger, but founders or teams that operate like this,
That's like always a good signal. And so I'm like, let me just bet on the known versus not bet because of this hypothetical unknown thing.”
Apr 30, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Networkers should offer 99% of help free to capture upside
“And I think that in general, you want to be like ultra free or ultra premium. So it's basically like, don't make money on every transaction. Don't be a gatekeeper who stands in the way of the traffic flowing. And it's like, not let 99% of the cars go through c…”
Apr 30, 2024 bullish
Apr 30, 2024 bullish
May 3, 2024 positive
Puri: MrBeast's videos get 100M+ views because concepts are universally simple
“The reason his videos can get a 100,000,200 million views is because It's a concept so simple. You could literally just draw it with a stick figure drawing and people would get it. Two people who don't know each other trapped in a room for a hundred days winne…”
May 3, 2024 positive
Puri: Practicing "cringe" skills creates an asymmetric competitive advantage.
“I look for things that are really valuable to have, But nobody wants to practice it. And even worse people would find it cringe or lame if you said I'm practicing this. Because I'm like, that's a gold mine. That is, we agreed it's valuable. Nobody really works…”
May 3, 2024 positive
Puri: Replacing "and then" with "but/so" transforms storytelling leverage.
“Just cross out all the ands and just try to replace them with, but. And you know, but so, right. So, but this, I wanted this or I was doing this, but then this happened. So then I was forced to do this, but then I encountered another obstacle. So then I tried …”
May 10, 2024 bullish
May 10, 2024 negative
Puri: Founders should not celebrate venture fundraising rounds
“Fundraising is not to be celebrated. I mean, think about what you're saying when you celebrate fundraising. It's either a combination of Congratulations. Now the game is starting. Like, you don't get cheered for to start the game. You get cheered when you win.…”
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024 positive
May 24, 2024 positive
Puri: Writers Should Prime Their Energy Before Writing Like Stage Performers
“No stage performer goes on stage just kind of cold and low energy. But almost every writer starts cold and low energy and just sits there somewhat miserably. And there's even some weird glory from, like, this, like, I don't know, this, like, pain that's martyr…”
May 24, 2024
Puri: Building a 'binge bank' of content beats a resume or portfolio
“This idea of create a binge bank, I think is so much more valuable than a resume or a portfolio. It's like, people will come knocking, they will get curious about you, and like, give them a way to just binge your content like it's a Netflix show. And by, after…”
May 24, 2024 neutral
May 24, 2024
Shaan Puri: Practicing neglected, uncool skills creates high-value differentiation
“So if there's a thing that has value that other people don't practice or try at and even better, it's like almost taboo or lame to say you do it. I've found that those skills are actually like premium skills to me because you almost like differentiate yourself…”
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024
Shaan Puri: Learn Storytelling From Professional Entertainers, Not Business People
“I don't try to learn how to be a better storyteller or a better writer from business people. Why would I do that? I would try to learn from the people who, their thing is storytelling, or writing, or Entertainment, because they're gonna be the best at this. Yo…”
May 24, 2024
Shaan Puri: Stories lose audiences if intention and obstacle are unclear for 5 minutes
“And basically, if you watch, if you read any story or you watch any movie, you should be able to pause at any moment and just point at the screen and just say, what's, what do they want right now? And what's in their way? And if you ever go, like, five minutes…”
May 24, 2024 positive
Puri: Content creation requires working backwards from a target emotion
“I need to create a reaction out of the average person just in their bedroom or at their desk, and I need to start with the emotion, my target emotion, and then work backwards from that. Write the thing that will create that emotion.”
May 24, 2024
Shaan Puri: Audience Connection Comes From Vulnerability and Low Status
“He goes, comedy is a low status game. So he goes, you know, you're going to be up on stage and you're nervous, so your natural tendency is going to be to puff your chest out to kind of project this false bravado. But he's like actually what you want to do is b…”
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024 positive
Puri: Low-Stakes Stories Build More Audience Likability Than Dramatic Ones
“Using storytelling, even on low stakes moments, actually builds likability and fandom more so than the dramatic, I was skiing and there was an avalanche. That's cool, but it's unrelatable. And actually, there's something fundamentally unlikable about it.”
May 24, 2024 positive
Jun 7, 2024 negative
Puri: Pulled All Money From Robinhood Because CEO Lied About Halts
“I took all my money off of Robinhood after that happened. I just fundamentally, morally was against what had happened. I believe that the CEO lied and is continues to lie basically about what happened during, during that period of time.”
Jun 11, 2024 neutral
Puri: Milk Road used proprietary crypto whale research as free marketing
“We would go to like 25 of the biggest crypto whales. These are guys who are placing tens of millions or a hundred million dollar bets on NFTs and coins... And we interviewed them and we talked about how, what's your bullishness? What's basically sentiment on t…”
Jun 25, 2024 positive
Puri: Company allocated 10% of marketing budget to unmeasurable 'cool shit'
“We used to have a do cool shit budget, which was, we would take 20% of our time, but we'd also take, I think it was like 10% of our money. We said 10% of the marketing budget has to be a no ROI play, meaning we think it's awesome, but it's not measurable. It's…”
Jun 25, 2024
Puri: Ask 'what are you excited about?' instead of 'what's new?'
“Asking what's new is a terrible question to ask, and it puts the other person in a sort of you sort of pin them into a sort of sad realization about their life in the moment. A different small talk question that I think is, it generates much more interesting r…”
Jun 25, 2024
Jun 28, 2024
Puri: Real competition in life is small because most people doubt they can win
“And he goes, the second thing is that in life, you believe you're competing with a much bigger pool of people than you actually are. Because the majority of people aren't even playing the game, and of the people who are playing the game, most of them don't eve…”
Jun 28, 2024 negative
Puri: Card counting no longer provides an edge in casinos
“Casinos use six decks, and they use auto shufflers now, and so the ability for the deck to get really hot has been cut down dramatically, and so, you know, they basically use six decks, which will smoothen out the variance, and then they auto shuffle, and they…”
Jun 28, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Intrinsic reward filter eliminates 98% of potential activities
“I want this next chapter of my life to be all about, I'm doing things where the only criteria is, the act of doing it has to be rewarding enough for it to have been worth it. And that one criteria eliminates like 98% of the possible things I want to do.”
Jun 28, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Cheesy Clichés Are Underpriced Assets Ignored by Smart People
“And by the way, things that are cheesy, but true, Are underrated because smart people write off cheesy things because they're cheesy because they've heard them before, but they haven't actually acted on it. So their underpriced assets are things that are chees…”
Jun 28, 2024
Jun 28, 2024 neutral
Parr: Working purely for intrinsic enjoyment requires privilege and luck
“That's a very privileged way to go about it, which is if you hit the lottery, like maybe we have, or I mean, we've worked hard, but we've got lucky as well, where that's a very privileged way to go about it. And so I do think you have to eat shit for a certain…”
Jun 28, 2024
Jul 8, 2024
Shaan Puri: Breakthrough solutions are found only through brute-force execution
“In my experience, the thing that's actually come out of this philosophy of there are no silver bullets is that actually
There are silver bullets, but the only way you discover them is by just firing a shit ton of bullets that you think are lead.
And then you s…”
Jul 8, 2024
Jul 8, 2024 positive
Jul 8, 2024
Jul 8, 2024
Jul 12, 2024 negative
Puri: My First Million compromised its brand by overly optimizing thumbnails
“I think that we have made a mistake in, in part of our world, which is, I don't think, I think we kept the content pretty pure and sacred to what we want, but I think the packaging we've sort of tried to sell out and calculate and try to like maximize clicks a…”
Jul 17, 2024
Shaan Puri: Made $5K profit betting a $10K bankroll on Polymarket
“A couple of years ago I got on Polymarket and I got really addicted to this thing. Every day I was going and I basically had like a 10,000 dollar slush fund that I was just betting on Polymarket. And I think I ended up making five or six grand and then I cashe…”
Jul 19, 2024 positive
Jul 19, 2024 neutral
Puri: Twitch Growth Was Driven by External Trends, Not Internal Product Features
“When every time somebody did the growth analysis, it's like all the things that caused growth were outs or exogenous factors. It was not some feature we created that drove growth necessarily. It was the popularity of a specific game or it was a new device gets…”
Aug 7, 2024 positive
You aren't cutting enough unless you add back 10% of deleted items
“If we are not adding back at least 10% of the time, the thing that we removed, either a process in the company, a role in the company, or a part of the product, a feature of the product, if we're not adding back at least 10% of the time, That means we have not…”
Aug 7, 2024 positive
Aug 7, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri launched The Milk Road after attending a farming conference
“I went to a farming conference because I knew it would put me completely out of my bubble, exposed to a whole bunch of different people with different thoughts and philosophies and different views about the world right now. And I knew I would get new ideas and…”
Aug 9, 2024
Shaan Puri: Investing decisions should be responses to logic, not emotional reactions
“And I define a reaction as making a decision in the moment based on an emotion that I'm feeling, usually fear or greed. Responding being, I have let the emotion cool off. I have let that settle. And I am now choosing a decision that I'm going to make based off…”
Aug 9, 2024 neutral
Puri: Do not react to market crashes for 30 to 90 days unless facing ruin
“When markets crash, just, I have to assess, like, A, is the wolf at the door? Like, do I actually have an existential crisis? If so, ok, I'll make a, I'll shift my attention to this and change, but like, if that's the case, it's because I somehow over levered,…”
Aug 9, 2024 positive
Aug 9, 2024
Shaan Puri ignores tasks outside his three yearly priorities
“So I actually do a thing, which is I wrote out for the year. I said, here's the three big things, big shifts. I always call it like three shifts I'm making this year. I'm making this shift, and this shift. Those are the three things that need to change in my l…”
Aug 9, 2024 negative
Aug 9, 2024
Shaan Puri: Beyond Startups and Private Deals, I Am an Investing Novice
“I'm a novice when it comes to investing outside of my realm, which is basically my realm is starting businesses or investing in private startups. Those are the two things I actually, you know, have spent enough time in to feel like I know what I'm talking abou…”
Aug 12, 2024 positive
Puri: Early believers matter far more to young founders than money or advice
“So I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early twenties, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time. They just have an irrational belief. You're a penny stock. But they see you as a blue chip and they want to…”
Aug 12, 2024 positive
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 positive
Puri: Dr. Gottman predicted divorce with over 90% accuracy in 15-minute observations
“This is a guy who studied marriages and his claim to fame is that he could watch a couple for 15 minutes, having a conversation about something and predict with 90 plus percent certainty
If they were going to have a divorce, end up divorced or stay together, 9…”
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Puri claims creators can only fake retirement or breakups once
“The one time you can fake your own death, you can fake retirement, you can fake your breakup, and everybody wants to click to see the goss, and then they, you know, it's the boy who cried wolf. You can only do it once, but you get a hell of a lot of clicks tha…”
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Puri: Contempt is the most damaging relationship behavior because it destroys respect
“Contempt was the one where regardless of gender, if you did these things like an eye roll, anything that's hierarchy, which is like, oh, you're such an asshole, right?
I'm good.
And you're bad.
Anything that creates anything that indicates contempt was like on…”
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Puri: Conflict escalates from misunderstanding to fight before reaching grumpy agreement
“And like most things, it starts off as a misunderstanding, turns into a disagreement, which leads to an argument, which escalates to a fight, and then it kind of de-escalates into a grumpy agreement, and you sort of move on.”
Aug 23, 2024
Aug 28, 2024 positive
Buffett: Reject anyone who is not an obvious yes when evaluating people
“The cost of bringing a not great person into my circle of life is so high. The cost of dis discarding somebody who might be great is nothing. It is so low comparatively. He's like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people. Meaning you're either obvi…”
Aug 28, 2024 bullish
Puri plans $10k–$15k grants to launch college satire newspapers
“I'm down to basically put in some amount of money, like 10 grand or 15 grand to like kickstart People on this thing. I don't think it'll take much money. I think 10 grand will be more than enough to start these on several campuses. And I think they should beco…”
Aug 28, 2024 positive
Puri: Great hires show their quality within the first two weeks
“You always know in the first two weeks, if someone's gonna be great, great people are great right off the bat. They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks. I've never seen, or, you know, rarely ever will you ever see somebody who turns out to be gr…”
Aug 28, 2024 positive
Puri: Asking candidates if they are lucky filters for optimistic leaders
“And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership potential and likelihood of success. Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism. Basically, people will always tell you they're, you know, they're optimistic about things, but …”
Sep 11, 2024
Puri: In any given month, only one to three actions actually matter
“And when we do that, it's amazing because every month has like, An embarrassingly low number of things that actually mattered, like one to three, and everything else was just the cost of doing business. Everything else was just the noise that it took to get to…”
Sep 11, 2024 negative
Shaan Puri: Operating internet businesses is far better than physical ventures
“I've done a restaurant. I have an e-commerce thing that has physical products, and I've also done some events, and every time I've done any of those things, I hate it. I'm like, oh my god, this would be so much easier. I would enjoy my life so much more. If I …”
Sep 11, 2024 neutral
Puri: Delaying decisions without defining the missing information wastes time
“If we don't have enough information to make a decision, what is the information we need? And then you often realize you're like, ah and actually it's just, I didn't feel confident enough to make a decision right now. I don't even really know what I'm looking f…”
Sep 11, 2024 neutral
Puri: Leaders can make confident decisions despite having low outcome certainty
“Well, I think there's a difference between confidence and certain. So I'm definitely less certain. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm less confident, meaning I can be confident that this is the right decision to make, but I can agree that, hey, there's low, low…”
Sep 13, 2024 positive
Puri: The best investment ideas come from essential tools on your P&L
“The first lesson I always remind myself is the best place to invest is in your P&L, meaning look at your expenses and go figure out which of those companies you think other people, you wouldn't want to cancel and other people are going to have as their expense…”
Sep 13, 2024 bullish
Sep 13, 2024 bullish
Sep 13, 2024 bullish
Oct 4, 2024 positive
Oct 4, 2024
Puri: Reviewing trip notes immediately extracts 20% to 40% more value
“What I do is the very next day, Instead of saying, oh, I got to catch up on work, and emails, and slack, and all this stuff, the 1:02 hours, I basically just take my notes, and I type them out, and I try to squeeze, you know, 2030, 40% more juice out of the tr…”
Oct 4, 2024 neutral
Puri: 10x net worth does not yield a 10x better life
“Even if this person has like, let's say 10 times the net worth that we have, they don't have like 10 times the better life. They don't even have maybe two times the better life. I actually don't think that there's really like any link, and I don't mean better …”
Oct 4, 2024 positive
Puri: The best way to build status at conferences is connecting others
“The way to build value at a conference is not to puff your chest out and say, oh, hey, come talk, you know, come look at me, come talk to me about my greatness. What he would do is any two people, he would just connect them to each other, and then he would bas…”
Oct 4, 2024 neutral
Shaan Puri: Outlier wealthy individuals are almost universally eccentric
“One of the things that really stood out was the more successful the person, the richer the guy, the weirder the guy, with really no exceptions during this trip. And when I say weirder, it would be that they have weird hobbies, would have that they have weird m…”
Oct 10, 2024 neutral
Oct 10, 2024
Puri outlines a four-stage progression for mastering wealth creation
“There's understanding intellectually. Realizing you thought you understood it intellectually, and then now you actually know intellectually, and then there's doing it. And I think I finally got past the third stage, and now I think the fourth stage is either i…”
Oct 10, 2024
Oct 10, 2024 neutral
Oct 14, 2024 neutral
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Oct 23, 2024 positive
Shaan Puri: Founders should consult investment bankers a year before selling
“The best thing I ever did was I talked to a banker a year before I wanted to sell my business. And I talked to them, and I go, a year before? What do you mean? And he goes, yeah, because I went to the banker, and I said, if I wanted to sell my business today, …”
Oct 25, 2024 positive
Oct 30, 2024 neutral
Puri: Serious Health Scares Destroy the Startup Obsession Delusion
“The liver punch in business is when you have a real life scare, and you're like, wow, I feel so stupid for having just spent Like, caring so much about these stupid KPIs and metrics and dialing the knobs and optimizing this funnel. It's like, dude, honestly, w…”
Oct 30, 2024 positive
Nov 6, 2024
Puri: Happiness is defined by your rate of progress, not status
“My formula is progress equals happiness, which is that no matter where you are, sort of like the y-intercept doesn't matter, the slope matters, and so wherever you're at, if you don't feel a sense of progress in your life, you will feel unhappy”
Nov 6, 2024 positive
Puri: Projecting 10 percent eccentricity externally boosts startup valuation
“I've always felt that if you build a great Silicon Valley company, internally in your company, you should be a totally normal person, but outside, you should have that, like, 10% crazy. Yeah. It just gives you, like, actually, like, two extra valuation. It jus…”
Nov 6, 2024 negative
Puri: Back-loading critical risk tests causes projects to collapse
“The entire thing collapses, because even though a marshmallow looks so small and like light, compared to spaghetti sticks, it's way too heavy, and you don't realize that, because you didn't like, you like back-loaded the possible Failure, you know, the failure…”
Nov 8, 2024 bearish
Nov 8, 2024 bullish
Shaan Puri: Bootstrapped Meet Your Class could exit for $20M
“I don't think you should ever raise money for this. I think you should bootstrap this thing. And if you actually just stuck with this idea and you bootstrapped it, you know, in four or five years, you would be sitting on probably twenty million dollars, which …”
Nov 8, 2024 bullish
Nov 19, 2024
Dec 5, 2024
Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett once worked for Shaan Puri.
“Steve Bartlett, who's the podcast host of what's it called? Diary of a CEO. Before that, he had a, like an ad agency or whatever. Before that, he worked for me, back when he was maybe a 19, 20 years old, 21 years old, something like that. He was just like a yo…”
Dec 5, 2024 negative
Viral stunts trap creators in dangerous, addiction-like escalation cycles.
“I think one of the problems is, like, you get that initial hit of, like, excitement and attention, and everyone loves it, and then it's gonna fade away, and then you're gonna keep hiding the cash, but you're not gonna get that same hit, so you're gonna have to…”
Dec 18, 2024 bullish
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Puri: Harvard dropouts offer a stronger founder signal than graduates
“Being a Harvard dropout is a stronger signal than being a Harvard graduate. There's all these things that sound silly, but actually end up being true, because if you're the type of person who can get into Harvard and that has enough conviction and an idea to d…”
Dec 18, 2024 positive
Jan 3, 2025 bullish
Jan 3, 2025 positive
Puri: Use ChatGPT for default, Perplexity for facts, o1 for analysis
“Yeah, it is my, like, default, and then, you know, I play with everything else, so usually if I'm like, how factually correct does this need to be, I'll perplexity, so I go to perplexity.
If it's analysis, I'll use ChappieCPU, like, have you used, like, the O-…”
Jan 3, 2025 neutral
Puri: LeetcodeWizard makes $15,000 MRR helping candidates cheat on coding interviews
“There's this website, leapcodewizard.io, and basically, it just helps you cheat on your coding interview.
It's like, oh, you got a coding test to get a job?
Just use this.
Watch, it'll, it'll, it's the same thing as a student.
It'll write the essay for you, ba…”
Jan 3, 2025 negative
Jan 8, 2025 negative
Jan 8, 2025 negative
Puri: 'Follow your passion' advice fails because few people have clear passions
“And most people who talk to you online or in person will tell you just follow your passion. But I don't know about you. I personally, I liked the idea, but I did not know what my passion actually was. If you told me what your passion when I was in school, I do…”
Jan 8, 2025
Puri: Entrepreneurs Must Master Building, Selling, and Generating Luck
“The one thing that you can control that will certainly succeed is if you build your skill stack. And there are three master skills you must build along the way. The first skill is learning to build. The second skill is learning to sell. And the third skill is …”
Jan 8, 2025 negative
Jan 8, 2025 positive
Jan 8, 2025 positive
Jan 8, 2025 bullish
Jan 8, 2025
Jan 8, 2025 positive
Jan 14, 2025 neutral
Jan 14, 2025 positive
Entering established categories requires 80% standard execution and 20% differentiation
“If you're going to go into that category, you're probably going to end up, even if you're trying to be super original, you're probably going to end up with 80% of the things the same because that's how business is. You're not a hundred percent different. But t…”
Jan 14, 2025
Jan 16, 2025 bullish
Puri: Living in San Francisco yields significantly more income through serendipity
“SF is now where the action is, but so the question would be, do I wish I was still in the city? And the answer is, I definitely would've, I definitely know I would make more money if I lived in SF. Like, it seems like it's a more expensive place to live, but a…”
Jan 16, 2025
Jan 29, 2025
Jan 29, 2025 neutral
Shaan Puri passed on Feastables' Series A at a $40M valuation
“Three years ago when we did the first version of this event, Jimmy, AKA Mr. Beast had launched his chocolate brand feastables. And it was like, okay, selling chocolate to little kids. I had the opportunity to invest. I think I had a forty million dollar valuat…”
Feb 11, 2025 positive
Shaan Puri's unannounced bootstrapped startup reached $10M run rate in year one
“We have this one company we started just a little over a year ago that's just been, like, up and to the right. Like, this company is, I haven't announced it yet, but it's like, Almost a ten million dollar run rate already. Profitable, bootstrapped in one year.”
Feb 11, 2025 positive
Feb 11, 2025 positive
Feb 17, 2025
Puri: I intentionally refuse to make decisions primarily for money
“Because I'm at a phase of my life where I am intentionally trying to not make any decisions for money. So even when I saw something that I was like, oh wow, you could go make money doing that. I no longer want to be that guy. I was that guy for like 15 years. …”
Feb 17, 2025 neutral
Puri: Only calculate the hourly value of tasks you dislike
“There's a simple, simple solution to that, which is you only price things that you don't want to do. If you want to do it, you don't put a price on it. If you enjoy the, if it's therapeutic to you or what's it called? Like whatever... If it feels good to do th…”
Mar 3, 2025
Puri: Businesses dominating a single closed market can replicate across similar ones
“A lot of businesses are like this where they're what I call pond businesses. It works in one pond. It'll work in all ponds. Businesses like any app that takes over a high school will actually be able to take over every high school.”
Mar 3, 2025 positive
Mar 3, 2025 neutral
Mar 3, 2025
Puri: Scaling volume with poor unit economics causes companies to 'grow broke'
“And you don't want to grow broke. So if you have the wrong model, right? You have the wrong cost structure today. And let's say you do go get these bigger contracts and you're cooking 10 times more, more cookies. Well, you're just literally going to grow broke…”
Mar 12, 2025 bullish
Puri: 10-person frontier tech engineering teams have a $50M to $100M acquihire floor
“Being at the leading edge of just the tech, you get two shots to win. If you make the breakthrough app, That actually does get product market fit. Then you get to win in the billions. If you're just the most hardcore tech team at building like good functionali…”
Mar 12, 2025
Puri: Major life decisions are choices to join or leave human networks
“And when he talks about your life on network effects, he's, his idea is basically everything. If you could take all your decisions you make and instead of thinking of them as things you did or decisions you made or just like events in your life, if you looked …”
Mar 14, 2025 positive
Mar 19, 2025 bullish
Puri: Companies will launch supplements to remove bodily microplastics
“I also think, by the way, for Plastic Free Everything, that there's gotta be a supplement that people are gonna try to sell that's going to, like, remove the plastic from your balls and your bloodstream. I think people are gonna get on the, you know, Every cat…”
Mar 19, 2025 neutral
Mar 19, 2025 bullish
Puri: A major plastic-free brand will emerge in baby products
“I think this is going to extend into clothes. I think it's going to extend into like homeware pans, everything like cups that you use. I think it's going to extend into baby products, all baby products. I think are going to, there's going to be a, the way that…”
Mar 19, 2025
Mar 19, 2025 positive
Puri: Business success relies more on market tailwinds than founder genius
“A lot of success in business just comes from surfing the right wave. I think founders like to believe that it's our own genius that's causing our success. And when it's failure, then it's market conditions. And actually, often it's the opposite. It's the marke…”
Apr 28, 2025 neutral
Shaan Puri's portfolio companies have not yet replaced jobs with AI
“I don't, we haven't like replaced job functions yet with AI. That's the, that's what I'm waiting for is like, basically like, oh, we don't need to hire this person because. An AI agent or this person with AI is better than this person with another person.”
Apr 28, 2025 bullish
May 2, 2025 positive
Mah: My company is building an AI digital twin of Shaan Puri
“We're actually doing, we're actually training one based off of you as well. So we're going to have it just watch every single video you've been part of. So it knows how to think like you'd be like, Hey, bring Sean into these conversations”
May 2, 2025 positive
Puri: Great founders are past-ignorant, present-realistic, and future-delusional
“I think a great entrepreneur's mindset is
They're ignorant of the past because it's already done.
If they live there, they'll die there.
And if you just stay stuck on, well, I've been failing for five years, you know, then you will feel like a failure and you …”
May 2, 2025 bullish
May 2, 2025 positive
Puri: Position your network value like an API
“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…”
May 5, 2025 positive
May 5, 2025 positive
May 5, 2025 positive
May 5, 2025 positive
Shaan Puri: Asking candidates for an unprepared talk tests mastery and communication
“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…”
Jun 25, 2025
Puri: Daily camaraderie and the journey motivate entrepreneurs more than financial figures
“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 …”
Aug 18, 2025 negative
Shaan Puri's E-Commerce Margins Crushed to 3% Absorbing Chinese Tariffs
“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, …”
Aug 18, 2025 neutral
Man Offered to Buy Landfill to Recover Trashed Bitcoin Hard Drive
“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…”
Sep 12, 2025 positive
Sep 12, 2025
A sudden Mexican import freeze shut down Shaan Puri's e-commerce warehouse.
“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.”
Sep 17, 2025
Puri: Negotiation Swings Company Sale and Fundraising Outcomes by 50%
“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…”
Sep 24, 2025
Sep 24, 2025
Sep 24, 2025 bullish
Puri: Tech founders must move to San Francisco to maximize success
“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…”
Oct 6, 2025
Puri: Treat your mood like a luxury asset with an expensive price
“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 …”
Oct 6, 2025 negative
Puri: Habitually breaking agreements with yourself destroys self-trust
“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.”
Oct 28, 2025 positive
Puri: Employee-drafted one-page plans with manager feedback maximize ownership
“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 …”
Oct 28, 2025 negative
Oct 28, 2025
Puri: Projects drop balls more often in groups without clear RACI roles
“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…”
Oct 28, 2025 neutral
Nov 12, 2025 positive
Nov 12, 2025 positive
Nov 12, 2025
Nov 12, 2025 positive
Puri: Paternity leave is more useful split into intermittent intervals
“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. …”
Nov 12, 2025
Puri: It takes 15 months to feel emotional love for a baby
“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?”
Nov 12, 2025 bullish
Parr: 'One Hour Books' will be Shaan Puri's most successful project
“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?”
Nov 17, 2025
Shaan Puri: Entrepreneurs are actually risk minimizers, not risk seekers
“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?”
Nov 19, 2025
Puri: In your twenties, prioritize learning and smart peers over immediate earnings
“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…”
Nov 19, 2025 bullish
Nov 19, 2025
Puri: A 10-year iteration timeline raises startup success odds to 80%–90%
“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…”
Nov 19, 2025 positive
Shaan Puri: Business will be secondary to creative projects moving forward
“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.”
Nov 19, 2025 positive
Nov 26, 2025 negative
Nov 26, 2025
Founders should sell boring services where customers lack emotional attachment
“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.”
Dec 1, 2025 positive
Puri: Holding twice-daily meetings during startup crises eliminates excuses
“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…”
Feb 18, 2026
Puri: Exceptional focus requires explicitly accepting mediocre progress on secondary initiatives
“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…”
Feb 18, 2026 neutral
Feb 18, 2026
Puri: Generically good pet projects are a major source of corporate waste
“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…”
Feb 18, 2026 positive
Puri: Intensity and concentration are trainable hard skills, not innate soft traits
“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…”
Feb 18, 2026 positive
Puri: Founders must balance long-term mission patience with short-term task urgency
“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…”
Mar 11, 2026 bullish
Apr 9, 2026 negative
Entrepreneurs who get too comfortable lose relatability, just like rich comedians
“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 …”
Apr 22, 2026 bullish
Apr 22, 2026 bullish
Puri: Longevity will have a 'ChatGPT moment' within 15 years
“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,…”
Apr 27, 2026
Apr 27, 2026
Puri: Entrepreneurs should pick businesses by preferred sales motion, not industry
“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…”
Apr 27, 2026 negative
Puri: True business success does not require Goggins or Hormozi's grind-culture suffering
“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…”
Apr 27, 2026
Puri: Founders spend closer to 15% of their time on product
“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…”
Apr 27, 2026 bullish
Apr 27, 2026 negative
Apr 27, 2026 positive
Puri: Willingly enduring hardship in a task signals a genuine calling
“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.”
Apr 27, 2026 positive
Puri: Internal scorecards prevent being psychologically whiplashed by external comparison
“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.”
May 11, 2026
Puri: Net worth grew 40x post-exit, primarily from private business ownership
“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.”
May 11, 2026
Puri: Adopt productive placebo beliefs over empirical truths to drive action
“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.”
May 11, 2026
Aug 26, 2026
Puri: First hiring filter must be evidence of past exceptional ability
“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…”
Sep 2, 2026 positive
Puri: The final ten percent of ruthless focus doubles your impact
“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…”
Sep 2, 2026 bullish
Sep 7, 2026
Puri: Successful Founders Must Alternate Between Delusion and Hyper-Realism
“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 …”