Sep 19, 2023 · 1h 6m · my-first-million
Brainstorming +$1M Business Ideas With Soylent's Co-Founder | ft. John Coogan (#496)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of My First Million, hosts Sean Puri and Sam Parr sit down with Soylent and Lucy co-founder John Coogan to brainstorm lucrative business opportunities, explore startup war stories, and debate venture capital power laws versus bootstrapped lifestyle businesses.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 39.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 2.5 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 1.4 The hosts pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 40:20 John argues founders have a societal duty to build mega-cap companies
John challenges Sam's bootstrap philosophy by insisting that owning 1% of a $10B venture is strictly superior to 100% of a $100M business because humans owe society maximum impact.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 38:55 Sam challenges VC power laws with his D-Day beach landing analogySam outright refuses John's pro-VC premise, comparing venture investors' indifference to company failure to slaughter on D-Day beaches while advocating for high-certainty bootstrap wealth.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 59:03 John reveals the exact mechanics of the $500 clear tape scamJohn educates the hosts on the psychological tricks of office telemarketing fraud, explaining how asking for the shipping department and referencing clear tape simulated an existing vendor relationship.
The host holds their own ▶ 17:47 Sam reveals internal revenue figures of VPN affiliate sitesWhen John introduces the VPN business concept, Sam immediately demonstrates proprietary domain research, detailing CompareTech's $14M revenue, $13M profit, and offshore ownership structures.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introducing John Coogan, Startup History, and Cancel Culture | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Shaan and Sam introduce John Coogan, lightly bantering about his angel investments, YouTube channel, and past co-founder appearances. John shares a brief contrarian take that cancel culture is over following Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, which the hosts accept smoothly. | |
| The Origin Story, Virality, and Exit of Soylent | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | John breaks down the origin of Soylent in a San Francisco hacker house, its viral marketing dynamics, and how Peter Thiel accurately predicted the failure of raising heavy venture capital for a product lacking network moats. Shaan contributes insightful analysis on product signaling, while Sam probes the disappointing financial exit. | |
| Inside Lucy Gum and Nicotine Flavor Capsule Innovation | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Sam shares his personal use of nicotine pouches and discusses Lucy's product innovation. John explains the engineering behind their liquid flavor capsule breaker designed to stop pouch dryness. | |
| Business Idea Pitch: Building a Creator-Owned VPN Platform | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | John pitches 'Beast VPN', a creator-owned VPN white-label model. Sam demonstrates strong industry knowledge by sharing his diligence into review aggregators like CompareTech making millions in profit, while Shaan mentions his similar prior plans at Milk Road. | |
| Business Idea Pitch: Rolling Up Traditional Ammunition Manufacturers | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | John pitches rolling up traditional shotgun shell manufacturers to capture operational alpha. Sam pushes back on ethical and legacy grounds, leading to a playful confrontation with Shaan and John calling out the cognitive dissonance between shooting guns and refusing to invest in them. | |
| Viral Trends: Men Constantly Thinking About Ancient Rome | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Shaan brings up the viral TikTok trend regarding how often men think about the Roman Empire, sparking a humorous riff on masculine daydreams, WWII scenarios, and situational awareness. | |
| Inside Founders Fund Culture and Social Media Trolling | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Sam questions why Founders Fund partner Keith Raboy is combative on social media. John explains the defensive culture stemming from media hostility against tech founders over the past decade, while Shaan pitches high-profile trolling as a viable media career. | |
| Sponsor Message: Streamlining Business Operations With HubSpot CRM | 5 | 3 | 5 | 6 | Following a brief sponsor read, Sam and John engage in an extended philosophical debate over John's assertion that lifestyle businesses are worthless. Sam forcefully pushes back using a D-Day landing survival analogy, arguing that bootstrapping offers better risk-adjusted wealth and freedom. | |
| Tech Political Philosophy and Future Computer Scientist Leaders | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | John shares his political perspective, endorsing Will Hurd to see a computer scientist president and analyzing how presidential legacies regarding geopolitical competition with China are evaluated in hindsight. | |
| Business Idea Pitch: Exploiting the Artificial Intelligence Barnum Effect | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | John defends building lightweight AI wrapper apps as valuable entrepreneurial stepping stones. He explains the Barnum effect and pitches creating viral personalized astrology or personality quiz applications on top of LLMs, which Shaan validates enthusiastically. | |
| John Coogan's Story: The High School Telemarketing Tape Scam | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | John tells a detailed story about his one-day high school telemarketing job selling 2-inch clear packing tape for $500 with a $5 Starbucks card to unsuspecting corporate shipping departments. The hosts listen in amusement as he deconstructs the deceptive sales script. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Coogan: Elon Musk's Twitter takeover officially ended cancel culture for founders
“Now that Elon bought Twitter and kind of just like caused enough chaos, like you can just say whatever you want. And there's like, no, I, I've been telling every, every founder I know, like cancel culture is over.”
Coogan: Food brands cannot build monopolies due to shifting consumer identity signaling
“Food is such a signal and there's so much badge value. It's very hard to accrue like monopoly power. And how do you actually go about disrupting Nestle? If it be, if every food is like an extension of personal expression, It gets very hard because as soon as e…”
Parr: VPN review site Comparitech made $13M profit on $14M revenue
“So there was one called compare tech that was doing fourteen million in revenue, thirteen million in profit. Like I saw their financials and they sold To a VPN company.”
Coogan: VPNs lack network effects and rely solely on marketing moats
“They all print cash and there's not really going to be one winner because there's no network effect. Again, it's, it doesn't have a big moat. The moat is marketing and that's why they all spend on marketing.”
Coogan: Aggregate VPN industry revenue is easily in the billions
“Easily, easily in the billions for the aggregate industry. And like you said, there's certain that are doing, there's certain VPNs that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars of sales.”
Coogan: Mainstream small-business search funds and roll-ups offer little alpha
“What I do know is that the hottest trend right now in business is like roll ups or search funds and every guy who graduates from HBS is like, I'm going to go roll up laundromats or I'm going to go roll up dentists dentists. It's like everyone has an idea for t…”
Coogan: Keith Rabois is aggressive on Twitter to stop misinformation spreading
“I think a lot of it is just like holding the line on like when he sees something that's like not true, he doesn't want it to spread, and so he just like shuts it down like really aggressively.”
Coogan: The tech industry should lower its defenses against criticism
“I think everyone in tech is somewhat like just injured from the past, like for sure. It's very obvious of just getting like, just beat down for every little thing. And so a lot of people have put up walls and I think that it's time. I agree with you. I think i…”
Puri: Fake laid-off Twitter employees should have become full-time tech satirists
“They should have just gone all in as personalities. I would have dropped the startup, like six months sabbatical on the startup. I'm just going to see what happens if I fully troll and like, maybe I could be the thing that the community needs.”
Coogan: VC-backed companies make up 99% of public market cap
“Basically only about one percent of companies that get started raise venture capital, but about 99% of the market cap in the public markets, they took venture.”
Coogan: Facebook would have died without venture capital
“I think that if Mark Zuckerberg didn't raise venture capital, his company would be dead.”
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…”
Coogan: Running a high school business is always a bullish founder signal
“If you ever talk to somebody who's like, they were able to, you know, run some small business when they were in high school, that's always a bull signal for entrepreneurship. Like there it's always like, oh, you're in, now you're doing the venture back thing. …”
Puri: AI will soon power a viral personality test or astrology app
“I think that's going to happen very soon. And this, we'll look back at this clip and be like, dude, he called it. John called it that that was going to happen. It has to happen.”
Coogan: Fraud operations must rapidly churn staff before employees expose scams
“It's the same thing with, like, a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme. Like, you gotta, like, you gotta, like, you know, get out anyone who knows the truth and keep the blinders on everyone who's there, because as soon as one person figures it out, they're gonna …”