Apr 7, 2021 · 1h 2m · my-first-million
MFM #168 - How to Reverse Engineer Businesses, The Indonesian King of Coal & the Story of Adidas
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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, Shaan Puri and Sam Parr explore unconventional business playbooks, from the illicit arbitrage of an Indonesian coal tycoon to the operator-celebrity partnership models behind billion-dollar brands. Through deep-dive case studies and entrepreneurial frameworks, they break down competitor reverse engineering, intellectual property licensing, and the historic turnaround of Adidas.
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 99.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.7 Guest teaching 4.8 Guest disagreement 1.8 The hosts pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 47:21 Sam bluntly trash talks Shaan's robot pet concept
Sam forcefully attacks Shaan's pitch, stating that while Shaan usually hits home runs, this particular idea is an outright strikeout and stupid.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 42:48 Sam rejects Shaan's claim that competitor tracking is not a real businessWhen Shaan claims his automated tracking concept is just a tool and not a real company, Sam flatly disagrees and explains enterprise B2B monetization.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 49:35 Ben drops $120M sales stats to disprove Sam's dismissalAfter Sam insists robot fish are commercially useless, producer Ben steps in with data showing RoboFish sold 15 million units at $8 each in its first year.
The host holds their own ▶ 43:45 Sam breaks down Rocket Internet's competitive intelligence engineSam demonstrates deep domain knowledge of the Samwer brothers' Rocket Internet playbook, detailing how a chief scientist tracked pixel-level competitor tweaks across global clones.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sam's Impromptu Handgun Purchase and Austin Banter | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Sam casually recounts buying a handgun on a whim at Bass Pro Shops and moving to Texas. Shaan pokes fun at Sam's awkward handling of the gun and they joke about past celebrity encounters. | |
| Pitching to a Sleeping Prince Andrew | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Shaan narrates a Silicon Valley presentation where Prince Andrew fell asleep on the couch before the first slide. The tone is humorous narrative with minimal disagreement. | |
| Evaluating PolitiFact and Fact-Checking Business Models | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Sam explains PolitiFact's 'Pants on Fire' meter before discussing how Jake Paul was booked on the show via Jeff Wu. Sam demonstrates strong knowledge of Brian Lee's celebrity-incubator model with Jessica Alba and Robert Shapiro. | |
| Turned Yellow and the Drop Servicing Strategy | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Shaan breaks down the drop servicing model of Turned Yellow, turning photos into Simpsons-style caricatures. Sam points out blatant copycats and they discuss copyright gray areas and IP licensing. | |
| How TinyCo Secured the Family Guy Gaming License | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Shaan details how Suli at TinyCo managed to beat EA to the Family Guy mobile gaming rights by leveraging Marc Andreessen and offering massive upfront guarantees. | |
| Corporate Bribery, Compliance, and Tech Espionage | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Sam ponders why direct corporate bribery does not happen more often in tech licensing deals. Shaan counters with the realities of executive compensation and corporate compliance training. | |
| Deconstructing Competitor Intel and Hiring Ethics | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Shaan admits he expected acquired founders to share competitor secrets, while Sam notes that professional norms keep people ethical. They discuss Anthony Pompliano's lawsuit regarding Facebook and Snapchat. | |
| Interning for the Indonesian King of Coal | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Shaan recounts his bizarre summer internship in Indonesia working for the 'King of Coal' who acted as a middleman bribing local politicians for mining rights before flipping them to oil conglomerates. | |
| Reverse Engineering Success with First Versions and Timelines | 7 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Both hosts bond over internet archaeology, using the Wayback Machine, Twitter searches, and FirstVersions.com to reverse engineer startup evolution and early career trajectories. | |
| Business Idea: Automated Competitor Intelligence Tracking | 8 | 4 | 3 | 6 | Shaan pitches 'Business Pocket' as a cool tool but dismisses its commercial potential. Sam forcefully disagrees, citing Rocket Internet's chief scientist copying tactics to argue it could support six-figure B2B contracts. | |
| Robotic Pets and Alzheimer's Care Market Opportunities | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | Sam aggressively derides Shaan's robotic fish idea as a terrible concept, but producer Ben chimes in that RoboFish sold 15 million units in year one. Sam pivots to explore therapeutic robotic pets for Alzheimer's care. | |
| Billy of the Week: The Adidas Saga and Brand Longevity | 7 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Shaan shares the Billy of the Week story of Adi Dassler, Puma's rival founding, and Robert Louis-Dreyfus's turnaround of Adidas. Sam adds tactical takeaways on private equity operating mindsets and enduring fashion brands. |
Statements from this episode (15)
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…”
Sam Parr: Brian Lee built LegalZoom, ShoeDazzle, and Honest Co with celebrities
“So this guy named Brian Lee I guess he's Korean. He's a Korean American. And I guess Lee's Korean, I think. And he partnered with Shapiro for LegalZoom and Shapiro was supposed to be like the face and the famous person. Turns out Shapiro, I mean, he's a really…”
Puri: Family Guy mobile game generated millions by reskinning Candy Crush
“So he took a proven game, Candy Crush, that's like super addictive, amazing at monetizing, and he just skinned it with the Family Guy branding and got Family Guy to help promote it, and Family Guy got millions of dollars in revenue from the success of this gam…”
Puri: TinyCo Saved Its Business by Acquiring Family Guy IP
“And so that's how they ended up getting the pitch to work and got the rights to family guy and save the company.”
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…”
Shaan Puri: Foreign spies stole Google machine learning models on USB sticks
“Of course there are people working for China, for Russia, for different countries as foreign agents, and there's actually been like cases of this where guys basically took the, you know, like The machine learning model out on a USB stick out of Google and like…”
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…”
Sam Parr: Snapchat fired Anthony Pompliano over refusing Facebook intel request
“It was Anthony Pompliano. He worked at Facebook. This is all public. This is, you can read the deposition, or I believe it's deposition... And basically, according to the records that we read, he worked at Facebook. He decided to work at Snapchat, and they sai…”
Puri: Multinational oil companies used local intermediaries to bypass bribery laws
“Those companies couldn't get their hands dirty. They could not risk Bribing foreign like politicians. So what they did was they let this guy bribe the fallout foreign politicians, get the rights, and then they would cut a commercial deal with him.”
Parr: Non-US business cultures treat copying as legitimate, unadulterated capitalism
“Our opinion of the right and wrong way is a lot different than you. And it is, Far more unadulterated capitalism of just what, why is copying wrong? Like, and they're kind of right, right? Like, why is it wrong?”
Parr: Rocket Internet built its business cloning US tech companies internationally
“Rocket Internet, Google it. It's a guy, it's three brothers named Ollie, Alex, and something else, Samware brothers. And they started this thing called Rocket Internet. And basically the way it works right now, it's a large publicly traded company. They had th…”
Parr: Competitor intelligence tracking could command six-figure enterprise contracts
“And I think that that 100% could be a service that you pay a hundred grand a year for and you get, and you, and they'll tell you the five nearest competitors. And every month you meet with their team and you say, all right, your competitors, they're doing this…”
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…”
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…”