My First Million: "Sara's List" Update: 12 Startups Where Stock Grants Will Make You A Millionaire

Hubspot Podcast Network Hubspot Podcast Network 9/22/22 - 35m - PDF Transcript

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All right.

Back to the show.

So he lives in India and he is a one-man company that makes something between $15 and $30 million

selling simple plugins for Google Docs.

If you have $20 million a year of income, that is a huge unheard of song.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like the days off on a road, let's travel never looking back.

All right.

We live.

What's going on?

All right.

I got a couple interesting things for you.

I'm going to start with this one-man company.

So I saw a tweet.

I got tagged and a tweet a bunch of times.

And I think we should talk about this because this was very cool.

Is it the Google plugin guy?

Yes.

Yes.

All right.

So it's tweeted out a great thread and his handle is real, real John David.

So shout out to him for doing this.

And he's basically like, dude, I discovered this guy and let me just tell you some things

about this guy.

How funny is it that something like this happens?

And I know exactly what you're talking about because I got DMed the amount, the same people

probably DMed me.

Well, that's when you know you're doing a good job.

When people see something and they think of you, I tweeted this out, I go, people think

you create content like a podcast or a YouTube channel to become well-known.

Right?

Oh, you want fame.

You want to become well-known.

And some people want that and there are some benefits to that, but that's not my goal with

this stuff.

My goal is to be known well, which means people know you really well.

That means when they see something, they'll know to send it to you.

They'll show it to you.

They'll share it with you.

They'll tell you to come invest in this deal with them.

When you're known well, it's because you've put your brain out there on blast.

People know how you think.

And so when they see something that they know you'll love, they immediately think of you

and they come share it with you.

And so I would say that even if you create content and you're never famous, it never

takes off and you become well-known, you will become known well.

And that alone is a big enough benefit to justify creating content.

All right.

Anyway, so we were known well because a bunch of people tagged us in this guy.

So this guy, what is his name?

So his name is Amit Agarwal.

So he lives in India and he is a one-man company that makes something between $15 and $30 million

selling simple plugins for Google Docs and Google Drive and the G Suite of Apps.

This is crazy.

I didn't know he was that high.

That is, if you have $20 million a year of income, that's like the equivalent of, I would

have to think about this.

And maybe someone who's thought about this is going to say, I'm an idiot and I'm getting

it wrong, but making $20 million a year in income is probably the same as being worth

like $500 million.

Lifestyle-wise, it definitely is.

Like it's a huge, that is a huge unheard of song.

So this guy, basically, he goes to IIT, which is like the Harvard of India.

He's a computer science guy.

He moves back to his hometown, so he goes to the big city, comes back to his hometown.

And in 2004, he starts off as like a tech blogger.

He's just writing tips and tricks on how to use G Suite.

And he creates a Gmail plugin that lets you do what's called a mail merge.

A mail merge is basically like, you want to email 100 people, the same thing, but not

in one group email, and not even as a BCC because you want to customize some component

of it, their name or something like that.

And so he created a plugin that just lets you do that in Gmail, because there's a lot

of services that will let you do that outside of Gmail, but like a lot of people just want

to run it inside their inbox and not like use some third party app to send emails.

So he creates this thing.

And that's, I think, his biggest hit.

But he just starts writing, you know, how to guides on his website.

His website's called Digital Inspiration, and so it'll be like, you know, how to calculate

the percentage score in a Google form.

How teachers can email your parents, the email parents using Google forms or something like

that.

And it's free, but then he has like a paid tier, $39 a year, $79 a year to get rid of

like the branding and stuff like that.

Email, you know, go past a limit of emails, something like that.

And so his main mail merge thing has been downloaded seven and a half million times.

And so if you assume like, you know, 5% conversion rate to paid, he's doing 1.5 million in AOR

just off of that one plugin, and he's got 13 more plugins.

So he's got like his whole set of things.

He's got this document management app called Document Studio, and it lets you create document

certificates and voices using Google Sheets.

And it's $79 million a year, $6 million downloads.

He's got a notification app, $49 a year.

He's got 10 million downloads.

He's got a YouTube app, $8 million downloads.

And then he creates one-off apps for big companies like Airbus, LinkedIn, Disney.

Even the U.S. Embassy has paid this guy to create custom G Suite things just for them.

Like if you kind of blend this all together, you start doing some estimates, like I DMed

the guy.

I was like, hey, can you confirm what the number is?

I don't want to say the wrong number, but I'm going to tell the story on the pod.

He didn't reply yet.

It's pretty safe to say this guy's doing more than 10 million a year, and it could be as

high as 25, 30 million if you're like really aggressive with how much he's getting from

the enterprise customers.

But somewhere between 10 and I'd say 25 million is a fairly safe bet.

And he's just building simple, useful things.

He had 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Is he famous for some reason?

Like what's, because a guy like this seems under the radar.

I think his blog has a good amount of traffic.

So I'm going to go open up his blog.

Yeah.

So his blog gets about 150,000 hits a month, visitors a month.

And so I think he probably just says, Hey, this is made by me, and then people go follow

him or something.

What's the tax rate in India?

Do you know, is it comparable to America or is it way worse or way better?

I don't know.

But I remember here at one point that only 2% of the Indian population paid taxes.

Really?

Like the majority of the population just simply didn't pay taxes.

This is a big problem in India because they're not banked either.

So it's like, there's no way to track anything.

Cash economy.

You don't have a bank account.

It's like, it's not for me.

It does not exist.

Yeah.

Taxes.

No, it's not for me.

But I think that might have changed.

This was like 10 years ago.

I heard that stat and I was like, what the hell?

So I'm sure that's changed over time.

Dude, what a baller.

You know, this is so great.

I think that the reason it's great is because it kind of breaks your frame on what's possible

because he's like, when you're in Google docs, there's so many times where I'm like, man,

I wish I just do this one thing.

This is just one very, very specific thing.

And I would never think this should be a product because I'm like, it's just me experiencing

one tiny issue that if I learned how to program or learned how to do like this other thing,

it would work perfectly fine.

And this little, you know, thing is only going to save me five minutes.

It's not a big deal.

But this is a good example of that.

I like this guy.

What's the, who's Carl Allen?

All right.

This is my Billy of the week.

Million dollars isn't cool.

You know what's cool?

A billion dollars.

This story is kind of incredible.

Also came to me from a Twitter DM is Twitter handle is Euro rep A R E P E. So Euro rep

A he goes, I got ability of the week for you Carl Allen.

He goes sold a garbage bag company for 400 million now a full time treasure hunter in

the Bahamas.

Okay.

So who is this guy?

You know, like, I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones, but in Game of Thrones, it's

like a song of ice and fire.

This is a song of garbage and treasure.

This is this guy basically is kind of an insane story.

It's very hard to even find information about this guy.

I don't know if you looked him up, but there's not a lot.

The only thing like they didn't cover his business.

They cover the fact that he was buying like a huge yacht, which is a great sign of it's

about his yacht.

Yeah.

So, so all right.

So here's what I do know.

All right.

So Carl Allen, he basically he starts off working at this company called Heritage Bag and Heritage

Bag makes plastic trash bags.

So like they do it not just like normal trash bags, but like for medical waste or like hospital

waste, but they'll make like anything that's like, you know, ice bucket liners, you know,

the like, they'll make takeout boxes, anything that's like mass production manufacturing for

for like this really core utility, very similar to like eggcartons.com, the story that we

told them the pod before.

And so medical waste bags is their thing.

He actually started off just like working there and he worked kind of like it's like

one of those stories we worked his way up from the mail room.

He had like one job, then he climbed up, then he got into business development, then became

the director of business development, then eventually he becomes the CEO and eventually

he buys the company.

And I don't know how he pulled this off.

I tried to find this, I could not find how this employee ended up owning the company,

but he did.

He ends up owning the company and it's a boring business based in Dallas, you know, selling

trash bags and he sells it for something like $300 or $400 million to I think a private

equity firm.

So they've got 800 employees, they've been around for 30, 40 years, something like that.

And they sell.

And so they, you know, they do this and then he's like, all right, what do I do with my

life now?

And at the age of 12, he had visited the Bahamas and he was like, wow, I love the Bahamas.

This is just a magical place.

He always had this idea.

And so he looks at this place, this island and he calls up the owner and he's like, hey,

you know, would you ever be interested in selling?

They're like, no, we've been asked before, we won't sell this thing.

It's a 92 year old woman.

She's like, no, we won't sell it to some big corporation that's just going to ruin it.

He goes, no, no, no, ma'am, I'm not a big corporation.

I'm a family guy.

I'm a family owned business.

I'm just a rich guy.

I'm just a guy with a handful of yachts and I need a place to park them.

And basically he convinces this woman to sell.

They sell 50 years after they had originally bought it.

He buys this island and he turns it into like his own little fishing, boating and exploring

place.

So he's got now three parts of his business.

He's got philanthropy, he's got his family office where he invests and now he's got his

island business, his yachting business, his fishing business and he owns a handful of

yachts.

He's got like 130 foot yacht at 80 foot yacht.

He calls it an exploration business.

Well, he's got his exploration business, but I think he also calls it investing his exploration

business.

I don't know.

It's a little confusing, but Alan exploration, I think is one of them.

But either way, go to his YouTube channel.

Did you watch any of his YouTube videos?

Sick.

You guys, the guy's amazing.

Let me tell you a story about a young man with a dream.

A dream of sailing the sea, living life with the ones he loves, discovering all the world

has to offer, a dream of exploration.

It only has 41,000 views.

And it's basically his channel where he is, he believes that there are billions of dollars

of lost treasures in the sea.

He's like, there have been three million shipwrecks.

He's like, and when something is lost at sea, it's not lost.

It's just at the bottom.

Like he's like, it's still there.

It didn't go anywhere.

It's still there.

And we just have to go find it.

And he did this because he met some guy who was a treasure hunter who had made millions

of dollars finding treasures in the ocean.

And he was fascinated by this guy and he's like, let's do this.

I want to do this.

And so he started doing this and he's looking for like these treasures where it's like King

Philip from Spain had this like, you know, Armada coming over and it got lost at sea

back in the whatever, you know, the year 1200 or whatever.

And he's like, we got to go find that because there were these like crazy gold things and

whatever.

And he wants to create a museum of the things that he finds.

And he's found a bunch of treasures.

He's found this long gold chain.

He's found like all kinds of stuff down there.

And he puts it in his little museum on his island in the Bahamas.

And it's just like, and it's a public, it's a private island.

I mean, he owns it, but he keeps it open to the public.

It's not like nobody can come.

And so people can come, they can visit, they can park their boats there, all that stuff.

So isn't this kind of amazing?

Like what a dope life this guy is living.

This is amazing for a couple of different reasons.

One, it's so fun to give in to these obsessions.

So you say like, well, what's the point of spending your life looking for treasure?

It's like, cause it's sick, cause it's awesome, right?

Like it's exciting.

That's an exciting chase.

You should do that.

And it is actually, I'm sure there's something like historical value.

I actually had a guy send me a pitch deck on investing in his like hunt.

And I was like, no, I'm not even gonna know.

No way.

Yeah.

I was like, not, not a chance.

Like I don't know anything about this.

This sounds like this.

Of course this sounds intoxicating and I love it, but like I have to avoid that.

But number two, I've been thinking about this phrase, make the, make 12 year old me, make

12 year old Sam proud.

And cause I remember like making some money and I remember someone being like, and I was

like, what's fretting over like doing one thing or the other thing.

And it was an awesome thing, but I was like, it costs too much and someone's like, yeah,

but it's sick.

Like it's awesome.

Like what, like, you know, when you were 12, this is what you always wanted to do.

And I'm like, you're right.

Why am I being such a boner?

I should just do this thing.

And, and now like I do think that's a good life motto, which is like, whatever 12 year

old you wanted, not all things, but some things you got to give into those indulgences.

And this guy is awesome.

I'm a big fan of that.

Well, we get this question a lot.

Oh, what would you go back and tell your 20 year old self?

Right.

Well, if you were 21 again, what advice would you give your 21 year old self if you hate

that question?

I know you hate that question because I say, no, they say, if you had a start over again,

what would you do?

I would have done the same thing because that's what I'm skilled at.

And that's what I'm good at.

You want, you want me to give you an easy answer like I don't know what you're good

at.

Right.

And so you're like, that's the question people always ask, but I, I'm with you.

I want the opposite, which is what advice would your 21 year old self give you?

Because it's very easy to lose the plot.

The older you get, the more responsible you get, the more practical you get, the more

like you get lower energy, less risk, all that stuff.

And there's like a version of you that's like, I don't know if it's 12 year old or the 21

year old, but in either case that like the goal was to have the most fun and do awesome

things.

And it wasn't thinking about like how to save for retirement.

That's not, that wasn't on your mind back then.

And so I think that for most people, the risk is not that they're playing life too risky.

It's that they're playing life way too safe.

And that the 12 year old view or the 21 year old view, you would look at yourself and be

like, Oh man, I grew up and I got kind of lame.

Oh, damn, like, I'm just kind of like this out of shape guy who complains a bunch and

like, you know, it's like saving money for when they're even older.

Like, dude, you're already old.

And so like, you know, I think that for most people, they actually need to go the other

way.

They need to have more fun.

They need to live more childlike.

They need to have just more silliness, fun adventure in their life.

And they need to take a little more risk and play less safe.

I would say that that is the majority of people.

And actually people treat it like it's the opposite.

They think the advice is you need to be responsible, you need to play it safe, right?

Life needs to be more serious.

And it's like, no, actually life needs to be way less serious.

Have you ever seen that one of the very, it's about 10 years old.

So it was one of the early viral YouTube videos and this, this guy, he's in his 30 at this

point in his 40s, he, when he was eight, he recorded himself saying, Hey Jonah, what's

going on?

And he, he's like, as an eight year old anticipated that he wanted to make a video in his 30s

where he was going to have a conversation with himself and he's like, are you still playing

with this?

And he like held up a toy and he was like, and the older Jonah was like, no, I'm not.

And he's clearly sad.

And the younger Jonah was like, because you really love doing this.

And we love drawing it and we love reading cartoons about this.

And right now I think I want to grow up and be a cartoonist where I talk about this.

And the older Jonah's like, Oh man, I kind of like quit doing that when I didn't have

time, but I actually still love it.

And this video went viral and I believe it kind of kicked off his career where he was

able to start making movies and cartoons like he used to be into.

And whenever I watched that video, I get inspired.

I'm like, what would, when I was eight, like, what would you say like, well, you said you're

going to do this.

Why aren't you?

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Right.

And I actually, I don't think the answer is, you do what the 12-year-old, you want it

to do.

Because maybe the 12-year-old, you just wanted certain dumb things or only knew about certain

things.

But it's more like, if I was just explaining this to the 12-year-old me, would they nod

and be like, okay, that's dope.

I didn't know that.

Hopefully, you know, that's crazy.

But like, that makes a lot of sense.

Like that sounds awesome.

That sounds fun versus like, just do what the 12-year-old wants.

And I think you're absolutely right that like people, in general, the happiest people are

the ones who are most childlike.

Why?

What are the traits of a child?

A child is generally very curious about the world.

They don't just like think that they know it all, right?

A child is generally like looking to have fun.

They're looking to play, not just work and grind, right?

Like, you know, like, I've never heard a 12-year-old on that grind set, you know, like, 12-year-olds

are looking to play.

They're looking to have a blast.

And like, guess what?

That's what you should be trying to do too.

And so, you know, everything.

And I think about, like, if I went back to the 13-year-old me and I was like, dude, this

is our wife.

And they'd be like, what?

They'd say, yeah.

Like, yeah, we get to be with her.

Like, she likes me.

And he would be like, oh, dude, awesome.

Like, this is amazing.

Wow, this turned out amazing.

That would be like something I would brag to my 13-year-olds up like, dude, we pulled

this.

Like, that would be so sick.

You get to have sex?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, yeah, dude, it happened.

Okay.

So, an update on Sarah's list.

For those who are new to the pod, back, I don't know, how long ago was this?

Like a year ago?

Only a year ago.

I was in New York.

Yeah.

It was a year.

So, let me go look at this video.

So, we did a video.

It's on YouTube.

September, oh, almost exactly.

September 17th, 2021.

It's September 19th today.

Wow.

So, basically, a year to the day, we did this thing, 12 startups where stock grants can make

you a millionaire.

And this was inspired by your wife, Sarah, who basically was a self-made millionaire.

And we said, oh, how'd she do it?

Did she invent the next big thing?

Did she make this crazy investment that paid off?

And you're like, no, she just like worked at good companies and like a good job, not

she wasn't CEO or C-suite, she was just like, normal job at a good tech company.

And like, yeah, like think about it this way, like, you know, they give you a job offer

that will pay you, you know, let's say 50K, just to use round numbers, 50K a year in

stock compensation.

So, maybe you make 150, then you get 50 of stock.

So, over four years, you got 200K of stock.

Well, if that company goes up 5X in value during those four years, which many tech companies

do, it's a million dollars of stock that you got.

And a lot of these companies will give you like maybe $100,000 a year in stock.

Exactly.

So, in these case, that I don't know what it went up, I think it probably went up five

or six times, I don't remember.

And your wife had done this at Facebook, she worked at Facebook, she worked at Airbnb,

did she work at another one over those?

She worked at Everlane, but I don't think they've had an exit yet.

And so, she had done this, and I was just like kind of, and it's also like, dude, those

were obvious.

It's not like she was like, oh, she was one of the first 10 employees at Airbnb.

It's like, no, she joined at Airbnb, had how many employees?

It was like hundreds, it's not thousands, right?

No, I think it was either 900 or 1,000.

It was six years ago, maybe, so they weren't new.

And do you remember the valuation at that time?

Like roughly, it was worth like...

I think it was 18.

I think it was 18 billion, and when they IPOed at the peak, I think it was worth 110.

100 million.

Okay, yeah, 100 billion.

So, let's say 5X there at that peak.

And so, anyway, so she had done this, and I just thought that was amazing.

I thought this is like the most under-reported story in like podcasts or tech news or Twitter.

Nobody talks about this.

You're missing one of the big parts.

The reason it's under-reported is it's not that unique.

There's thousands of people who work here.

There's hundreds of thousands of people who collectively work at it.

Maybe it's millions, actually, millions of people who work these types of gigs.

By the way, she's not a programmer either.

She's not like an engineer, and there's not like some barrier that you need it.

Oh, I can't do it.

I don't know how to code.

I can't work at a tech company.

She's a non-technical person.

She's skilled, but she's non-technical at a tech company.

And so, anyways, we basically made a list called Sarah's List, which was what are the

dozen companies that we would bet on today that we think, if you just went, you got that

job, you got that stock package that's worth, let's say, a quarter million dollars today,

that that can 4X, it could turn into a million dollars over your four-year vest.

Are we going to recap this and see how we did?

Yes.

Sick.

Yeah.

I have the numbers here.

So, I'm going to read you the companies, and then I'm going to read you where we were

right, where we were wrong, because one of the companies on here just got acquired.

So, the reason this came up was Figma just got acquired, and Figma was on our list.

It was number seven on our list.

They weren't in order.

It was just like one of the ones we listed, and Figma got acquired just now for $20 billion.

And when we had done the thing, Figma was at $2 billion, so that was a 10X.

Was it really?

Yeah.

Figma was at $2 billion later.

Like 12 months later, it got valued at, or sorry, in between, it had also gotten valued

at $10 billion.

So, it kind of depends on the timing.

But when we did the pod, the last known valuation was $2 billion, I believe.

Wow.

And so, that was their Series D. So, yeah, so, basically, that's a 10X from where we

were at.

So, you go get that $200,000, you know, stock package, you're now sitting on $2 million.

Yeah.

The vest over four years.

So, a $200,000 stock package is $50,000 a year, which is incredibly reasonable for...

That's like a, yeah, more like an entry-level...

It's a table stage.

Very junior position there, whereas you can get $100,000 a year, so you might have had

$400,000 in total stock, that'd be $4 million that you're sitting on.

It's so hard to make $4 million in cash, like it is not that easy.

And this is one of the easier ways to do it.

So, I think that's kind of underrated.

All right.

So, let me give you the new companies on the list.

We had Flexport, Zapier, Uniswap, Andoril, the defense company, Replet, the developer

tools company, or the developer company, Airtable, Figma, Rippling, OpenStore, Fair, NextHealth,

and OneTrust.

Okay.

So, those are the companies.

Now, I'm going to read you where they were at and where they are now.

Out of the 12, I'll just tell you right now that all but two of them, I believe, all but

two of them are up.

And the other two, it's just they haven't raised another round, so we don't know, but

there's a reason to believe where they might be up.

One Uniswap might be down just because crypto has gone down in total value.

So, Uniswap might be down, but only Zapier and Uniswap are not marked up.

So, already you're up if you're in any of these.

And Zapier is not marked up because their whole shtick is they don't want to raise, they're

like we bootstrap, we raise this one round of funding, we're not raising anymore until

we go public.

Exactly.

So, you're still likely up, it's just not marked.

Okay.

So, Flexport, when we had done it, it was at $3 billion, it's now at $8 billion.

So, almost a 3x markup.

Okay, Zapier and Uniswap, we talked about, okay, Andarill, when we talked about it, it

was a $4.6 billion, now it's at $6.6 billion.

So, not a huge markup, but you're up, you know, whatever, 50%.

Replet.

Replet, when we had done it, when we had talked about it, I think the last known valuation

at that time was $200 million.

It raised again at $800 million.

I invested in that round, so I know that it's actually worth more today because I get emails

and phone calls from these groups that are trying to buy my Replet stock.

They're like, hey, we are willing to buy $5 million, up to $5 million of your Replet stock.

And so, I think that Replet's probably valued today on the open market more than $800 million,

but that's the last one they've known at.

So, at least a 4x markup, likely more like 8x is my guess on Replet.

Air table.

Air table was at $2 billion when we did it, 2.3.

It's now at $11.

So, a 5x, 5x jump on, on, on air table.

Figma, we just talked about $2 billion, now it's got bought for $20, so $10x.

Rippling was $6 billion when we talked about it.

It's now at $11, so double.

Open store was $250 million when we talked about it, and that was the only exception.

It was the one that was lowest when we talked about it as an evaluation.

It's now at $750 million.

What was it when we started?

$250.

And now it's what?

$750.

Wow.

$750.

Fair.

Fair was at $7 billion.

It's now at $12.5.

So, a little under double.

Next health was at $400 million.

Now it's at $1 billion, so a little more than double, 2.5x.

And one trust was at $2.7 billion, now at $5 billion, $5.3 billion, so another 2x.

Pretty good.

I think we did good.

Yeah.

All right.

Good.

Yo, where's my Larry David foot?

Pretty good.

It's pretty.

Pretty.

Pretty.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

Keep in mind, we made these predictions at the beginning of the best tech bull market,

not of all time, but a really good one.

So a lot of these valuations could be completely nonsense, you know, like at that time, we

could have thrown at a dartboard and picked 10 random startups and the likelihood that

they would raise this.

And now it's down, but the valuations I'm giving you are the afters or all 2022 valuations?

Wow.

All right.

So a few takeaways.

One, exponential growth, hard to completely understand.

Like thinking like, can this two or three or four X?

For most people, myself included, it's an exercise to understand what that means.

Okay.

So basically, you're right.

Exponential growth is astounding.

And so you look at these companies, I've talked about this before where when we were getting

acquired, we had a chance to get Discord stock.

And I was like, oh, Discord is valued at 2 billion.

Wow.

It's already at 2 billion.

It's like, well, we need to believe for us to take this deal.

It's like, well, we need to think that it's going to get over 6 billion.

I don't know.

Its last valuation was 15 billion.

So even me, who's in the industry, in the space.

I am a tech investor.

It's just hard to fathom these companies becoming worth, not just billions, but tens of billions,

not just tens of billions, but even up to 100 billion in value.

That is just very, very hard to fathom.

Here's Figma's growth.

And the reason why this is astounding is because I heard what their valuation was, which was

10 billion.

I thought, that is ridiculous.

I heard these numbers and then I thought, huh, that's actually not that crazy.

So in 2017, they started charging customers in 2018.

They're at 4.1 million in revenue in 2019, 23 million, 2020, 77 million, 2021, 100 million.

And check this out, 2022 goal.

And they're on pace to hit it $450 million.

So in the course of six years, they went from zero to $450 million in very recurring revenue.

And their product does everything.

But just look at some of those jumps.

What were the first jumps?

So it goes zero.

Then it goes from zero to what?

Two or four?

So here's the order, four, 25, 75.

And then this sucked 100.

And then 450, 100 to 450 is astronomical.

That is huge.

Yeah.

I think there's like a thing in SaaS that SaaS investors look for is called triple, triple,

double, double.

I don't know if you see this, but basically it's like.

Yeah.

They like triple, triple, double, triple, triple.

Well, they did more than a triple.

They did from four to 20, something that's 5X.

So they did more than a triple.

Then they did 20 to 75, 25 to 75 or whatever.

Then they did a triple for five, five, triple.

And then they did double.

And then they did another double, then they did another 4.5.

It's just kind of insane.

It's crazy.

So, and obviously helped by like, you know, remote work, because like Figma is basically

like a tool for designers and product people to share designs, like, you know, a designer

will send me a mockup.

I add my comments.

I can move stuff around.

I can see their mouse moving.

It's almost like we're working on the same thing together right next to each other, even

though we're miles and miles apart.

And by the way, amazing story.

This is also another Teal Fellowship win.

And so this guy started this thing when he was 21 years old, like 1920, 21 years old.

And there was like a five year buildup where they didn't make any revenue.

He was just building the product slowly, but surely, and then got to a private beta and

then a public beta and then finally started charging people.

You know, I think the company was founded like 2011.

And then it started making money in 2017.

Even if I had this idea, there is no way five years later, I'm still doing this idea in

the middle of that.

And by the way, there was the ICO boom in crypto in 2017, you know, guess where my head

would have turned if I had been like, oh, whoa, I should be doing that over there, right?

In between, then there's like, you know, just waves and waves of other interesting, exciting,

sexy things.

And he just didn't take his eye off the ball.

They just kept going, kept building, and they won.

So the two more things that are hard to understand.

The first one I said was it's hard to understand exponential growth.

Number two, it always seems late.

So if I bet a lot of reactions, if we go and read the comment section was this seems overvalued,

this is already too big, you know, there's no meat out left on this bone.

It always seems too late.

And that goes back to exponential growth is hard to understand.

So like, if I told you like your home that you're in right now might be worth $10 million

in 20 years, you'd be like, there's no way.

And you say, well, that's just like, you know, 4% growth for the next 20 years and it's already

grown 4% for the trailing 50 years.

Like, okay, I understand logically, but like when you say that number, it's quite hard

to understand.

And the last thing, which is every startup we named, it's not like they're unknown.

It's all pretty obvious shit.

If you Googled best startups to work at, I bet you six of the 12 that we named were

on some type of list.

And granted, we're not playing with our lives here.

We're just naming 12 things and we got 10 out of 12, right?

You know, like if you're in that 11th or 12th one that might stink, but like we're not that

smart.

We're 7.5 out of 10 in terms of industry knowledge.

Yeah, totally.

And so I think there's a couple other takeaways with this too, which is you said it right.

It's really easy to think you're too late on these tech winners.

And what I would say is when there's actually a tech winner, when they actually have the

fundamentals, they have a great product and they're winning in the market and their growth

rate is like, you know, real.

These things can get a lot bigger than you think.

I remember reading when Facebook got valued at 15 billion by Microsoft and they had like

no revenue at the time, or they had like, I don't know, maybe a few hundred million

in revenue, but it wasn't like, it just seemed like, how big is this social network thing

going to be?

And like, if somebody at that time was saying, and I'm sure there were a few people, but

some of the time saying, yeah, this is going to end up being a trillion dollar company.

I'd be like, is there such a thing as a trillion dollar company?

That's insane.

Right?

Like I've told the story before, one of the biggest mistakes I made, one of the worst investments

I made was an investment I made right.

And that means I invested in Tesla and Tesla was at 2 billion.

And I put all the money I had straight out of college, I put it into Tesla at 2 billion.

And I wrote it up till it was at 7 billion or something like that.

And I cashed out at 3X.

And I remember at the time thinking, okay, General Motors and these other, whoever the

biggest ones at the time, I think they were at 20 something billion, maybe they're 25

billion.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but something like that.

And I was like, one day Tesla could be, you know, half as big or maybe even as big as

those companies.

It just seemed like that was the roof.

That was the ceiling on how big these could be.

And then Tesla went up and became at one point a trillion dollar company.

Now it's come back down to like, you know, whatever half.

But my 2 billion could have been become a trillion basically in terms of multiple.

What would you have made you think?

How much did you put in 25,000?

Yeah, I had like 25 grand in it.

And so what's that?

Something like that.

Is that a hundred?

I can't even do that.

Is that 200?

I done the math at one point and this wasn't the peak.

But at one point it was like, I would have had $6 million from that 25K.

It was like a great angel investment.

And again, this felt late.

Like Tesla was already out successful Elon Musk was a, he's not what he is today, but

he was a known person, right?

Like I'm talking about this was back in probably 2013 ish 2012, something like that.

Dude, we should do another one of these episodes because I think there's a lot of great companies

right now that valuations are low where in 10 or 15 years when there's another great

market, things will be drastically different.

You know, this will be one of those things where you're saying in 10 years you're going

to wish you would have done what we're suggesting, right?

And we should do another one.

I think we should.

I even had people build me like a website for this, like a sick looking website.

I think we should do this.

Me and you, I think should own a job board called Sarah's List and we should just keep

this updated.

What did you think that I tweeted?

I tweeted out.

I was like, yeah, like, I think this is a great way to make wealth where's like, but like

researching these is a bit challenging.

And that tweet got seen by millions, not millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people

and a lot of really good replies.

And there were some cool things, startups that were mentioned and different job boards,

but nothing where it's like perfect, where, where, where, where, where I think it needs

to be.

But yeah, I agree.

All right.

I think that's it.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Episode 365: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) give an update on "Sara's List." Sam Parr's wife, Sara, came up with a list of 12 established startups who had the potential to 5-10x over the next 5 years. Find out how much these companies are worth today. And a new Billy of the Week.
-----
Links:
* Amit Agarwal
* Carl Allen
* Carl Allen's YT channel
* "Sara's List" YT
* Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.
* Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter.
------
Show Notes:
(01:40) - Millionaire from Google plugins
(07:35) - Billy of the Week
(13:20) - Make your 12-year old self proud
(19:15) - Update on "Sara's List"
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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
-----
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• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
* #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
• ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
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