Shaan Puri on the triangle of talent, counter-positioning brands, and how creators should buy companies instead of running ads

Summary

Shaan Puri — co-host of My First Million, serial entrepreneur, and investor — makes the case that the smartest play for creators isn't running ads or launching their own brands. It's buying companies.

His own model: rather than taking sponsorship dollars from Somewhere.com, an offshore hiring platform, he bought equity in it. When he acquired his stake, the business was generating seven figures of profit annually. It's now at eight figures. The mechanism is simple — he brought distribution the company didn't have, and the company brought operations he didn't need to run. He describes it as marrying media and private equity, two industries that each understand exactly what the other lacks.

Epic Gardening is his clearest external example. Kevin, the channel's founder, has built a large YouTube following around gardening and used it as the acquisition engine — buying a seed company, then using his audience to accelerate revenue. Chernin Group backed him with tens of millions of dollars to do it at scale. Puri thinks Kevin could build a billion-dollar business as a gardening YouTuber, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Doug DeMuro's Cars & Bids follows the same logic.

Puri's view is that most creators are still making the wrong trade — monetizing through ads or launching their own brands, which requires them to be operators. The better path is taking equity stakes and letting world-class operators run the business while the creator provides distribution.

Triangle of talent

The framework came from Puri's experience selling his company and becoming an employee at Twitch. Every CEO, he argues, carries an implicit trust score for each person on their team — not a job title, but a read on whether someone identifies problems independently, solves them without instruction, and can manage others through complex work. The people at the top of that score get the raises and the new projects. Gravity pulls acquired founders downward toward task-execution mode, and fighting it requires actively seeking out the biggest unsolved problems rather than doing what you were bought to do.

His Twitch example is concrete. A colleague named Hubar had been flagging a sharp drop in Twitch's Brazilian market share that nobody was acting on. The cause was mobile game streaming — something Twitch had internally written off after early experiments failed. Puri pivoted to that problem instead of the work he was assigned, and it became the project that mattered.

Counter-positioning as brand strategy

All positioning is counter-positioning. The word that matters most in any brand statement, Puri argues, is "but" — the point of difference against whatever is already in the consumer's mind. A restaurant that says it's healthy and fresh blends in. A yoga pants brand that says it's premium athleisure but no microplastics has positioned against Lululemon specifically. Lists of attributes create muddy drinks. A single, clear contrast creates a brand.

He also argues that brands only get credit for what's genuinely weird about them. The list of unusual, even controversial things a brand does is the actual asset. If that list is short, there's nothing to talk about.

AI as speed, not new leverage

Puri doesn't frame AI as a new category of leverage — he puts it in the same bucket as Naval Ravikant's existing four: people, capital, code, and media. What AI changes is speed and iteration volume. He's writing a book right now using Claude, feeding it a folder with an outline, writing samples, and a style guide, then iterating drafts without the friction of managing a human collaborator. He got a full draft in a single night. The value he adds is taste and curation at the end — not generation.

His broader information diet philosophy is the same logic applied to inputs. He tries to spend as much time as possible with "kids, dogs, and dead people" — children for imagination and playfulness, dogs for unconditional presence, and dead people meaning old books, archived videos, and forgotten memos. A 2004 Max Levin video with 89 YouTube views over a trending X post. The goal is to avoid the tech ecosystem problem of everyone consuming the same content and calling themselves contrarians.