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

think we got him here in the temple of Technology welcome what is going on gentlemen what's going on there he is hey there he is good to see you look you're looking fantastic you you got the lighting you got the real mic are you look like a professional yeah clearly a professional I I had to show up right I wanted to come here and just lay down a gaunlet I'm not a technology brother but I would like to be the technology cousin perhaps technology Uncle I'm I'm still workshopping names but I honestly like I like Uncle Uncle is hilarious you've got that sort of Elder you know Elder Statesman that's what I'm that's what I'm going be like uh yeah no that's perfect that's fantastic it's great to have you on and the audio is and I I hate to uh you know throw shade at Justin Mars who was on five minutes ago but it's just night and day difference it's it's great to have the the sound yeah a real professional on a gentleman scholar it's not my first podcast Gentlemen let's go uh what's on your mind today what you know maybe let's start there I don't think we need to introduce you uh we can just dive right into it oh I just think what you guys are doing is genius so I needed to first come on and give you some flowers for that thank you uh I think Innovative is an understatement I think we need to just acknowledge what is actually happening here the Andrew tape might have been the first but you guys are the second to say hey I'm G to create a podcast and it doesn't the podcast is nothing the podcast is just feed stock for the shorts for the clips and uh that that is a core core Insight that you guys have pounced on you're doing great with The Branding uh love it love everything you're doing that's what Jord said he said I want to be the Andrew Tate of technology and so I said I can make that happen I have experience in YouTube and John is also John's John's dream is to be a Harry Harry Potter fan Harry Potter fan fiction yes that's the ri we have going oh well we can talk Harry Potter I can go deep on Harry Potter if you want but Jordy I think that Andrew Tate is trying to be the Jordy of you know felons and or whatever he does cam girl sites well you know the funny thing it was it was weird timing but Andrew Tate showed back up in the US and then there was that loss suit against uh passes and that was sort of like potentially convenient timing it seems like he might be you know kind of coming trying to enter the US market competition is for losers any we don't want to compare ourselves regulatory capture yeah uh I I actually so one of the things I'm like super curious about you're uh content creator yourself uh you know you have the podcast uh what what's like what's your what's your information diet like some something that John and I talk about a lot is is our show is heavily based on what's happening right now what the current thing is we obviously focus on X as a platform but if you're only consuming content on X then you're not injecting anything sort of new um and you're just like part of the hive mind how do you think about your information diet and kind of where where do you spend your time uh kind of coming up with with ideas yeah it's a great question I I think that uh the in the information diet is probably like today something that only nerds like us talk about but is going to become a very popular concept as people realize that it's garbage in garbage out so um what you know I think the problem that the tech guys have is you uh we will all go consume not necessarily garbage content but just the same content right so we're all on X we're all reading the same things we listening to all in and listen to the same podcast and then guess what you have the same thoughts as everybody else and like while calling yourself a contrarian right it doesn't really make sense and so you know for me I do a couple of things so I have I have a phrase that I like which is um kids dogs and dead people and I want to spend as much of my time as I can with kids dogs and dead people and uh you know so what does that mean kids will teach you a certain set of things so kids kids are highly uh playful they they work with their imagination a lot they're completely delusional they have no idea of what's realistic and what's not and so the more time you spend with kids the more playful you become the more imaginative you become the more delusional you become so I take that from them uh dogs are sort of these unconditional lovers right dogs are are always always down always loyal always happy um they are they're there for you in every way and so you know pick that up from dogs and the last is the dead people so how do I how do I change my ratio of tweets to books right because you know long form as as everyone gets interested in consuming long form I sort of wanted to go the opposite way uh sorry people get interested in consuming short form I want to consume as much long form as I can so old whether it's old videos on YouTube like I watched this thing with Max Levin from like 2004 talking about and I was like this is fantastic and it has like you know 89 views on YouTube and so you you start to get excited about being a a collector of of of pieces right it's like oh this is a a wonderful old memo uh you know when they first pitched PowerPoint at Microsoft or this is a this is a great book I I read this book recently called um talk like what was it it was uh St like Lincoln talk like Church Hill it was about like public speaking and just being a goddamn man and the way you show up to things and I was like this is fantastic and so I'm trying to spend as much as I as much time as I can with dead people it's great great answer uh can you take us through the triangle of talent I really love this we printed this off here because I think it's a fantastic framework for elevating Talent within an organization we're a small company here but uh I I I wanted like what inspired you to S to to map this out this way and and what do you think people are taking away from it how's the reception been every blog post I write is just a pot shot at somebody it's an annoyance from an employee in my company and then I'm like you know what I'm gonna write this over here I hope you read this I hope you really understand this that's the the honest truth is irritation is the the the itch and Innovation is the scratch as I like to say you know Steve Jobs had a line we we just talked about earlier on the show he told his team I hope what you just did makes you hate each other yeah you should hate each other doing this because they messed up the mobile yeah the email sinking and it went so poorly that Apple was looking terrible in 2008 and he was like you guys should hate each other for this right it's so bad anyway so so the the real insight here actually came when uh I sold my company so I sold my company and I went from CEO to now I was an employee yeah so you know I'm on the other side of the table and I was trying to figure out like oh this is interesting like now I have a boss I have a manager what does this guy care about how does he think about me and like what like what's this Dynamic like and what I realized was that in every company um there's like this little number floating above your head and it's your trust score it's like what you know that movie where it's like how many days you have left to die or whatever and people could you could see it on each other's forehead or something like that very Black Mirror yeah it's like a Black Mirror like death node or something like that yeah so the the thing I realized was that basically for the CEO they look at all their employees and there's just a trust score and the trust score is basically like can I can I trust you to um be watching out for problems and identifying them yourself or am I going to have to deliver like the issues to you I'm going to have to be the one telling you hey we got to solve this and then if I even if I did do that to if I gave you the problem do I trust that you'd be able to solve it do I trust that you could manage like a group of people in solving this or is can I only give you things that are like small bite-sized where you can alone do it right um do I have to give you the instructions on how to solve it or could you figure it out right so everybody's got this trust gor you want to be at 100% right like you want to be at 100 and those are the people ultimately they get they get the raises they get the opportunities when the new thing comes up that's who you put on the project is the people you trust the most and really like your trust score goes far beyond like your job title um and and I realized this when I was working with EMT at twitch yeah and so then in my own companies I sort of realized like okay could I like assign some numbers to that score could I assign some levels to that score and so yeah that's where the triangle comes from I don't know if you want me to like say what the level I'd love to know like obviously when you're the CEO if you're selling your company you're probably operating at level five Superstar but then you go into twitch you said it was a very different environment did you feel yourself moving downward towards like level four level three there's gravity gravity is moving you downwards right because you're supposed to you know like you if you go to these big companies you're not the CEO of the founder anymore not all the problems don't roll up to you all the opportunities aren't your decision whether you're going to do them or not and so gravity is kind of pulling you down to get to like kind of like a level three which is like a bit bit of a you're just a sort of a task doer or you can or maybe you can manage a team of people to do to do a set of tasks but I was just like trying to fight that so like I had a great conversation with my buddy Furon when we got Acquired and he goes he was pulled up the company metrics like the company dashboard and he's like the CEO view basically and he's like which one of these numbers do you think our project will move and I was like I like I was just thinking of they bought our company to do X we should come here and do X and what he was arguing was like cool that made sense when we were trying to sell this company to them of course we wanted to say how big of a deal it was but now that we're here we're on the same team we should just be more objective like is our thing going to move any of these metrics and he goes don't you just think like whatever we do while we're here we should just be able to move one of these kpis like five or 10 per.

and like we should just make that our budget like we're not going to do a project if it can't move the needle five or 10% on one of the like the core metrics usage Revenue um you know profits right so and I looked at what we were doing it was never going to do that even if we did it really well it would never have moved any of those metrics and so I literally just didn't do any of the work I was supposed to do for about a month I just started walking around the office asking people like what's going on over here like what are what are the problems are you dealing with what's what's something that somebody should be doing that nobody's doing right now or what's something that's worrying you and our buddy hubar who sold curse to uh to Twitch he was there and he was like this guy who had been like ringing this Bell that nobody was listening to and he's like hey look at this our our market share in Brazil has dropped like dramatically and nobody cares nobody's doing anything about this um and he's like it's because Mobile gaming uh it's all mobile gaming over there streaming from their phone and we don't even have like the functionality to do that and internally at the company we had all written off mobile game streaming as like something that wasn't a thing because we tried it it didn't work nobody watched Candy Crush and we all moved on but hey something has changed and here's the data so we only started working on that so that was kind of my real life experience of not letting myself go from a level five to a level three cuz that's where the gravitational pull was and like trying to fight to be like no no no I'm only going to I'm going to try to identify the biggest problems and I'm going to try to go solve them that makes a ton of sense uh I want to talk about branding when we launched this show I was very obsessed with like the growth hacks and the quote tweets and the clips as you mentioned but you came to me and you said I think the fact that you guys have really thought about the brand and that Jordy was the one who really thought about the brand the most but um what is your playbook for developing a new brand what's your stack what who's in the room are you using AI tools is starting a PowerPoint or a dock or a Notes app like how do you think about developing a brand what are the best uh what are the best practices these days yeah it starts with a a very simple principle which is all positioning is counter positioning so you got to you want to position yourselves in the consumer's mind but it's always going to be relative to what's already in the consumer's mind so you might say we are a restaurant we make food that's healthy and fresh it's like great but everybody says the same thing so not only have you Blended in but you're not counter per to anything versus if you say um we make yoga pants like Lululemon except for ours aren't full of microplastics right now you've counter positioned against lud lemon so you say we're ath athleisure we're premium but no microplastics right so it's the butt that matters the most whereas everybody focuses on the things before the butt they're like totally we're this this this this and this yeah that too we're open source too yeah we do that too and they just try to add this long list and it becomes this very muddy drink and so I think what you guys did just look at your brand right so you guys are counterposed in a in a cool way right so first you're like very masculine brand so you're not neutral where I think most people are afraid um to have any sort of like like first of all masculinity was like not cool for a while now it's cool again it's on Trend but like um I think you guys do a good job you show up in suits so you're counter position you're not a podcaster in their bedroom uh wearing a hoodie right I wore my this is like a wedding outfit I had from like an old Indian wedding I was like I got aess right because you've created a brand that's that says that's how we behave here we're gentlemen here y right um You have this aesthetic right but it's all counterposed it would not work if every podcast already looked the way you look wouldn't be any you would get no credit yeah the the other the other example that's relevant is uh like there's a very popular podcast that we're fans of that uh notoriously does not run ads and it'll be obvious uh it's the number one technology podcast in the world they don't run ads so we came out and we said said we're going to run a bunch of ads yeah we're doing it for the money most most podcasters oh we just like the community just the reach and we happen to run ads and we were like we doing this for the money it's the most profitable podcast and it was it was you know fun it was just for fun um talk about there's one other in the branding thing that's important is you're only going to get credit for what's weird sure Mak sense you should make a list of what's weird about you or about your brand or that you do that's unusual that might even be like controversial even that it's unpopular or people say that's too far too much and so like if you want to have a br start writing a list of what's weird and if that list is only one or two things long you don't you're not going to have much really to talk about we we talked to a Founder yesterday at demo day who pitched and he just named his company Pig it's just called Pig and he's like I just like it was like I honestly thought it's a great name nobody's GNA forget I I don't remember any of the other names very hard to remember and I remember Pig uh it's a great name just roll around in mud yep um and I he does I mean he does like this like data integration like cleaning up like Legacy cold bases like very much like rolling around in the mud like he's not afraid to get you know dirty just solo founder just comes in and cleans up your code base he's just the pig talk about the opportunity around investing in creators and Creator businesses uh I think you've talked about M sort of the Mr Beast Empire quite a lot uh there's you know slow Ventures came out recently they have a dedicated Creator fund you are a Creator that's sort of creating value in all these different ways what do you think uh the opportunity is in that space and are you making Investments there yourself I think the bigger opportunity is the creators investing not investing in creators so you know like uh like our our business is very simple right so we uh we have this podcast my first million and it as it grew we had sponsors who wanted to come in and sponsor it and we said yes for a while we got really excited like oh my God this is crazy we're going to paid to talk but then you realize like media is a pretty [ __ ] business model and so the trick is to do media uh to build media's graded a c a few things right it's great at building brand and distribution and awareness and all those things but it's pretty terrible at monetizing and so the trick is to monetize with investing and so what we did was I would go private Equity style and I would buy I bought a piece of this business somewhere.

comom it's like a offshore hiring platform so you need talent in the Philippines or you want a developer in latam like get somebody for five times less than in the states right that's the pitch so instead of them just sponsoring us and me taking ad dollars and then them getting obviously some multiple of that otherwise why would they keep giving us ad dollars right they're clearly getting an Roi uh off of that I went and I actually just purchased a chunk of the company and said great now I own a piece of this company I own the equity in it and I will grow this company I could buy it even at a totally fair price right I don't need a deal because if it's at this much and when we bought that business it was making millions a year in profit so like it was already seven multiple seven figures of profit and now it's eight figures of profit right because I was able to grow that using my audience so I was my own private equity and the the beauty of this is that um media knows a lot about audience and distribution and growth but it knows nothing about private Equity private Equity knows a lot about doing deals and knows nothing about media and distribution and growth and so marrying the two together is what's actually happening so for MOSI is doing this right that's his model uh I'm doing this that's our model and so there there will be more people who do this right now what the creators are doing is they're just creating their own brand and they're they're trying to monetize by being operational I think the Smart Ones will eventually just take chunks of companies and uh let the operators like world-class operators do that work and they will be uh just doing deals what do you think of the Doug Muro cars and bids story it's one of my favorites but is it a one-off exception to the rule or do you think it's the start of something new and a bigger Trend no I mean that's going to keep happening right right now epic gardening is the best example of this you guys watching what he's doing no not really break it down okay so um epic gardening basically he's got this YouTube channel about freaking gardening right so he's like but it's great he's growing he's he's like I'm trying to grow like a new breed of zucchini and he's like trying to do and you look he's got this Farm whatever so he's uh so I think it's name Kevin so Kevin is doing this so what he's doing is he's uh he's amazing at content and he creeps creating really awesome content and then on the back end he started either building his own products or buying so he bought like a seeds company so there's a seed company was doing X dollars in Revenue already he's able to go acquire that company knowing he's got better distribution than that company has right he's got something they don't have he's got a giant megaphone to millions of people who are trying to learn gardening from him they like listen and trust him and so when he says use these seeds they're going to use those seeds when Jimmy says buy this chocolate they're going to buy that chocolate and so like that's the that's the model that they're doing that he's doing right now and so what happened is churnin went gave him tens of millions of dollars of money and what he's doing is both building up his own infrastructure and his own products but he's going out and being very acquisitive and he's acquiring companies that um you know his customers would his his audience would be customers of very simple model I think that guy if he does this right he could build a billion dollar company as a gardening YouTuber that's fantastic yeah Unthinkable a decade ago right yeah completely yeah I feel like churn in to their credit was like very early to that Trend like it seems like it's becoming very much a part of the zeit guyses now but I know they were doing it they were thinking about this stuff very intensely like almost a decade ago um how do you think about your own personal leverage in the age of AI you've been somebody that's had a lot of Leverage I think for a long time right you've sort of a a major shareholder in multiple businesses you have the audience you're starting new companies you're buying companies but um has your level of ambition sort of 10x you know with with some of these new technolog IES obviously the potential hasn't been fully you know isn't fully here but it's clearly coming and how does that impact sort of your personal road map and how you're thinking about your career yeah that's a big question you know I think for me over time uh you're right that like you start to learn the The Leverage game okay so what is the leverage game The Leverage game is um with the same or even fewer inputs can you get more outputs right it's a magic trick I I put less effort in or I put less time in or I put less capital in can I get more more out and so how do you do it nval says it well he says you know there's the old ways of Leverage which would be like you know people so you you hire people they do the work so you know uh you hire you hire them you get you know thousands of hours of of work done by other people great there's Capital which is investing cool so I've you know been doing that but now he's like there's the new ones there's code and there's media right code is you know basically a a worker that will work you know like what do you think about a landing page right a landing page is basically a Salesman that's you know awake 247 giving the perfect pitch that you told them to give with no sick days to every customer everywhere in the world and can do thousands of customers at once that's what a landing page is so that's leverage and that's code uh and now media is what we do with the podcast so yeah I've been dabbling with these different things with AI I don't think it's like an uh I don't think it's an entirely new form of Leverage it's more speed and Reps so I'll give you an example right now I I have this book series that I'm creating and I think the old way to write a book and one of the reasons I didn't want to write a book is if you talk to anybody who writes a book they're like it's like they went to Nom dude there's like you know this multi-year period where it was just a grind every single day and it's it's terrible experience yeah um and so I'm writing a book right now and here's literally what I was doing right before this so this is my conversation with Claude so I create this little folder and I say hey Claude I'm creating a book here's the premise and I said uh inside this folder you will find an outline you'll find some of my old samples of writing I want you to copy my tone of voice and a style guide some of the dos and don'ts of how I think about writing this book um and I said you know right now I only kind of I have a loose outline and really I know I know kind of what chapter one should be all about and I said draft it it drafts it and so um it's basically the equivalent of having a research assistant and a writing assistant um but who have who has no emotions or feelings so I could just he just gives me the draft I'm like N I don't really like it and I don't really have any specific feedback just like try again and it just does it again it does it again like if I told somebody on my team that if they worked hard and drafted this thing over two days and they came to me I'd have to like do the freaking compliment sandwich and be like you know it's really good there's some areas for improvement would you mind doing this and now it's going to take a week and then he's going to go back and every draft is like just a small Feud that's developing between me and this person right and so and so I had ended up having to ride it myself and really having that Feud internally also and there'd be many days where I'd wake up and see that blank page and be like do I really want to do this right so this AI process where I'm like I wake up and I'm like give me a draft of the chapter I don't like that first example find me another example that has very similar characteristics boom it finds another one you know come up with a better analogy hey you're being too wordy and it's just I'm getting draft after draft after draft try this one in the style of Malcolm Gladwell like to me this is Magic what's happening I'm writing this book I got a full draft of the book in one night just by going back and forth with CLA it was unbelievable and now all the values in the edits it's the taste it's the curation at the end and yeah you putting your stamp on it yeah on on the book thing have you taken anything from uh the the five types of wealth by our buddy sahil Bloom on it feels like he did a really good job of creating infographics that could go viral and he's kind of the the you know the Andrew Tate of publishing now in the sense that the book is the book is its own thing but there it's clippable it's clippable which is like it's rare for a book to think about are you thinking clip first now how are you thinking about that um I don't like to start with growth hacks because I think it leads you the wrong way sure I think you I I have this channel on my SL called Clues you just you just keep you keep you take note of the clues and the time will come where you go back through that you say you know what I did notice that hey having a couple of killer diagrams yeah really made the book more sharable because you're not sharing a book and saying read this book you're sharing a a killer page or a killer Visual and people want people then ask wow how do I get more of that is that what book is that right so you keep that as a clue but I think you can't let that drive the creative process um you know this is a little bit up but I just think there's like you got to decide like am I going to try to engineer this or am I trying to Art This and like I think if you're doing art you should art it um and there's a time and a place for that that engineering of virality or more sellability but I don't want to AB test my way into art cuz I'm not doing this for money anyways right like if I want I might make money from a book but the way I say it is it's like just CU a church serves food doesn't mean you go there because you're hungry like you know that's not why you go to church so it's like if you're going to write a book you should be doing it because you have something killer to say and you think you can deliver that message that's the main thing let's keep that the main thing and then yes we we keep track of some ideas some growth acts some clues that might be helpful somewhere along the way well where can people find it when it comes out how can they make sure that're the first one to get a copy in the mail I'm not I mean I'm not even there yet if you just follow me on Twitter you you'll see it along the way Fant or my email list shore.

com is the the email list well you have to send us an advanced copy we read on the stream we're gonna we're going to do a 24-hour live stream of us reading cover to cover uh cover to cover I love it uh no yeah a live audiobook reading cover to cover we need material ramp ads yeah we'll put our own ads in he heavily sponsored aor amazing having you on you're the first technology Uncle yes the First Technology unle appreciate you sharing Uncle of the week I'm putting that in my LinkedIn right now fantastic you're the man you're welcome anytime thank you Sean thank you we'll talk to you soon cheers bye bye bye yeah that was great what a pro the lighting the mic yeah he's he's a pro I think you're on to something with the uh the 100 hour work week I think you you pop into Claude you start start noodling on it get some good diagrams in there you got a ripper it's a banger it's a banger it's a banger uh we have Trey Stevens joining in a few minutes uh we want to ask him about flock safety uh