Podbit · My First Million
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund invested in SpaceX in 2019 and is walking away with $12 billion at the IPO — roughly $33,000 per teacher in the fund. They reportedly boycott Elon politically. Whoops.
Where this was said
At 42:53 · chapter starts 42:35
Shaan kicks off his favorite segment — tracking who gets rich — by spotlighting the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund's 2019 SpaceX bet, which is set to pay out $12 billion, or roughly $33,000 per teacher. The irony: the fund reportedly boycotts Elon politically. Then comes Antonio Gracias, the second-largest individual SpaceX shareholder at roughly 7%, whose $90 billion payday stems from years of helping Elon fix factory production bottlenecks at Tesla and SpaceX's earliest days — and a personal loan to Elon made with no equity strings attached. The conversation detours hilariously into NBA courtside seats, with both hosts confessing to obsessively zooming in on mystery schleppily-dressed rich people at games, a story about Sam meeting Knicks player Landry Shamet without realizing he was famous, Shaan using his toddler daughter as celebrity bait to interact with Tom Hanks, and the unanimous verdict that the best celebrity greeting is a confident 'good to see you, man' — as if you've met before.
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund invested in SpaceX in 2019 and is set to make $12 billion in the IPO — about $33,000 per teacher in the fund.
Antonio Gracias owns about 7% of SpaceX through his Valor fund. He earned it by helping Elon debug factory bottlenecks at Tesla and SpaceX in their early days — and once loaned Elon money personally, expecting nothing in return.
Antonio Gracias, Elon's longtime manufacturing adviser, owns about 7% of SpaceX through his Valor fund — set to net him around $90 billion.
Sam built Algrow, a SaaS for finding viral content formats, with zero coding experience using ChatGPT and Cursor. Six months later: 10,000 users, $14K/month in revenue.
Sam's first MVP threw an application error on its very first user — and he shipped it anyway. The core idea worked, and that was enough to validate the product and keep users coming back.
Sam joined Discord voice chats, muted himself, and silently screen-shared his product. Users in the chat started tagging him asking what the tool was. No pitch needed — curiosity did the selling.
Most founders post links in Discord and immediately get banned for self-promotion. Sam's approach was the opposite: build rapport, help people with the tool, let word of mouth do the work.
Find where your ICP lives. Listen before building. Validate with DMs and Loom recordings. Build in public with users inside your own Discord server. Turn early adopters into advocates with free access.
Instead of fearing the self-promo ban in large Discord servers, create your own private server for your product. You funnel in ideal customers and build a relationship that email can't replicate.
Algrow helps creators find and replicate viral video formats, starting at $25/month. It analyzes subscriber counts, average views, and trending formats — and can even generate the videos with AI.
After weeks of Sam silently screen-sharing in a Discord server, the server owner — unprompted — made a full YouTube promotional video about Algrow. Sam paid nothing and asked for nothing.
Producer Gus admits Discord never crossed his mind as a customer acquisition channel. Pat connects the insight to a broader lesson: match your distribution channel to where your actual customers live.
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