Speaker
Shaan Puri
Appearances over time
17 episodes
Episodes
17
9 drunk ideas that sound stupid (but are secretly genius)
We found the internet's best sales advice
Killer marketing secrets that always work (ft. Ogilvy Adman, Rory Sutherland)
Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder
5 ruthless business lessons from one week in NYC
I dropped out of college and built a $3.6B company from scratch
3 weird businesses doing $10M, $20M, $30M
We found an app that lets you buy anything for $0
We decoded the business behind this influencer’s perfect life
The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet
Brutally honest guide to not losing money in the market
The "Idiot Index": the simple math that made Elon Musk billions
We found 7 business ideas that will blow up in 2026
The 50 richest families in America are betting on this trend
Mohnish Pabrai: This will save you 10 years of bad investments
I put 80% of my money in the S&P
How Replit Agent made $1M on day one (then $250M in a year)
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
True innovation requires a high degree of skepticism upfront. If an idea is completely uncontroversial, it is probably too normal to succeed.
A celebrated Hacker News comment distilled sales into 7 simple rules, including 'people buy 4 things only: time, money, sex, and approval' and 'sell aspirin, not vitamins.'
SpaceX is going public at a $1.75 trillion valuation, making it the largest IPO in history.
Shaan pitched a 'reverse vacation' — a lock-in productivity camp where participants wear Adidas tracksuits, eat slop, take cold showers, and grind toward a goal, the work equivalent of an Ironman.
Hannah Neelman's Ballerina Farm brand — selling sourdough mix, electrolytes, and meat — generates an estimated $70–80M per year in revenue.
Nick Sleep averaged more than 20% compounding returns over roughly 15 years by concentrating his fund in Costco, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway.
Box, the enterprise cloud storage company co-founded by Aaron Levie, is currently valued at approximately $3.6 billion.
After undergoing a deep personality test, Pabrai transitioned from a burnout-inducing corporate management role to single-player investing where his performance skyrocketed.
LeBron James reportedly spends $1 million a year on his body, which Shaan uses as a metaphor for extreme investment in your core product.
Starlink has grown to 10 million paying subscribers in roughly 4 years, generating about $11 billion in annual revenue.
Hannah Neelman of Ballerina Farm has 20 million followers across all her social media platforms.
The collar leverages AI modeling to attempt bark translation, although verifying accuracy remains a difficult hurdle for users.
According to the Hacker News commenter, every purchase boils down to time, money, sex, or approval/peace of mind — selling anything else leads to failure.
PSA controls approximately 70% of the collectibles grading market, making it the dominant trust authority for card and collectible authentication.
The Starlink business operates at approximately 40% EBITDA margins, making it a high-margin recurring revenue business.
A crossing guard named Christine makes thousands of dollars a month printing and mailing her daily musings. Quirky, analog media with low production value is capturing a premium audience precisely because it cuts through modern digital noise.
Amjad filmed a simple iPhone video announcing Replit Agent — the world's first end-to-end AI coding agent — framing it as an 'early preview' borrowed from gaming. Day one: $1M ARR. Day two: $2M. In two days, Replit beat its previous total growth.
AI has made it possible to build a multimillion-dollar business without venture capital or a big team. The best opportunities aren't hyperscale plays — they're the boring local industries nobody has computerized yet. Ice rink management software in England is already at $100K ARR.
AI foundation models are fundamentally commoditizable — developers switch between them with a single click. Unlike Microsoft's PC dominance, there are no network effects or economies of scale locking users in. The only moat might be continuous capital, but that doesn't keep big players away.
If you're building something genuinely new — a market creation business — keep pivoting until the market pulls you. If you're entering an existing market, forget pivoting and obsess over execution. The mistake most founders make is not knowing which game they're playing.
Consumer product metrics come with a huge lag and are mostly outside your control. Sales is different — it's a contact sport where personal effort directly drives outcomes. Amjad now gets personally activated when a deal is at risk and will show up to a client's office to win it.
Amjad Masad says we're already inside the technological singularity. AI model releases have compressed from every two years to every few weeks, and the second derivative of progress is itself exponential — meaning we genuinely cannot model what comes next.
Amjad wanted to get on Joe Rogan's podcast. He visualized it, then unexpectedly got asked by Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman to help Rogan's daughter build an app. He helped her win a competition — never asked for anything in return — and Rogan called him.
A Vercel employee installed Contacts.ai via Google OAuth. That app had been compromised when one of its own employees downloaded a Roblox cheat that contained a backdoor. The attacker escalated privileges inside Vercel, then found database secrets stored in clear text — accessing every customer's data.
Startups consume your life energy — they age you, eat your friendships, and starve relationships. Building Replit with his wife Haya meant they shared the dark years together rather than competing for Amjad's diminishing attention. The result: a marriage made stronger by hardship, not weaker.
Amjad describes experiencing genuine perceived time dilation under extreme pressure — a skill he learned from competitive gaming in Jordan and deliberately practices. Shaan connects it to powerlifting: the last rep is where most people rush and break form, and training poise there carries over to life.
Coming from Jordan, Amjad says the most underrated thing about America is that it treats newcomers as equal participants. Back home, sharing a startup idea with friends got you laughed at. In San Francisco, having a normal job requires a disclaimer.
Dumb.co turns a cheap flip phone into a call-and-text forwarder so you can leave your smartphone at home. By making messaging intentionally high-friction, it forces you out of screen addiction and restores short-term focus.
Replit went from 120 to 60 employees as team members quietly quit day after day. Amjad would arrive at the office dreading who would walk over to resign. The only bright spot: a small War Room where the Replit Agent team was secretly building something world-changing.
Replit grew from $2.5M to $250M in annual revenue in a single year — and is now on track for $1B. The growth was validated by a PwC audit and is backed by positive gross margins, which Amjad says is rare in the AI industry.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Business 67%
- Technology 10%
- Society & Culture 9%
- Health & Fitness 6%
- Education 2%
- Sports 2%
- Comedy 2%
- Science 1%
- News 1%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
