10 Startups w/ Stock Grants That’ll Make You A Millionaire | Sara’s List 2024

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, today is everybody's favorite episode. It is the Sara's List episode. So we're talking about 10 companies that you can become wealthy with without having started it or invested in it or joined early.
Old Sara's List, and I get a little presentation for you. If you're on audio, get over to YouTube right now, because I have slides that are gonna be fun. So it's called Sara's List. This is Sam's wife, Sara.

**Shaan Puri** (0:31)
Oh, that's hilarious.

**Sam Parr** (0:33)
She's on the cover of My First Million. And the reason why is because she has an unlikely story, a story that I hadn't really heard. And when I heard it for the first time, it kind of shocked me, which is, I think when I heard this, she was about 30 years old at the time. She was a self-made millionaire, but she didn't start a company. She wasn't killing herself working 100 hours a week like we were. She wasn't paying herself scraps. She was getting paid a nice salary with nice benefits.
She worked at a great company that had good culture. She didn't have to make risky angel investments and get lucky. She was not a high-profile exec that just got some huge pay package. And she wasn't lucky like the Facebook graffiti guy that just got a bunch of stock from Facebook and made $70 million. And so her story was almost incredibly boring. It was incredibly simple. And I just couldn't believe it. I was like, I'm trying so hard to make a million bucks here. That was such a better path. And so just to recap, self-made millionaire didn't have to start the business, didn't have to do risk angel investing, wasn't a high profile exec, wasn't the graffiti guy. What she did was she joined Airbnb. And so if you look at this chart, this is Airbnb's valuation over time. And there was a period when Airbnb started, that was the high risk period. That's the flat part of this curve. And to join Airbnb, then you had to see something that was not obvious. You had to believe something that took a huge leap of faith. You had to work like crazy in a tiny apartment. There's a fun video, by the way, of them taking midday dance breaks where they just played a bunch. Everyone stands up for the desk and they're dancing. You had to do weird startup stuff. There was a guy with stinky feet probably. That's not even what we're talking about. She joined after it had crossed a 10, even, right Sam? $20 billion valuation.

**Shaan Puri** (2:11)
Yeah, and if I remember, they already had that huge office. Do you remember that huge office had 888 Brannon? And I imagine there was 1000 people plus working there. It wasn't small.

**Sam Parr** (2:22)
And you and I were living in San Francisco at the time, and it was stupidly obvious. You could have slapped me in the face and then said, what's a company that's a winner? And I would have been like, Airbnb is a company that's a winner. It was obvious at the time. I had friends at Uber, same thing. Uber was obviously a winner at the time, where they were already multi-billion dollar companies, but because of the space that they were in and how dominant they were, it was clear that they still had room to run. And what we call Sara's List is basically a function of using your time as your investment.
Most people don't think of their job as an investment decision, but your time, your talent, where you're going to spend four years working is a investment decision. You should be thinking about it like a venture capitalist, and especially if you're working in the tech scene. And so these are all venture-backed tech companies that we're talking about. So the criteria for Sara's List, it's a company that has product market fit. It's just a clear, obvious, successful company. Doesn't mean it can't fail, but it just means it has product market. But it's not in the scrappy figure it out phase and wandering phase of startups. It's funded, it's growing, and you'd get a nice salary and benefits. They got oat milk in the fridge. And that if you joined and you got a $200,000 stock package, so that's like getting 50 grand a year of stocks. Maybe you got 150,000 salary and 50,000 of stock. That could become worth a million plus in five years. So can it 5X in five years? We're not looking for max upside, we're looking for lowish downside and enough upside where you can turn a $200,000 stock package into one, two, three million dollars would be the outcomes that we're looking for.