#112 - Why Buying Businesses Is Better Than Starting Them and The Mad Genius of Kanye West

**Sam Parr** (0:19)
What are you learning about being part of a big company? Like anything, I imagine you're not gonna say anything negative about Twitch, but is there anything about a big company that you're learning throughout this that I can learn from you?

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
Be more specific. What are you curious about?

**Sam Parr** (0:38)
In the last three months, what is your number one takeaway about big companies that you like and what is it about you don't like?

**Shaan Puri** (0:46)
What I like is that the rich get richer, so when you're already the market leader or you're the biggest company in a space, all the gains, like if the whole industry grows, you grow the most. And that's been very true for Twitch. But I think it's just generally speaking, Twitch is the biggest marketplace of its kind. There are competitors, but when the whole market is growing, like right now, gaming is getting more and more popular. Maybe it's because of shelter in place. People have more time on their hands.
It's growing like crazy and the people inside the company have to do nothing in order to make that growth happen. All we have to do is walk out of the house with a big pot and just catch the rain of growth. So I think that's really cool is that big companies, when things go well, they get to eat up a whole bunch more share more than it and probably create enough value, like a whole other startup that goes from zero to a billion dollars.

**Sam Parr** (1:41)
But isn't that the same with a small company? Basically, you're just saying like catching a tidal wave is good.

**Shaan Puri** (1:46)
I'm saying when growth happens in a market, people flock to the leader. They just go to the top of the mind brand. So the small companies in our space are not growing at the same rate we're growing.
So we are the biggest and growing the fastest, which is usually not the case. Usually the big company is big, but they don't grow at the fastest rate because it's hard to grow on a big number. But when there's a big wave, the recognizable brands do the best. I think this happened for Calm also in the meditation space. As meditation got hot, Calm and Headspace were the two brands that people knew about. They had good names and they were featured in the app store. They were the top two ranks in the app store. And they just got a shit ton of growth because of that, because the rich get richer in many ways. The leaders grow the fastest. And so, I think that's pretty cool. That's a cool thing about being at a big company and seeing what that's like. The realization I had today, because I was in a meeting, and there's a lot of times when you're in a startup, and it's easy to think, oh my God, Google is going to just throw a thousand people at this, or like Facebook probably has 50 engineers working on this. Or even if you're not so engineering heavy, just the general idea that a big company can squash you. They could do this better. They have more resources. They have more footprint. They have just more people to throw out the problem. And then when you're in a big company, you see how much, like first, people in a big company work eight hours a day, no more.

**Sam Parr** (3:06)
Or less.

**Shaan Puri** (3:07)
Or less, yeah. But generally, for sure, not more. And I would say in a startup, like I used to work 14 hours a day. And so already, that's almost a double day every day compared to what you get out of a big company. The second thing is, in a big company, I don't know if it's just me, but like, I would estimate somewhere between 30 to 60% of all your work hours are in meetings about other things other than the problem you're trying to solve. So it might be like, we're doing talent reviews about promotions. Cool, that's important. You got to do it for your organization to work, but you're not, if you're just a startup thinking about how do I build this product that just makes this one thing really great? How do I solve this problem better? How do we make our app better? All you're doing is basically coding, or in your case, maybe it's creating content. But for most software startups, it's like you're just coding and you're talking to users and you're looking at the data. And in a big company, there's all these other things. There's all hands you have to attend. And then there's this 4 p.m. team building exercise that the whole company is doing because we're all remote and they want to make sure everybody's happy. And so we're all going to do this goofy fashion show from at home. And there's all these cool things that I can see why they're useful. But if you just think about it, a lot of hours are not going towards the A plus problem.