#143 with Jeremy Cai of Italic - Influencer Coffee Making Millions, What Cold Chain Is and Why It's Booming, And Tons of Ideas

**Shaan Puri** (0:15)
Yeah, I'm recording on my side. Let's do it.

**Sam Parr** (0:20)
Jeremy, do you know Shaan?

**Jeremy Cai** (0:23)
Yeah, funny story. Shaan was one of my role models back in college.

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
What?

**Jeremy Cai** (0:34)
So I went to college in the small school called Babson in Boston. And most of the people there eventually end up in finance, but the main stick of the college is like, it's supposed to be number one for entrepreneurship. A lot of kids were really into that. And around Boston, we organized a trip to San Francisco, visited a bunch of tech companies.
It was back in like winter 2013 or 2014, and Monkey Inferno and Bevo. Like, you know, Sean was this like really impressive guy who we visited and the office was spectacular.

**Shaan Puri** (1:12)
So it's mostly just the office.

**Sam Parr** (1:17)
Also Sean, but like, I think we've mentioned that office a little bit, but this is how I actually met Sean as well. And I don't care if Sean shouldn't describe this because it was kind of his, but he had this office, Jeremy, that was, it was called Monkey Inferno. It could have housed or, you know, probably 50 people could have worked there if they wanted to.
Maybe more.

**Jeremy Cai** (1:39)
It was really impressive.

**Sam Parr** (1:41)
If I, like they had an espresso machine, they had, I think, a cook that would come every day, like a professional kitchen. It had tables that looked, it had a table that was maybe 15 feet wide, and it looked as if you cut down a Yosemite tree and turned it into a table.
It looked like a $200,000 table.

**Jeremy Cai** (2:01)
The worst part was I thought that was every startup. So I was like, oh man, these guys are living the dream, like working in this dope office. And then reality hits when you actually move here. And it's like, oh, that is like one of a million.

**Sam Parr** (2:16)
Shaan, do you think that that place costs more than $2 million to decorate?

**Shaan Puri** (2:21)
No, that's a little bit much. But we got lucky because, you know, my main investor and the guy who actually started the lab, he owned the building. So first, he was the landlord. It's not like we were paying some crazy rent, you know, to some landlord. So he had bought this building in 2008, 2009, right after the real estate crash.
So he scooped it up for super cheap. I don't know, like a couple of million bucks, I think he got this building that was, at the time, seven different like lofts, like apartment lofts. And he just smashed down the walls and combined them into a giant live workspace. And he left one loft. So there's actually an apartment at the top. So it's three stories of office, like office floors, but we only use the top floor for desks.
The second floor, we turned into like ping pong, like the classic, you know, stereotypical stupid startup blowing money thing. It's like ping pong table, snack room. We turned it, we created a weight room in there, like to exercise in.
The third floor was wherever his desk is, and the fourth floor was just this loft, this apartment where you could just crash in if you stayed late. And so my first year there, I slept in that apartment 200 days out of the 365 of the year. It was basically my house.

**Sam Parr** (3:32)
Jeremy, yeah, I mean, like this office, it also had like, it had like a Mac one computer, like the first Mac.

**Shaan Puri** (3:40)
Right. I remember I picked up a coaster once.
So the story is, so Michael and Zochi Birch owned the building. They started the lab.
They had had a ton of success. So they wanted to work in like their dream environment. So they built their dream environment, which most entrepreneurs can't afford to do. They owned the building. They did the renovation. They had this one designer, this guy, Ken Folk, who is like this like kind of designer to the stars type of guy. And he's like, wild.
Like you have art behind you, Sam. This guy would come in every two months and just rotate the art. So we would come into the office one day and like all the art had changed, but you wouldn't notice because they're the same position, but it's just a different picture in there. And he was just like an elf that would like turn over the office with new shit all the time. And I was like, are we paying for this? What's going on? And I remember picking up a coaster and it said $700 on a sticker under the coaster is still on there.