#146 with Suleman "Suli" Ali - Voluntarily Selling Our Data, Creating The New Religion and A Fund Making Millions Shorting Pharma Companies

**Shaan Puri** (0:01)
Yo, it's My First Million, and I'm Shaan. Today, Sam is out, and I brought in a guest for the brainstorm. It's one of my best friends, Suli.
By the way, it's funny, I always say one of my best friends, instead of my best friend, just as a slight hedge in case they don't feel the same way, you can always make it easy with the one of my best friends. Anyways, one of my best friends, Suli, is here, and we talked about a bunch of things. He had a bunch of ideas. We talked about a reputation system for people.
So like Yelp for people and the idea of selling your own data instead of having companies sell it for you and how that might work. We talked about an idea for creating a new religion. That was kind of a wild one. I don't know how people will feel about that, but I liked it. We talked about a bunch of fintech ideas. So things like owning assets with your friends, what the modern day timeshare might look like, co-living spaces, starting new banks, starting a competitor to Stripe and a framework around that, doing the opposite of what the big companies do.
And we talked about pharmaceuticals, we talked about superhuman, we talked a little bit about just stuff that's going on in his life. Suli was the first ever guest on the podcast. So if you go back to episode one, it's with Suli, that's where he talked about his kind of life story. Today, we do none of that. Today, we jump straight into a brainstorm and just shooting the shit, just catching up. So we're not talking about what he's done in the past, but he has a very interesting life. He sees a bunch of interesting ideas. You think he's not only has he been a really, really successful entrepreneur, but he was also an investor in, I don't know, 100 companies, 100 startups, including a bunch of big ones that you've heard of. So I asked him fun questions like, look at your calendar and in the last 30 days, who was the most interesting person you met with or you had a meeting with on your calendar? Or if you had to make a million bucks this year, how would you do it? And he talked about some fun ideas like title insurance and stuff like that. Anyways, I won't give it all away. Hope you enjoy this episode.
I think Suli has the potential to be a guest kind of like Andrew Wilkinson, a returning guest who comes on every two months or so as a friend of the pod. But you guys let me know. You be the judge. You can say more Suli or that's enough Suli. Either one. I won't take any offense.
Let me know what you guys think. Feel free to tweet at me and hope you enjoy this episode.
Suli, you're back. The first episode, the guest from the very first episode of the podcast, the podcast would not have even been born without you, and now you've returned. I don't know, what episode are we on now, Brady? Are we like 130 or something like that?

**Suleman Ali** (2:43)
No, dude, we're like 145, I think this is.

**Shaan Puri** (2:46)
145, all right, so 145 episodes later, he's back. How does it feel?

**Suleman Ali** (2:51)
Man, have you done 144 episodes in the time I've been gone?

**Shaan Puri** (2:57)
Actually, that first one was funny because it's like literally everything we've done about the podcast is different now. So at that time, we were in a studio in San Francisco that I was booking for $100 an hour.
And the concept was an interview. It's like, tell me how you became successful.
Nobody listened to it. And now a bunch of people listen to it. It's all on Zoom, and it's not about how, you know, it's not an interview show anymore.

**Suleman Ali** (3:18)
That's great. I keep seeing everybody on Twitter raving about it and being like, I love this show. Anytime somebody mentions a podcast, they're like, you got to watch and listen to this one.

**Shaan Puri** (3:28)
So yeah, it's great.

**Suleman Ali** (3:29)
Congrats.

**Shaan Puri** (3:30)
Thank you.
And so now you're back for the brainstorm version. And I don't know if you've heard any of these episodes, but basically it's real simple. It's like, if we weren't recording this and we were just catching up, what we would be talking about, it's that.
But maybe you can leave some of the sensitive numbers out because there's a bunch of people listening. But the big idea is just like, what are some either half-baked business ideas, so startup ideas that you're like, oh yeah, somebody should totally go do that. Or I just had this pain point and fuck, someone needs to build a better way to do this. So that's one version of it. And the other is, hey, have you seen this thing? And it's something that most people haven't heard about, but you know about it and you kind of educate us. So I'll let you pick where you want to start. What's basically what's interesting to you?