#154 - Making Millions Anonymously, How Pornstars Clean Search Results, & What is Gayburgers?

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
Okay, we're live, we're live, we're live. We're going to talk about how we're going to make this podcast better, and I guess we'll brainstorm publicly. But, Shaan, I'm in Austin right now. Is it?

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
Hell froze over, bro. What happened?

**Sam Parr** (0:30)
What's going on in Austin? Is it national news? I haven't been to like...

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
I think it is national news. I don't listen to the news, but I've heard about this through Twitter and whatnot. So here's what I know. I know there's some kind of crazy storm. Texas has no power. You have no power. What's going on?

**Sam Parr** (0:43)
Yeah. So I woke up Monday morning and it snowed eight inches and it was like 10 or 15 degrees, which in itself is no big deal. But they don't really have snow plows here. And also all the power shut off. So I haven't had power since Sunday night, but I also haven't had so no power, no water, no heat. And it's been like 10 degrees and all the grocery stores are closed. So it's a little apocalyptic. It's no big deal for me because I've got friends and I'm sleeping on their floor. But if you're broke or you don't have a family member to rely on, it's a bad situation for a lot of people.

**Shaan Puri** (1:15)
Yeah, that's crazy. So what are you what are you doing? Is it like it just just waited out? Is there like any solution?

**Sam Parr** (1:22)
I'm at the office now just chilling. I've been eating like macaroni and like peanut butter, like whatever, like office, like the office scraps that are it's all good. But I'll tell you something cool. So I have a good friend named Noah Kagan. Noah Kagan was on the podcast. Noah Kagan runs this company called AppSumo. And my best friend, one of my best buddies is Neville Madora. And so Neville, Noah, and then this guy named Andrew Chen, who's a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. They were all supposed to go to Puerto Rico on Monday. And they're all down at Neville's house. And obviously, their flight got canceled and Neville had power. And so me and my wife, Sarah, and us three all are just chilling at Neville's house. And it's actually pretty fun because I'm hearing all these cool stories. And I could actually tell you one or two of them. But it turned out to be pretty fun.

**Shaan Puri** (2:12)
Yeah, you had like a slumber party, adult slumber party.

**Sam Parr** (2:14)
Yeah, and it was pretty cool.

**Shaan Puri** (2:16)
So what were the stories? Because that's a good group of people. Those are people who each are very interesting alone. So I want to know what you hear while you were slumber partying over there.

**Sam Parr** (2:25)
Andreessen Horwitz is like this really cool firm, right? I don't know what they have, maybe $15 billion in assets. Some huge, you know, they're like...

**Shaan Puri** (2:33)
I think less, but yeah, something like that. Crazy, multi-billion.

**Sam Parr** (2:35)
They're like a tier A or tier one firm, and it's cool. And I was like, I asked them, I go, Andrew, tell me about angel investing. How do you do it? And he goes, there's a lot of like, it could be complicated, and it's hard, and it's a required, and it's a learned skill set and all that. But he was like, I'll try to summarize a few of my rules. And he told me his rules. And those were only invest if it's Bay Area or Bay Area connected, which is interesting. The second one was only do it if it's growing 3X a year. If it's hot, like a lot of people see something like Clubhouse or something else that's hot and trendy, and they run away from it. And he said, no, run towards it, and don't care if it's overvalued. Don't care if it's expensive. Run towards the heat. Don't run away from it. Even if it's expensive, do it, because that's actually a good sign, and it turns out more likely not to be right. And then go for quantity. So do, if you can't, if you have to choose between a few, more money or less money, but more quantity, do the quantity one. What else? I think there's a few more, but that was my takeaway. Kind of interesting, right?

**Shaan Puri** (3:31)
So it is interesting. So I don't know if you were paying too much attention when they first came out, but they were, they had an interesting kind of like splash in the market because Mark Andreessen himself, very popular dude, and they came out and they had A16Z, and they basically, it was kind of like shots fired at the venture capital industry. So they came out and they had this there. So they're A16Z, they got Mark Andreessen, who's a big dog, and they came out, raised a bunch of money, and what they did was kind of interesting. They first said, to differentiate from all the rest, they did two things I thought were kind of interesting. First was they hired a bunch of people on staff. Most venture firms are just like the partners who invest, and then some analysts who go hunt and do analysis and due diligence on deals. They hired a huge marketing firm, a marketing staff and PR and recruiting and whatever else, because they were like, we're going to offer all these services to our portfolio. That's more popular now, but at the time that wasn't super popular, and these guys took it to the next level, where they had 50 people on payroll, and they're poaching someone high up at Google to come work for their fund in service of their portfolio companies. That was kind of interesting, and a whole bunch of other venture investors were like, yeah, that sounds good, but that doesn't matter. It's just for show, basically.