3 Niche Business Ideas: AI Psychics, Creator-Owned VPNs & Guns with Soylent co-Founder John Coogan

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
It's useful for crypto users to use a VPN, and so that was one of my ideas, but we sold before we got around to doing that.

**Sam Parr** (0:08)
That would have been cool if you would have done that. That's a pretty cool move. Too bad.

**Shaan Puri** (0:26)
All right. What's up? We got John Coogan here.
John, somebody who I only know through a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in LA, and that's the best way to meet anybody who's going to be a podcast guest. So you got a crazy background. I'll give people the rundown if they don't know who you are. So you've been an entrepreneur your whole life, never had a job.
Started two companies that were both really interesting. Soylent, which was basically making a meal replacement drink, is the easiest way to explain it. Tastes like the milk of Honey Nut Cheerios, which I always appreciated. And then Lucy Gum, which was like a nicotine gum. Both of them went through YC. Together, they've raised over $130 million, a bunch of good lessons there.
You're also an EIR at Founders Fund, which is one of the more interesting places to kind of hang out or be a part of. And like us, you've made the mistake of leaving entrepreneurship to just be a YouTuber. And this is great. So you know how to make content too, which is amazing. You make really awesome videos. Sam was sending me one this morning. Sam, you like his stuff, huh?

**Sam Parr** (1:28)
I love it. Yeah, I like your stuff, John.
By the way, Shaan, I'm an investor of Lucy, so I gotta get that out of the way.

**Shaan Puri** (1:35)
And probably a user too, at one point for sure.

**John Coogan** (1:38)
But I mean, I think you did invest like four years ago, so the fact that I haven't been on yet, I think I earned my stripes by posting on YouTube, playing in the content world.

**Sam Parr** (1:46)
What is your guy, I don't even know, can you say what the valuation is? I think I invested $25,000 at a $10 million valuation.

**John Coogan** (1:53)
And 10, yeah, you were probably in the seed round, and now the company's worth like 60, 70 mil.

**Sam Parr** (1:57)
All right, on paper, I've made a little bit of money.

**John Coogan** (2:00)
Yeah, not bad.

**Shaan Puri** (2:01)
We had, I think we could tell the story. We had one of the other co-founders of Lucy come on the pod once, and this guy, we had met him at some like event, maybe a hustle event, some nighttime event.
And this guy was holding court.

**Sam Parr** (2:15)
That was Dave.

**Shaan Puri** (2:16)
Dave, yeah, he was telling stories. There's five people around him. He's got ideas.
He's like, oh, there needs to be something called Pleasure Island, and it's a place where you can just go sin. And I was like, wow, who's this guy? What is he talking about? And he's telling stories, he's amazing. Everybody's just captured by this guy. I'm like, we gotta have this guy at the pod. He comes on the pod, tells none of the stories, and none of the ideas. He's like, nah, I don't want to tell all those on the pod. And we were like, dude.
And so I don't even think we ever ran the episode because he refused to tell the good stuff. So John, will you make the same mistake as your pal?

**John Coogan** (2:48)
Absolutely not. I mean, I do think a lot of founders have just a ton of scar tissue built up from the last 10 years of the media just going after tech founders and tech bros, bro grammers. It was really aggressive for a while there. Anything you said would be like, take it out of context, put in some click bait. But now that Elon bought Twitter and kind of just caused enough chaos, you can just say whatever you want. And there's no, I've been telling every founder I know, cancel culture is over. Don't worry about things. Just say whatever you believe.

**Shaan Puri** (3:17)
So we're gonna do some of your philosophy, some of the philosophy, like cancel culture is over. But first, let's run through the background here because both of these startups, normally we try not to spend too much time on the guests with the background, but yours, both are so interesting.
Can you just tell us, give us the origin story for Soylent because when this came out, it was a very different idea than anything I was seeing anybody do in Silicon Valley. Nobody would, at that time, this was maybe 2012, I had just moved to San Francisco and you had kind of like Uber and Airbnb, but very few people were in the San Francisco venture community were doing like a drink or like a product that you could eat, you could drink that wasn't software based, but still was innovative. And so it was like kind of in this mix. And I remember Andreessen Horowitz got behind it and some others. And so it was very interesting thing. And I think it started out of like a hacker house, right? Like you guys had a crazy house, is that right?