Ben and David on My First Million

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Hello, Acquired Listeners. Today, we are releasing a guest episode that David and I did with the guys over at My First Million.

David Rosenthal (0:08)

So awesome. I love these guys.

Shawn and Sam are just like a riot.

Ben Gilbert (0:14)

True hustlers.

David Rosenthal (0:15)

True, true hustlers. I mean, literally, Sam started a company called The Hustle.

Ben Gilbert (0:19)

And they're like very unafraid to go places that David and I normally wouldn't touch on. So we had a lot of fun chatting with them. We wanted to release it for all of you too here on the ACQ2 feed. Obviously, if you like this and you like Sam and Shawn's particular breed of podcasting, go check it out.

You can find them on YouTube or Spotify or basically anywhere. So without further ado, onto our interview on My First Million.

Shaan Puri (0:45)

Yeah, like the easiest way to explain it is all in is billionaires talking about billionaire shit and my first million is millionaires talking about billionaire shit.

All right, what's up? We got a crossover episode. Call me Tim Hardaway. We got the guys from Acquired. Yeah, you like that?

David Rosenthal (1:10)

That's good, that's good.

Shaan Puri (1:11)

On the fly, baby.

Yeah, that's for the 5% of listeners who know about basketball. So we got the guys from Acquired are here. We're doing kind of a joint episode, the old Alabama wedding, as I like to call it. We're just getting cousins together here. Because you guys got a podcast that is pretty awesome. I remember when I was working at our previous startup, a guy came to me, he was like, there's a podcast you're going to love, it's called Acquired.

And I go, what is it? He goes, it's like the backstories of these, of all great tech acquisitions, like how it all went down, they go into like all the nerdy details. And then I binged you guys for like six days straight. And so that's how I kind of first got into it a couple of years ago. So welcome to the show, David and Ben.

Sam Parr (1:52)

Thank you.

David Rosenthal (1:53)

We did a super fun crossover with you a couple of years ago now, but it was just with Shawn, Sam, you were off traveling the world, doing amazing things.

Sam Parr (2:02)

Well, that's what he said. He was like, you're probably doing something amazing. I was like, probably just like a doctor's appointment or something.

That's what you think. Yeah.

David Rosenthal (2:10)

You guys have totally come up since then.

I mean, you were big back then, but I was like, within the first couple months, I think of you starting this. And it's just been awesome to watch how far you've come.

Ben Gilbert (2:20)

That was kind of in our, even though it was year four or five for us, that was kind of our early days too. Cause Shawn, you're right, we were mostly about acquisitions at that point. And we talked about the Bebo acquisition as part of the episode. And now we do these like three, four hour entire, you know, history and strategy of a company, regardless of whether there was a transaction. But yeah, that feels like, I don't know, the funny thing about exponential growth is it feels like a lifetime ago, all the time.

Shaan Puri (2:43)

I always think about that. Like when you pick a niche and then you kind of are gonna run out, but the niche can get you somewhere. So for example, I was thinking about this with Coffeezilla, the YouTube guy who exposes people's scams.

And I'm like, and then he did one the other day that was like, he DMed a celebrity to promote some NFT thing. Like, hey, we'll pay you to promote this NFT thing. And like the white paper said like this shit to scam or whatever, but he didn't read it. Obviously he just like promoted it. And he's like, ha, scammer. And I'm like, but that's kind of entrapment. Like you're running out of people to cover here. So you had to now create scammers?

David Rosenthal (3:17)

Like, I'll do that in the day.

Shaan Puri (3:18)

Yeah, exactly. But like that wasn't his original stake, but I was like, yeah, you're not gonna, like you're trying to be on this YouTube once a week treadmill and there's not once a week gonna be a giant Logan Paul, like celebrity name did this bad thing. And I'm gonna be the exposure. It's like, what are you gonna do next Tuesday? Cause there's not like, this isn't that current, but you guys did a good job of switching it out.