Jack Smith: Selling A Company For $800M At 29, Million Dollar Businesses that Can Be Started Just From Reading a Manual, and More

**Jack Smith** (0:00)
You wake up at something like 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. And the first two to three days, the only instruction they give you is, hey, feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out. Okay, see you in three days.
And you sit there, so it's really extreme.

**Sam Parr** (0:15)
What?

**Shaan Puri** (0:17)
This is my management style, too.

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
All right, we're live here. We have a guest, Jack Smith, one of my best friends, in my wedding, an amazing person. I don't even know how to describe you, Jack. What you, I guess like the top line is you started a company that you sold for like $800 million when you were 29 That's like the headline impressive stuff. But we have you here because you have done, you're just like one of the more interesting people I know.

**Jack Smith** (0:52)
Okay, well, thanks for having me. I also thought kind of an interesting contrast coming after Rob, because like he was describing himself as like the pinnacle of human optimization, right? Like he plans how long it takes him to go to the toilet each day. And then I was thinking, I'm maybe an interesting contrast. So I'm like human procrastination, like the exact opposite of that.

**Sam Parr** (1:14)
So yeah, but you do optimize stuff. Like, Shaan, I don't know if you know this, but like Jack, once we went to his birthday party and his wife made him a cake and it was in the shape of an Amazon box because he had this like, it was like a walk-in closet, but it was basically a room in his home and it was full of Amazon boxes. And you're like, Jack, what is that?
And he has this list, this Excel spreadsheet that he keeps.
And anything that he buys ranging from a book bag to baby apparel or baby accessories, or one time he was obsessed with chocolate, he would literally buy 50 versions and test all of them and then rank them on this like attribute system and then have a... And so he had these huge lists of everything that he's tested. And he's done this so much that we're... Haven't you been banned from Amazon like multiple times?

**Jack Smith** (2:04)
Yeah. And then also, Bonobos had this policy for... I don't know if they still have. I think for many years they had a policy where you could return any item, even if it was used, up to 365 days after. And so I had a spreadsheet tracking when I bought everything. Basically, I got a new wardrobe every year because I just sent all my clothes back on 340 days and then just got it all as credit and just bought an entire new wardrobe every year.
So yeah, I got banned from Amazon a few times, but Bonobos shouldn't have.

**Shaan Puri** (2:37)
You and Rob have more in common than you think. He's planted his poop and you're planting your returns in a giant spreadsheet.
You have this, like Sam said, this kind of like personal wire cutter you create for yourself.

**Jack Smith** (2:52)
Sure.

**Shaan Puri** (2:52)
Have you always done that or was that like, I got too much time on my hands, I'm going to come up with a new hobby, like, you know, figuring out the best of everything. Were you doing that kind of when you were 21 also?

**Jack Smith** (3:04)
Well, I didn't have any money when I was 21 I still bought stuff from Amazon, but I think it probably would connect like, Shaan, you've talked on the pod about, you know, having an inquisitive mindset.
And I think for me, I like to go deep on something. So as Sam said about chocolate, when I was just interested in chocolate, I wanted to go deep. So I'm like, I bought my own beans, I roasted them in my house.
I wanted to learn what's the entire process because I think it's kind of interesting, these crafts that go back centuries, and some people dedicate their whole life, right? Like 50 years, they're an expert chocolatier. And then for me, it's just kind of interesting just to have a glimpse into that and keeping that mindset about craft, but also maybe challenging the way things are done sometimes. Because if you've done chocolate for 50 years, you're maybe like, that's the way it's always been done. But if you come from a fresh angle, you may be like, wait, what if you did it this way or something? But I think it's just I'm interested in general to go deep into topics.

**Shaan Puri** (4:08)