Shaan's Story: How I Made My First $1,000,000 By Age 31

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
I now realize something I already knew, but I didn't have the guts to act on, which was that at any given time, you're really only gonna get to throw your all into one thing. And so why not throw, like, if you're gonna do that, like, choose really wisely?

**Sam Parr** (1:24)
We're in San Francisco, we're outside of San Francisco. We're doing a live pod, first time in a while.

**Shaan Puri** (1:30)
We're in this studio, is this a music studio? Is that what this is normally, music studio?

**Sam Parr** (1:34)
Did the instruments give it away? All right, people were asking online, they said they want us to do a pod. We already did My Story, it's the second episode.
Now we'll do one on you.

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
All right, let's do it.

**Sam Parr** (1:45)
So how old are you now?

**Shaan Puri** (1:46)
Good question, 34

**Sam Parr** (1:50)
And you're from everywhere.

**Shaan Puri** (1:52)
Everywhere.

**Sam Parr** (1:53)
Where?

**Shaan Puri** (1:54)
I was born in Oklahoma, believe it or not.
Tulsa, Denver, Texas, China, Indonesia, Australia, San Francisco, yeah, that's it. And maybe a little bit of London too, two months.

**Sam Parr** (2:08)
And you're living in Australia in pre-college, or college age.

**Shaan Puri** (2:13)
I studied abroad there, and then also after college, I started a company with a guy who, a well-known entrepreneur in Australia.

**Sam Parr** (2:23)
And that was pre-college?

**Shaan Puri** (2:24)
That was after.

**Sam Parr** (2:25)
But you went to college in Duke too, so you went from Duke to Australia.

**Shaan Puri** (2:29)
Yes.

**Sam Parr** (2:29)
And at Australia, you did the sushi thing.

**Shaan Puri** (2:32)
No, I did that just at Duke, that's where it started.

**Sam Parr** (2:36)
I thought the sushi thing was in Australia.

**Shaan Puri** (2:37)
No, no, no, that was here, and then we moved to Denver because basically, people moved to Silicon Valley, that's the tech hub, and people move to LA when they want to be an actor.
Denver is the place to go. So Chipotle started there, the first Chipotle started there. Noodles and Company started there, Quiznos started there, Smash Burger started there. There's like seven or eight.

**Sam Parr** (3:00)
Just copious amounts of open-minded white people.

**Shaan Puri** (3:02)
Yeah, people love lunch. Lunch is a really big deal there.
But all the talent, the people who know how to pick locations and roll out restaurant operations, all this stuff, they're all still there. So when it was like, where are we going to start? It was like, uh.

**Sam Parr** (3:16)
Because Denver is kind of like a big suburb.

**Shaan Puri** (3:18)
Like this is how dumb we were. We were like, we want to be the next Chipotle. How do you do that? Well, we're Chipotle start. And so literally we found the location across the street from the original Chipotle to open our restaurant.

**Sam Parr** (3:29)
That's a great plan.

**Shaan Puri** (3:29)
And so we were like, yeah, I guess we'll just do the exact. And then we were like, who rolled out the real estate? Oh, these two brokers? Okay, well, we'll go talk to them. And then who did this? Okay, we'll go talk to them. And that's basically, that was our whole plan of like figuring out how to start this restaurant.