This Opportunity Is Hidden In Plain Sight

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
Very important question is, where is their opportunity?

**Shaan Puri** (0:01)
Well, yeah, I want to do an Oz Perlman style. I'm going to write something down, and we'll see if I'm right. Go ahead.

**Sam Parr** (0:06)
Let's see. All right, do you write it down?
Tell me when it's done.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
All right, it's done.

**Sam Parr** (0:13)
So obviously, there's a big opportunity in AI right now. Obviously, there's a big opportunity in peptides or biology with AI, something like that.
What I'm going to talk about.

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
I did not write that down.

**Sam Parr** (0:30)
All right, carry on then. I was looking at where is their opportunity right now?

**Shaan Puri** (0:48)
When you open your laptop, what does your to-do list say? Scheme?

**Sam Parr** (0:53)
Yeah, it's not even a laptop, it's like a notepad, the hotel notepad. I don't think most people actually ask themselves this very important question. Where is the opportunity right now?

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
I was sitting there as a 14-year-old. How do I have sex?

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
No, that's literally what you should be thinking. You should be thinking as a 14-year-old, you're like, which girl's gonna kiss me? Where are the girls that might kiss me and how do I get them to kiss me? That's actually what you should be thinking about.
I think entrepreneurs need to think like that. It sounds caveman, sounds stupid, but it's actually the thing. Where is the opportunity right now? You met me back in, I don't know, 2013, 14, something like that. Do you remember what I was working on back then, like the types of stuff I was working on?

**Shaan Puri** (1:37)
Yeah, it was a, the first, it was a Bebo, which was like a past-its-heyday social media network and then that pivoted into a Twitch streaming competitor or a plugin for Twitch streaming. I don't think you ever fully figured it out.

**Sam Parr** (1:55)
So, early on, I was working on, like you said, like messaging apps, social media apps, basically. And hey, guess when all the social media apps were made? Between 2004 and 2012
And then I'm, you know, so I'm 10 years late to the party and I'm starting to think about, like, hey, what if I, what if I made, like, a place where you could post photos and send videos to each other? It's like, yeah, it's called Snapchat. Like, hey, what if we made a way for you to message? Like, yeah, it's called WhatsApp. It was actually created in, you know, whatever, 2007 And so the things I was working on was the last waves opportunity.
Now, that sounds stupid. Why would you do last waves opportunity? Well, the answer is it's pretty understandable because that's proven to work and I'm trying to, I'm so insecure and like have such a lack of a spine that I'm just gonna go towards what I think might actually work and I'm using what has already worked. But the problem with what has already worked is in business, what has already worked is now done in the game of No, that's not true. It's winner take all.

**Shaan Puri** (2:57)
You just talked about Groons.

**Sam Parr** (3:00)
No, no, but I'm saying what I was working on, like social media, like venture tech is winner take all.
You don't work on Airbnb five years after Airbnb has been proven to be successful and you're gonna be like another Airbnb. There's not gonna, because these are network effect businesses. The winners have these like runaway escape velocity, that's why they get so big. That was the game I was playing. So I was in the venture game, doing venture technology companies and in that I was doing the venture technology companies of the last 10 years. Pretty stupid. So, and what should I have been doing during that period? Well, like during that kind of like 2012 to 2018 range, like the most interesting things were basically anything in crypto, which by the way, it's not like it was invisible to us. Like people in our office loved crypto.

**Shaan Puri** (3:44)
And you're into it.

**Sam Parr** (3:46)
I was buying crypto. We just didn't think of it as like, we didn't put two and two together.

**Shaan Puri** (3:51)
Everyone has to Google this, that if you Google Shaan Puri, there's an article from an Indian newspaper that says, famous entrepreneur, Shaan Puri puts 25% of net worth into Bitcoin. And I think this was any pre-acquisition. I think this was pre-wealth. So, like...

**Sam Parr** (4:07)
Yeah, what's 25% of $300?
So yeah, crypto was an interesting space to play. The other one was basically like anything in machine learning or, you know, big data. And lastly was like different, like new mobile apps. We had one mobile, we had one iPhone engineer and our company when I joined in 2012 The iPhone came out, I think like four years before that or something. So like, you know, we were just not even on...