Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

Justin Mares (@jwmares) joins Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) on this episode. Justin breaks down his most popular blog post, the 4 types of side hustles, and brings all kinds of ideas for how you can start your own. They also talk about Justin's DTC businesses - Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, and Surely Wines. They end the episode with a few ideas around camping, a new dating app, and how to leverage VAs & no code tools.

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* Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/

* Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million

* Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

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Show notes:

* (1:23) How Sam & Justin know each other

* (5:17) Justin's DTC bone broth company

* (10:00) Frameworks for side hustles

* (13:22) Side Hustle 1: Buying an asset

* (17:51) Side Hustle 2: Launching on top of a marketplace with demand

* (22:08) Side Hustle 3: Unique product that grows through paid acquisition

* (25:31) How Justin balances all his projects

* (30:38) The $30K/year CGM experiment

* (39:09) The skinny on Duck Duck Go

* (42:32) Ideas: Airbnb camping

* (45:27) Idea: Non alcoholic wine

* (51:10) How to naturally boost your T levels

* (1:01:04) Idea: Dating app based on your credit card usage

* (1:03:49) Idea: The no code automation officer

* (1:07:28) How to follow Justin

Startups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years in his books "the Hard Thing About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Ben to discuss the ups and downs of dealing with "the struggle," and why the best startup leaders are often the ones who simply refused to quit.

Twenty Minute VC

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “You need just as good business people on your team as you do technology people in order to win” – Brian Singerman
  • Anduril’s team recipe is made for success by having elite technologists and pre-existing relationships with the government
• We need to control our own destiny when it comes to national security – defense products need to be built on-shore, not outsourced
  • Anduril is creating software (Lattice Platform) and hardware for national defense and security
• Every founder needs to have ‘IT’ = Know their unique strengths and effectively supplement their weaknesses with other people
  • In Brian’s opinion, Palmer Luckey has ‘IT’ and compares him to Elon Musk as a technologist visionary
  • Relationships with founders are the key to VC success in this valuation inflation market

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Brian Singerman is a General Partner @ Founders Fund, one of the most prominent venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla, Palantir, Stripe, Affirm, Airbnb, Facebook, and many more. As for Brian, he has led investments in the likes of Affirm, Oscar Health, Wish, Asana, Oculus, and Postmates to name a few. Brian also sits on the board or is an observer to The Long Term Stock Exchange, Solugen, Cloud9, Modern Health, and of course, Anduril. Prior to Founders Fund, Brian spent a very successful 4 years as an engineer and executive at Google.

In Today’s Episode with Brian Singerman on Anduril, You Will Learn:

1.) How did Brian first come to meet Palmer and the Anduril team? Where did the meeting take place? How did the discussion go? Did Brian instantly feel that Palmer was special? What about the way Palmer presented, suggested this to Brian?

2.) The Market: What gave Brian the confidence Anduril would be successful where so many others had failed? How did the market change or evolve in a way Brian did expect? In what ways did the market surprise Brian? Does Brian think we will see the relationship between Silicon Valley and the DOD change over time?

3.) Anduril: The Business: Why is Anduril as a business, so hard to copy? How did Brian gain comfort around their defensibility? What does Brian think is the biggest misconception people have of Anduril as a business? How does Brian think about when is the right time to add secondary and ancillary products?

4.) Investing Today: Why is Brian no longer Zoom investing today? What does Brian mean when he says you have to, "play a different game to the hedge funds today"? In what way does he and Founders Fund look to do this? How does Brian think about the current levels of pricing? How does he determine when to pay up vs when to be disciplined?

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) is joined by Steph Smith (@stephsmithio) for an idea packed episode. They start off talking about opportunities around spending your FSA dollars and on swag packs. They transition to talk about the role of automation at companies and Steph shares how she would go about automating repetitive parts of her role. The end the episode talking about Steph's new course, approaches to building a company, and Fidelity allowing trading accounts for teenagers.

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* Want Steph's course? You can find it at https://doingtimeright.com

* Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/

* Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million

* Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

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Show notes:

* (1:06) Intro

* (2:20) Ideas around spending your FSA dollars

* (15:58) Ideas around giving out awesome swag

* (21:52) The role of chief automation officer

* (27:37) Building a company around automation

* (35:03) Giving away free alcohol as marketing

* (41:22) How Steph invests her time & money

* (43:50) Steph's new course - doingtimeright.com

* (47:44) Approaches to building a company

* (51:39) Fidelity allowing teenagers on the platform

* (56:52) How to find Steph online

In this episode Sam (@theSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) update "Sara's List". This was a list of companies Sam and his wife created 5 years ago when she was looking for a job. What was the criteria? They had to be established startups who had the potential to 5-10x over the next 5 years. She went with Airbnb. If you are looking for a new job, check out these 12.

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* Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/

* Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million

* Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

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Show notes:

* (1:01) Sara's List 2.0

* (6:59) Flexport

* (9:30) Zapier

* (13:16) Uniswap

* (18:07) Anduril

* (21:45) Replit

* (27:39) Airtable

* (31:01) Figma

* (33:38) Rippling

* (36:35) OpenStore

* (40:23) Faire

* (41:33) NexHealth

* (43:31) OneTrust

What’s it like to run a startup that has achieved its goal of impacting humanity at a time of desperate need? Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel joins Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE to discuss the power of taking offensive risks to seize unlikely futures with massive upside, sometimes with the result of changing the odds of life itself. For founders seeking greatness, the conversation also teases out many of the enduring lessons of how we can increase the odds of creating massive breakthroughs.

LIMITED-TIME OFFER: Go to wander.com/kyle, download the app and create an account to enter to win a free Wander Trip and you can also become a Wander Founding Member for $100 and unlock benefits like:

* Get $100 credited toward your first stay

* Limited edition founding member hoodie

* Early access to Wander Homes before everyone else

* A potential opportunity to invest in the company

For episode #19, I chatted with John Andrew Entwistle, founder and CEO of Wander.com, about the challenges of starting and scaling companies, building the future of life, work and travel, cultural pitfalls in early-stage startups, the importance of writing down life lessons and how immigrants can save America. Prior to starting Wander, John Andrew was the CEO and Co-Founder of Coder.com, on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and a Thiel Fellow.

This is a very special episode because a few weeks back I announced that I joined Wander’s founding team as CMO after initially investing in the company back when Wander was just John Andrew, an idea and an incredible domain. You might be wondering – what is Wander? It’s a network of smart homes in inspiring places that you can book for you next workcation, vacation or anything in between and control every aspect of the experience from your smartphones — from unlocking the door to setting the temperature to turning on the fireplace to adjusting lights and even accessing the Tesla in the garage. Our approach is entirely different from traditional travel options because we own and operate 100% of the homes on our platform and we believe that by owning both the bits and the atoms we can deliver a truly superior guests experience.

We just launched last week and want our early believers to join us on the ground floor. For a short period of time, you can become a Wander Founding Member for $100 and unlock benefits like:

* Get $100 credited toward your first stay

* Limited edition founding member hoodie

* Early access to Wander Homes before everyone else

* A potential opportunity to invest in the company

We’re also giving away a free Wander Trip for you and up to 3 friends for 3 nights. Just go to wander.com/kyle download our app and create an account to enter for free. This episode is a little different than most in all the right ways. I hope you enjoy this conversation with John Andrew Entwistle.

Rob Dyrdek (@robdyrdek), founder & CEO of venture studio Dyrdek Machine, former professional skateboarder, and star of hit shows like Rob & Big and Ridiculousness, joins Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) to discuss how he transitioned from acting and athletics to venture capital and how he structures his many business interests. He also talks about how he structures his life to achieve maximum human optimization, why he’s glad he didn’t have TikTok growing up, and much more.

Show Notes:

* (00:57) Why Ridiculousness is always on MTV

* (11:35) How Rob structures his business, money, and time

* (16:49) How Rob tracks his time with custom scripts

* (26:22) The transition from skater kid to human optimization

* (35:40) The value of opening your finances

* (44:16) Why Rob is glad he didn’t have TikTok growing up

* (58:29) Why Rob is trying to create a “Drake equation” for business

Links:

* Rob’s Podcast: https://dyrdekmachine.com/build-with-rob

Twenty Minute VC

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways

• “It may be lucky but it’s not an accident” – Chris Sacca
  • Don’t dismiss your success, it will always be an unexpected combo of luck and hard work
• “Training by way of tragedy. When things are going up you tend to correlate it with talent, when things are going down you tend to correlate it with luck.”– Chris Sacca
  • With more experience, you eventually invert this curve. You learn how to properly self-reflect on your own failures and successes
• Let the large amount of good in the world outweigh the small amount of bad
  • When investing or decision making in general, don’t let the small potential for bad results overpower your ability to say yes
• “There’s a surplus of assholes coming down the pipeline”– Chris Sacca
  • Many young adults growing up in computer science have never had a job that required human interaction, shaping their interpersonal capabilities often for the worse
  • The sheer ease of access to information is contributing to this as well as kids are not used to hearing no
• Chris is leading the climate change firmLowercarbon Capitol where every deal has the potential for more than 1 gigaton of carbon removal
  • Climate change efforts are not just charitable, they are profitable

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Chris Sacca is the Founder and Chairman @ Lowercase Capital, one of the best performing funds in the history of venture capital with a portfolio including Uber, Stripe, Twitter, Instagram, Twilio, Docker and many more. Despite this incredible success, in 2017, Chris and his wife, Crystal announced they would be stepping back from day to day investing to focus on ongoing efforts to rescue our democracy, heal the planet, promote diversity within venture capital. Earlier this year, they announced Lowercarbon Capital, with $800M AUM, with the mission to back companies that make real money slashing CO2 emissions, and buying us time to unf**k the planet. Fun fact: As a result of his incredible investing success Chris has also been a Shark on Shark Tank and even starred in an episode of Billions.

In Today’s Episode with Chris Sacca You Will Learn:

1.) How Chris made his way into the world of investing having started life as a lawyer? What was his first investment? How did the first Twitter $25K angel check come about?

2.) How does Chris evaluate his own relationship to money and wealth? Why did Chris and Crystal interview some of the wealthiest people? What did they learn from those discussions? How does Chris view the role of luck? Why was it when Chris lacked optimism he lost the most money? How did being $4M in the hole from public markets impact his mindset?

3.) What does it mean for Chris to bring up healthy and happy children? Why does Chris believe today's parenting has bred a generation of asshole kids? In what way is great parenting aligned to great team management? How does Chris give feedback to his teams vs his children? What tone should be used? Should it always be "radical candor"? Should it be immediate?

4.) Does Chris believe that VCs really add any value? What does Chris believe is his secret sauce? Why does Chris believe that as a VC you have to be outspoken and loud about the value you provide? What have been some of the biggest lessons for Chris from sitting on boards and working with Bill Gurley? Why does Chris believe that most VCs are shitty managers?

5.) Why did Chris decide to come back from retirement and found Lowercarbon with Crystal? Why did he not decide to do it all with his own money? Why is now different for climate tech than prior generations of climate tech innovation? How big does Chris want to scale Lowercarbon? Will Chris make more money from climate investing than from tech?

Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Chris Sacca

Chris’ Favourite Book: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived, How To Raise an Adult

with @michaeldell @martin_casado @pmarca @smc90

It's rare to see a company go public then private then back to public again, as Dell Technologies did -- and which also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare. How does one not just start, but keep -- and transform -- a company and business, especially as it adapts to broader, underlying tech platform shifts like demise of PC, end of cloud, cloud wars, and much more? This is really a story about innovation: who decides, who judges, who does it, and where.