How To Come Up With Billion Dollar Business Ideas | Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah

1. 0:00 – 1:08

   Intro

   1. DSDharmesh Shah0:00

      So this is what I call it, the Trillion dollar Venn diagram of success, right? Uh, I just made that up.

   2. SPSam Parr0:03

      [laughs]

   3. DSDharmesh Shah0:03

      But, so you draw both circles of your skills and say, "Okay. Well, I am now not, like, one in a million, I'm one in a billion," right? Or one in five billion, whatever that is. And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So, so that's kind of thing number one is like-

   4. SPSam Parr0:20

      Right

   5. DSDharmesh Shah0:20

      ... what's your thing? What are your skills? Um, and what drives the value-

   6. SPSam Parr0:24

      Draw one circle

   7. DSDharmesh Shah0:24

      ... like, how much value will that intersection create? It's two things. One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is-

   8. SPSam Parr0:43

      So on the pod right now we've got Dharmesh. Dharmesh is, is the, uh, founder of HubSpot. He's, uh... Well, your technical title is CTO, right?

   9. DSDharmesh Shah0:51

      That is correct.

   10. SPSam Parr0:53

       I see you more-

   11. SPShaan Puri0:53

       I think this means that, uh, that you have to do the ad reads for your own company today. [laughs] Why are we talking about HubSpot? You do the ad reads.

   12. SPSam Parr0:59

       [laughs]

   13. SPShaan Puri1:00

       You tell people why to buy.

   14. DSDharmesh Shah1:01

       We're talking about HubSpot because you guys do a much better job.

   15. SPShaan Puri1:03

       [laughs]

   16. DSDharmesh Shah1:03

       I am terrible at that. I'm terrible at the promotion side of things, but...

   17. SPSam Parr1:07

       The,

2. 1:08 – 23:20

   Why renting is better than owning

   1. SPSam Parr1:08

      uh... Shaan, do you... You're renting a house right now?

   2. SPShaan Puri1:11

      Yeah.

   3. SPSam Parr1:12

      And Dharmesh, you do not rent though, right?

   4. DSDharmesh Shah1:14

      Not anymore. I did for a long, long time. I'm a big believer in rentals, as it turns out, but...

   5. SPSam Parr1:19

      I, uh, I'm staying in Brooklyn for the summer, and I rent a, a furnished house, and it... or a apartment, and it is so much better than owning a place and having to worry-

   6. SPShaan Puri1:29

      It is

   7. SPSam Parr1:30

      ... about stuff all the time. It is so much better.

   8. SPShaan Puri1:33

      I agree.

   9. SPSam Parr1:33

      I, I think I, I... I'm on the renting train, I think, now. Like, I've kind of been there, but, like, I actually love it more. Do you like it? 'Cause Shaan, you owned a place in San Francisco for, like, four years, and then now you rent again.

   10. SPShaan Puri1:43

       Way better. In fact, every time something breaks, I now just have joy to be like, "Let me call somebody else. It's their problem."

   11. SPSam Parr1:49

       Exactly.

   12. SPShaan Puri1:50

       It's their cost to fix. They have to arrange it. They have to do whatever, and I don't have to think about it. Plus, also in California, property taxes are, like, insane, or, like, in San Francisco, 'cause the, the, you know, the house price is so high. So you know, even if you try to do the calculation, it's so hard to beat just this annual property tax every single time on rent.

   13. SPSam Parr2:11

       Wait, so Dharmesh, if you, if you had the choice again... I mean, I, I think maybe perhaps you bought because, like, your wife wanted to, or your kids wanted to, but if it was up to you, e- even with the family, would you be a renter?

   14. DSDharmesh Shah2:25

       If it was up to me, yes, um, because just the, the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership-

   15. SPSam Parr2:35

       [laughs]

   16. DSDharmesh Shah2:36

       ... uh, you know, bestows upon you is just not worth it. It's... That's, that's my thing. It's just like, like, I don't wanna worry about those things. I wanna, I wanna get as close to, like, living in The Matrix as I possibly can, right? And renting is a step closer to being in The Matrix, where you don't have to worry about physical things and atoms and things like that. It's like, "Ah, that's somebody else's problem." I just show up.

   17. SPSam Parr2:52

       How, how many people in your socioeconomic, like, ballpark, like, uh, you know, founders of multi-billion dollar companies or people like you, do you think also rent? Because I think that'd be a sh- if it were a fair amount, that'd be fairly shocking to a lot of people, but do you know a bunch of people that are similar to you that still rent?

   18. DSDharmesh Shah3:10

       I know people that are similar to me in terms of that they would prefer renting, because I've talked to them about this, but almost everyone I know now... Once you get a family and once you have, like, other things that you're trying to factor in, um, for instance, uh, you know, one of the things, my wife loves gardening and let's- loves having a yard, and that's kinda hard to do in a rental. Um, not that you can't do it, but it's, um-

   19. SPSam Parr3:29

       Right.

   20. SPShaan Puri3:30

       O- one thing that a, a guy told me who, who similarly was... You know, I think he's probably got, like, a 10 or, 10 or $20 billion house. He was like, it... He's like, "Renting is amazing until you want the... until your wife wants a specific house." And then once your wife wants a specific house or in a specific neighborhood, that neighborhood, like, like higher end neighborhoods have no rentals. So you just-

   21. DSDharmesh Shah3:50

       Yeah

   22. SPShaan Puri3:50

       ... can't get into that neighborhood. You... which means you can't have whatever, so then you're forced into a different path.

   23. DSDharmesh Shah3:55

       That's true.

   24. SPShaan Puri3:56

       And so it's not... You know, it's a, it's a version of, uh, good problems to have, so we'll, we'll count it that way. Um, all right, what are we ta- what are we talking about? Where should we start?

   25. DSDharmesh Shah4:06

       Well, you had-

   26. SPSam Parr4:06

       I don't know, man

   27. DSDharmesh Shah4:06

       ... a few things left over from the last episode, Shaan. I don't know if we wanna jump into some of those. Um, like the very end-

   28. SPShaan Puri4:11

       Let, let's do one

   29. DSDharmesh Shah4:12

       ... of the last-

   30. SPShaan Puri4:13

       Let's do one, because I think you will have a take on this. So, so have you ever read... I don't know, do you know Paul Graham, by the way?
3. 23:20 – 33:25

   Framework for three types of employees

   1. DSDharmesh Shah23:20

      works at multiple levels of ab- ab- abstraction. They're, like, um, three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is you have the creatives, and these are people that start things. They have ideas. They have 180 mile, you know, ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. Uh, then there are the... So they're the starters. Uh, then you have the completers. Those are the people that can make a list of, like, "Here are the things that need to get done in order for us to ship a product or do whatever." Um, and often those folks are at odds. Like, the, the idea folks are kinda really frustrated with the, the completers that are just like, "Ah, I'm just trying to check a box and make our..." You know, it's like, "Yes, but I'm doing this thing and it's not good enough yet." But you have that tension, and that's what brings in the third person, which is the collaborator. And the collaborator is really good at communicating, is really good at bridging gaps across departments, across individual people, and kind of pulling it all together. Um, and usually you're looking for someone that has at least some, like a nine or a 10 on one of those dimensions, a seven or an eight on another one, and usually very low on the third, right? It's like you can have the creative-

   2. SPSam Parr24:13

      What, what are you?

   3. DSDharmesh Shah24:13

      Which, we're, we're creative. I'm on the creative side. I'm, I've... Yeah. Um-

   4. SPSam Parr24:17

      For sure

   5. DSDharmesh Shah24:18

      ... terrible at execution.

   6. SPSam Parr24:20

      Well, but how... That doesn't make sense to me because you lead a $20 billion software company that, and you've been doing it for 20 years. Like, and as a CTO, so like sh- how on earth do you pull that off? And it's public- it's publicly traded, which means you gotta go through all the bullshit that, like, is the opposite of creativity.

   7. DSDharmesh Shah24:38

      Yeah.

   8. SPSam Parr24:38

      How do you, how do, how-

   9. DSDharmesh Shah24:39

      Well, like, well, like one thing you shared last time, you, you talked about those little, like, kind of calculators or the little, like, kind of growth, growth tools that you had built, which was just like, "Oh, I was just tinkering and I made this little, like, page load speed test site." And then, or whatever. I don't remember the exact example.

   10. SPSam Parr24:54

       Yeah.

   11. DSDharmesh Shah24:54

       But you had built like three or four of those that drove, like, a substantial amount of traffic for HubSpot early on, and like even now with WordPlay, like, you know, you're just, you're still creating stuff even now that's like-

   12. SPSam Parr25:03

       Yeah, but we were just talking, we were just talking, he's getting ready for the earnings call, and like that to me is the opposite of creativity. You know what I mean? That's like you're, you have so many... You have such a narrow lane that you could stay within. That's like, seems so hard.

   13. DSDharmesh Shah25:17

       Yeah. So I'll, I'll say this. Um, I have done everything in my, uh, in my power to reduce the time I have to spend on things that I'm not good at, right? Which is, uh, things that are kind of non-creative, not a part of that. So I don't have any direct reports, which is unheard of for a company that is, you know, for a founder that has, uh, 7,000 people in the company, a lot of them on the kind of product and engineering team, which presumably, um, you know, the CTO would kind of help manage and lead. I, I don't do that. Um, and so and the only meetings I go to are where there's some creativity involved. I don't like to go to kind of status things and updates or whatever. It's like I can read an email as well as the next person. Um-

   14. SPSam Parr25:52

       [laughs]

   15. DSDharmesh Shah25:53

       So but, yeah. But there are things that are non-delegatable that, um, one of them we should, we should probably talk about, it's, it's on my list of things. Uh, so one is earnings calls. Um, another one is getting onto public stages, right? So for instance, we have an annual conference called Inbound that, you know, the last time it was in person, it had like 25,000 people in the live event, right? Like it's, um, it's big, and I have to give the keynote every year, and I've been doing it for 10 plus years now, which I hate and I'm bad at. Uh, but that was one of those, because I'm founder, that was one of those non-delegatable things, right? I couldn't say, "Oh, well, we're gonna have someone else go do that," because, you know, in my role as founder, I have a certain kind of weight to me just by virtue of the title, um, of, of being a founder versus, um, someone else, so-

   16. SPSam Parr26:35

       Sha- Shaan, listen to this, listen to this Dharmesh story, and Dharmesh, you can fill in the blanks as we go 'cause you could decide how much you wanna reveal. But there's been a couple different times, maybe three different times I've introduced Dharmesh to a founder of a company who was raising money, and literally within five minutes, he replied and said, "I looked at the deck. I'm in for blank amount." He, he... Dharmesh, you can reveal if you wanna say some of the, some of the times how much it was. But, uh, and he replied with, "I'm in. Just so you know, though, I've got one rule, which is I always side with the founder, um, and I'm always on your team, but the downside of that is, like, I'm gonna make close to no time..." You didn't say it this way, but it was like, "I'm gonna make close to no time for you," or like, you know, like, I think you said it like, "I'm totally gonna be silent, a silent partner. I'm not gonna bother you, which means if you wanna bother me, I probably, w- you know, I'm not gonna talk to you that much. But that's like the stipulations for taking my money. If you wanna take it, great. Do it."

   17. DSDharmesh Shah27:32

       Yeah.

   18. SPSam Parr27:32

       I've seen that happen three different times, and do you wanna reveal how much it was or no?

   19. DSDharmesh Shah27:37

       Uh, I, I don't recall, but, um, but I will say this, I've made roughly, I think, a little over 100 investments now across my angel investment, um, I won't call it a career, but my activities, and 80 to 90%, um, I've never actually talked to the founders or ever met with them.

   20. SPSam Parr27:53

       [laughs]

   21. DSDharmesh Shah27:53

       Um, over vast majority of my deals, I make the decision within 24 hours. Um, it's like, like I don't have time to go dig in to do due diligence on some industry or whatever. It's like, that's not the point. My point is not that. There's only two reasons I do angel investing. Um, and it's, and none of, neither of them are to make a return. Um, one of them is around living vicariously through other entrepreneurs. I just like, I like that process. Um, and this is, you know, predates even starting HubSpot. And the other one, uh, quite immodestly, is just bragging rights.

   22. SPSam Parr28:23

       [laughs]

   23. DSDharmesh Shah28:23

       Is to be able to say five, 10, 15 years from now, it's like, because no one cares like how much you invest. I was like, "Oh, yeah, I was in Okta back in the day. I was in StackOverflow back in the day. I was like, you know, first money on this company, this company, this company." Uh, and that feels nice. It's, uh, it's not such a kind of magnanimous giving back to the community as purely like, "Oh, it'd be cool to be able to have been part of, you know, these great founding teams that went off and built great companies." I really respect that you said that part because I thought you were gonna say, like, um, you know, to support the causes-

   24. SPSam Parr28:53

       I like to help founders

   25. DSDharmesh Shah28:53

       ... I care about.

   26. SPSam Parr28:54

       Yeah.

   27. DSDharmesh Shah28:54

       Yeah, I just... You know, just to foster entrepreneurship-

   28. SPSam Parr28:57

       [laughs]

   29. DSDharmesh Shah28:57

       ... or like, you know, y- you know, use the D word, democratize something, something. And instead you said a, a true thing that I, and I think every angel investor feels is like, it's awesome to have a notch on your belt and be like, "Yeah, I s- I, I either I saw that or I backed that. I bet on that and it, and it worked out," and it's awesome. It's an awesome feeling, and it is a perk of the job and it's a real one. So, uh, the fact that you said that to me shows me that you are a real one, Dharmesh. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm what I refer to myself as like a warm-hearted, red-blooded capitalist, right?

   30. SPSam Parr29:27

       [laughs]
4. 33:25 – 1:06:10

   Why Dharmesh built WordPlay

   1. SPShaan Puri33:25

      You built a thing called Word Play. Is it wordplay.com? It's wordplay.com, right? Uh-

   2. DSDharmesh Shah33:30

      Wordplay.com, yeah.

   3. SPShaan Puri33:31

      Uh, by the way, you buy domain names, so you bought the hustle.com for us. You bought me, uh, copythat.com. Thank you for that. Um, I forgot to say thank you in person, but, uh, uh, so you buy, like, a lot of amazing domains. But you have wordplay.com, and did you tweet that it was getting 7 million users a week or 3 mil- what was the number?

   4. DSDharmesh Shah33:50

      It was. So the... I just went and checked the numbers. Okay, so just to kind of place the timeline in, in frame, uh, so November and December of last year, 2021, is when Wordle took off, and January is when it really, um, kind of hit its, I think, close to its peak. Um, and that's roughly when The New York Times acquired Wordle. Um, and couple things kind of bo- I mean, it was fine. I think it was, um, you know, a great outcome for Josh Wordle. But there were things that were kind of bothering me that were limitations in the game, and I was an avid player of the game. Um, and now it's like, okay, well, The New York Times has bought it. There's no way that anything's gonna happen for, like, years-

   5. SPShaan Puri34:25

      [laughs]

   6. DSDharmesh Shah34:25

      ... if ever. Uh, so that was kind of thing number one. Uh, thing number two, like it was, uh, it had been a while since I had launched, like some simple free thing publicly. Uh, hadn't gone through the process, and there were other things I wanted to learn. Um, it's like, oh, I wanna learn more about Vercel and Next.js and TypeScript and things like that. So like, okay, well, this is a, a excuse. And then that intersected with the third thing, which was, like the dominant variable in the equation, is my, uh, son was taking a Python programming class. He's 11, right? Uh, he's going through this process. And for him, um, it's, you know, still very abstract. He's learning programming. He enjoys everything involving technology and screens, but, uh, it was abstract. So on a Saturday night, I said, "Okay, well, let me build something," and Python happens to be my language. Um, build something so he can see, because he plays Wordle. He knows the game. Um, and so I started on a Saturday night with a deadline for Sunday, that I'm gonna launch something with him tomorrow. We're gonna have Google Analytics on it, so we're gonna launch it. I'm gonna launch it by tweeting it. And so he know, he knows what social media is, right? He's, um, y- you know, uh, so I'm like, "Oh, we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday. I wrote the code over the course of last night in Python, the language that you're learning, and we're gonna launch it, and now you can see users coming in," right? You can see the... And so now what I want him to have in his head is that when he, as he, through the course of his life, as he encounters problems that are solvable with software, which is a lot, like, it's actually tactile for him. It's like, "Oh, I don't know, I don't have the skills right now to do what, you know, Dad just did, but I know it's possible. I know it's possible because he did it in the span of 24 hours," right? "So if I wanna go off and build a video game, I wanna go off and build some tool for my school, I wanna build some social network for my fr..." Whatever it is, it feels like now it's, it's more approachable for him. He's got years to go before he'll get to that level. But, um, anyway, so those three things sort of came together, and so we launched it, uh, on that Sunday. This is, I think, in February or so, give or take. Um, and since then it's had, like 45 million games have been played. Uh, nine and a half million people have come through it. Um- Any given moment in time right now if I were to look at the Google Analytics, there'd be 2, 3,000 people playing, like, right now. Um, which, you know-

   7. SPShaan Puri36:30

      How, how did it get so much traffic? Where did the traffic come from?

   8. DSDharmesh Shah36:33

      Well, it helps that I have a social media following, right? I've got a million followers on LinkedIn, I've got 300,000 on Twitter, so there's that. Uh, there's some viral elements-

   9. SPSam Parr36:40

      Yeah, but that, that, that, that's, that's a lot, but that's not... I, I wouldn't have thought that-

   10. SPShaan Puri36:45

       It's not enough for that. Yeah

   11. SPSam Parr36:45

       ... yeah, it's not enough for that, is it? How many users do you think got from that?

   12. DSDharmesh Shah36:50

       Um, in the early days-

   13. SPShaan Puri36:52

       Like, like, what, was it big, was it big right off the bat? Like, the first week, was it big? I know the first day probably a bunch of people checked it out.

   14. DSDharmesh Shah36:57

       No.

   15. SPShaan Puri36:57

       But, like, I'm sure you posted it, and that was the big surge.

   16. DSDharmesh Shah37:00

       Yeah.

   17. SPShaan Puri37:00

       So what was like the first week roughly? Do you remember?

   18. DSDharmesh Shah37:02

       The first week was probably maybe 50 to 100,000. So it wasn't, it wasn't a lot, but it was something. Uh, but then it's like once you kind of get into it, this is the, you know, the kind of power of iteration is that, oh, well, one of the things that I found missing in the original Wordle was that it was a single player game. Like you played, and you played once a day, and that was it. Uh, so two big changes that we made in Word Play, one was it was unlimited play. You didn't, you didn't have to play just once a day. And two, it, it allowed you to challenge your friends. So you could say, "Oh, I just played this word. I solved it in four turns. Here's my score," and send literally a simple link to anyone or a group on... And this happens tens of thousands of times, right? Like, someone will take a link that they just played, they're really proud of their score, and then their family, they can post it to their WhatsApp group, uh, they can post it to their, you know, wherever they want and say, "I invite you to, like, beat my score" kind of thing. Um, and so that's the viral element. And so then as more people play, you can... and I track that as you might have as a Google Analytics event, and say how many people, how many times are people clicking that share button and issuing challenges to other people? And so that... Once you can kind of get into something where there's a compounding effect on the user base, so as the user base grows, um... And so now the thing I'm fighting though, right, is that, so that's happening, that's going well, but then the interest in Wordle, uh, and related games is waning-

   19. SPShaan Puri38:16

       Right

   20. DSDharmesh Shah38:16

       ... because everything has its kind of peak and its, uh, and its ebb. Um, and so, but I- it's been an interesting exercise. And so we, on the kind of learning path, one of the things I hadn't done in a while is like, okay, well, what's traffic actually worth? Let's say I had to make a living on this thing or make the company, quote-unquote, or project profitable. So I put Google AdSense on it, which is the easiest thing to do, and discovered that, like, like if I weren't bothered by the fact that there would be two ads on the main game board page if I were solving for monetization, it was like $90,000 a month, uh, in Google AdSense-

   21. SPShaan Puri38:48

       Wow

   22. DSDharmesh Shah38:48

       ... um, based on the traffic. Yep. Um-

   23. SPShaan Puri38:49

       Wow. I thought you were gonna say way less.

   24. SPSam Parr38:51

       I was gonna say... Yeah, I thought he was gonna say like 5 grand a month. But 90 grand a month-

   25. DSDharmesh Shah38:54

       Yeah

   26. SPSam Parr38:54

       ... and your, you only have, your only costs are hosting, right?

   27. DSDharmesh Shah38:58

       Yeah.

   28. SPSam Parr38:59

       And-

   29. DSDharmesh Shah38:59

       And my time. Right. Yeah.

   30. SPSam Parr39:02

       And first of all, Shaan, go to wordplay.com and then go to like the About page. His About page is incredibly well-written. It's wonderful copywriting. It's wonderful...
5. 1:06:10 – 1:10:25

   Driving value through an intersection of skills (Trillion dollar Venn diagram)

   1. DSDharmesh Shah1:06:10

      Pixar, which I think it can be, by the way, Shaan, just so you know. Okay, so imagine... Let's take a step back. I'm on a whiteboard, and the whiteboard we s- It's the universe of all possible people, everyone on the planet, and you draw a circle with one of your skills. So in Shaan's case, let's say we put copywriting- As one of the skills that he's in the top 1% or top 5%, whatever number you wanna associate with it, and so that's the circle. It's like, okay, X number of people are at Shaan's level, um, or better at, at copywriting. Awesome. Let's say we draw another circle that's, um, we'll call it crypto. Knowledge of just how crypto works. And that's a group of people. Awesome. Um, rarer skill because it's newer. There's fewer people that know how to do that versus copywriting. We can accept that. It'll be a smaller circle. Uh, what happens, though, is if you intersect those two circles and turn it into a Venn diagram, the number of people that know copywriting really well and also know crypto really well is 100 times smaller than either of those circles combined, right? And this is... We see the same effect, like, in standardized tests. If you took the SAT or the GRE or the GMAT, there are people that are really good at English portion of the test, there are people that are really good at math portion of the test, but the ones that score really, really well are the ones that are good at both. They don't have to be the best at both because that's the thing that's actually rare, is the combination- Mm-hmm ... of the English and the quant. Same thing here. So now imagine... So this is what I call, like, the trillion dollar Venn diagram of success, right? Uh, I just made that up. [laughs] But, so you draw both circles of your skills and say, "Okay, well, I am now not, like, one in a million, I'm one in a billion," right? Or one in five billion, whatever that is. And if you can convert that into some kind of monetizable business thing or whatever, that's when magic sort of happens. So, so that's kind of thing number one- Right ... is like what's your thing? What are your skills, um, and what drives the value- And one circle ... how much value will that intersection create? It's two things. One is how rare is that intersection, whether it's two circles or three circles or whatever, how rare is it? And then the other one is how, um, how much does it kind of reinforce the other skills that you already have? So for instance, l- uh, I'm a software developer. That's one of my... That's my core skill. I've been programming for, what, 30 years now. That's my thing deep down inside my core. If I combine that with I'm gonna go off and, which I could never do, uh, become a Olympic level swimmer, let's say, like, also very rare. The intersection of that, it's like, okay, well, the opportunity that reveals because the two things are so unrelated, it's like I don't know how I would take my ability to build a web app and intersect it with my... Like, yeah, there's some things I could do, but I don't know if that would be that huge. But, uh, software development is applicable to lots of... If I was gonna be an academic researcher, if I was gonna go into music, if I was, like, other things, um, there's a lot more overlap to the degree that it... Like, those two inter- They, they reinforce each other. So software helps me do this, and that helps me do this, and this is one of the reasons. Uh, so my advice here was as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at. Um, that, that will kind of drive that, kind of that rarity and, and that's what drives, uh, drives the overall value. Uh, which kind of brings me to is, like... And so when I think of things that I want to learn, it's like, okay, well, this is why I got into copywriting. It's like if I can... And copywriting is another form of... This is communicating at scale is what copywriting is, right? Right. Like, it's, uh, in, in usually textual form. It's like, okay, well, I don't know that many software engineers that can copyright really well. Like, like, literally, like, other than th- that have now started companies, right? It's like I... Th- they don't exist. But, um, very rarely do you get, like, really, really good, um, engineers that went off and read six books on copywriting and- Mm-hmm ... took Shaan's class. That, that's not a common occurrence, um- Wait, you, you, you weren't, you weren't a good writing, uh, writer before you got into this? No. No, no. Oh, wow. I mean, your writing's great. And by the way, Shaan, let's, what's... You gotta pimp it out. Maven.com/powerwriting? Or just go to maven.com- Yeah ... and you see it. Yeah, yeah. Just go maven.com, M-A-V-E-N.com. I'm on the homepage. Starts in two weeks. All right, so the, the, uh, th- what you said is great. I would add one more circle to that. Well, so your, so your Pixar thing, by the way, the reason you m- might pull it off is because you have a very weird and unique and related level of skill. So yes, there are people that are better, maybe better creatives, better animators, better entertainers, whatever, but they don't know crypto, and maybe that's the thing that unlocks the next trillion dollar company, is entertainment intersecting with crypto. It's the Netflix for the blockchain. Whatever it is, right? Something like that, where two things combine that never had been put together in that way before. Um, anyway. Right. The, the, the other circle that I would add that

6. 1:10:25 – 1:28:24

   Why Shaan is starting the next Pixar

   1. DSDharmesh Shah1:10:25

      I think people underestimate is... So I tweeted this out. And so people... I didn't explain what the tweet is. The tweet was, I said, "The next company I build is gonna be like a new, New Age Pixar," uh, like the, like the next Pixar, and, um, I think I w- I, I think I would work on that project for 30 plus, like 30 c- 30 plus years. I'd j- I'd just keep going with that company. I wouldn't be trying to sell it or flip it or get out of it or whatever. Um, so that was the tweet, and then a bunch of people... I basically had two reactions. One reaction was, "Awesome," like, "Where can I sign up? How do I work for this company? That, that sounds awesome. I love Pixar, you could do it." And those are, like, fans of M- MFM type of thing, or people who themselves had been thinking, "God, that would be awesome to create another, like, Pixar type of company, you know, 'cause I love Pixar." Then there was the other half of people that were like, "What makes you think you could do this?" Um, you know, like, "You know how hard it is to make a movie? You know how expensive it is? You know how the, how unique, you know, Steve Jobs and E- you know, whatever, uh, Lasseter and Catmull, like, how, how rare those talents were when they came together? That's a once in a generation company." And then other people were like, um, one guy had this amazing burn. He was like, uh, "Check, uh, acquihire," like a green check mark. "Acquihired power writing co- uh, course podcast next Pixar." And I was like, oh, thanks. [laughs] That's, that's pretty solid, actually. Um, and so, you know, a bunch of people were sort of all in the same bucket of, like, "This is so hard, this won't work. What, what... You, you can't do it," that... some version of that. And so the third circle, where one is like, "I'm really great at X, I'm really great at Y," the third is just I have the courage to go do a thing. Totally. And, like, um, Tim Ferriss once told this story. He goes, "I went to a, a business school class, a Harvard Business School class. I gave this talk. At the end of the talk, I go, 'Oh, by the way, guys, I'm doing this challenge, um, uh, only for you guys,' you know, uh, whatever. 'Uh, I wanna get in touch with either Bill Clinton, Jennifer Lopez,' or, uh, you know, some sports person, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever. Um, 'If anybody here can connect me over email with them, like, you know, just r- reach out to them, and if you get ahold of them, connect me over email, I will buy you two round the world plane tickets, um, you know, for... You could fly business class for a year, uh, around the world anywhere on my dime. All right, guys, thank you very much.'" And he told that to one class and, um, and he's like, "You know, uh, you have 30 days to complete this challenge."

   2. SPShaan Puri1:12:42

      [laughs] And then, um, I think it... I forgot who it was. It was like he did it to two classes, but he gave a slightly different message in each. The first one he just, just said that. 30 days go by, nobody did it. Uh, sorry, nobody suc- completed the challenge. He's like, "Ah, what happened?" You know. Turns out nobody even tried the challenge. The perceived difficulty was so high that nobody did it. So in the next one, he told that story, and I think he added a twist, which was whoever gets the closest to it, uh, wins

   3. DSDharmesh Shah1:13:09

      Mm.

   4. SPShaan Puri1:13:10

      A- and all of a sudden, like, everybody tries, and in fact, I think somebody did get in touch and actually suc- successfully completed the challenge. And he was like, uh, he had this principle which was sort of like, you know, everybody wants to fish where everybody else is fishing 'cause they think it's so easy to catch fish there. He's like, in actuality, often it's easy to just go, go catch a fish where the fish actually are, and you, you don't have to base it on how, how many people, how many other people you think have tried something or how, what the perceived difficulty is. And in fact, sometimes the bigger you go, the easier something can be because nobody else is even trying to do it.

   5. DSDharmesh Shah1:13:43

      Yeah.

   6. SPShaan Puri1:13:43

      And so I would say, like, you know, this Pixar thing, who knows if I'm gonna go do this or something else. I tweet things just almost to, to my prototype. It's like, "Let me say this out loud. Let me see how that feels."

   7. DSDharmesh Shah1:13:52

      Yeah.

   8. SPShaan Puri1:13:52

      If I sleep-

   9. DSDharmesh Shah1:13:52

      Yeah

   10. SPShaan Puri1:13:52

       ... and to wake up tomorrow, do I wanna tweet five more ideas about that, or am I over it, and it was just a passing, fleeting moment? Um-

   11. DSDharmesh Shah1:13:59

       Yeah

   12. SPShaan Puri1:13:59

       ... but, but the, the core ingredient I think most people lack is courage to actually go and do the thing, and I think that's the, the, the... Pe- people put way more emphasis on what skill am I top 1% in. They kind of, they, they under-credit themselves.

   13. DSDharmesh Shah1:14:13

       Yeah.

   14. SPShaan Puri1:14:13

       One cr- one skill you could just have for free, you just gotta go, it's like at the san- the, the-

   15. DSDharmesh Shah1:14:17

       Yeah

   16. SPShaan Puri1:14:17

       ... the deli at the gro- at the grocery store. Go pull the number, is-

   17. DSDharmesh Shah1:14:20

       Yeah

   18. SPShaan Puri1:14:20

       ... you know, I, I have the courage to actually go do it. Like, you know, I'm g- I will go do, pull the trigger on this thing and not wait for other people to kind of like-

   19. DSDharmesh Shah1:14:27

       Yeah

   20. SPShaan Puri1:14:27

       ... reinforce that it's a good idea to me.

   21. DSDharmesh Shah1:14:29

       Yeah. And this is, and I could not agree more. Um, and so, and I think people conflate sometimes skill versus talent, and they believe they don't have the talent for entrepreneurship or for design, for programming, whatever it is. Uh, in my mind, uh, so skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Uh, talent is the rate at which you can acquire a particular skill. So if you have a talent for music, that means you will acquire musical skills faster than someone that doesn't have a talent for music. It doesn't mean that someone that doesn't have a talent for music can't learn it. So they may have a ceiling as far as how far they can go. Fine, I get that. Uh, but this doesn't mean they can't do it. And so o- one of the big lessons kind of in my, in my life and my professional career is that most things are actually skills, not talent.

   22. SPShaan Puri1:15:09

       Mm.

   23. DSDharmesh Shah1:15:09

       Mostly, like, it's like you can start with zero. Like, I was w- I would've been voted least likely to ever start a company in my entire, like, generations of family, right? Like, that's not, uh, a talent I ever had, like, uh, when I, um, until I went off and did it. Like, public speaking was not something that's like, oh, that, that's a skill, and you... And then, um, there's this thing from s- software engineering I think it's, it's worth sharing. The, the... I think some of the best ideas are when you take stuff from other industries and pull them into this thing and apply it here in a weird way. But in software engineering, there's this, uh, thing called functional decomposition, which is take a problem, be able to articulate well. So a function that has a set of inputs and a, an output and what it's supposed to do, and really all software problems are being able to take, like, the highest order function is, uh, let's say you wanna, um, grade a possible, uh, investment based only on the website. It's like, oh, I'm gonna give you a domain, and you're gonna give me a score from zero to 100 as to how good this is. Okay, well, that function is easy to define. Like, domain goes in, score from zero to 100 comes out. What other functions does that function need in order to pull that off? It's like, okay, I want a function that looks at the domain and looks at the level of SEO they have. That's one layer down. The person that's writing the SEO function goes down a level. It's like, I'm gonna look at the on-page SEO and see how good they're doing at meta tags and H1 titles, and then I'm gonna look at the off-page SEO and their link acquisition and that kind of stuff. That's, it's like... So if you roll it all down, and you go down far enough, individual functions at the atomic level are so simple as to be trivial. What matters is the fact that you were able to abstract it down to that simple thing, right? And so most things, uh, can be broken down that way. So, so if you look at, oh, I wanna become someone that can give a talk at, in front of 25,000 people on a stage, um, that seems like an insurmountable task for someone like me that's never done that. Uh, and that's not my, not my, not my thing. It's like, oh, well, what does that involve? Number one, you have to have, kind of overcome the... I, I didn't have, like, stage fright. I had severe stage anxiety, right? Stage, stage fright is like, oh, there's a ship that's gonna come down from space and just suck you up because you s- you were so bad.

   24. SPShaan Puri1:17:01

       Right.

   25. DSDharmesh Shah1:17:01

       And s- stage anxiety is like, man, I wish a spaceship would come down and suck me off this stage right now.

   26. SPShaan Puri1:17:07

       [laughs]

   27. DSDharmesh Shah1:17:07

       I wanna get off. Um, so there's that. Like, don't, you know, don't pass out on stage. And then there's the, oh, uh, you learn about storytelling. You learn about writing. You learn about slide design. You learn about humor, and I did all those things, right? Read books, took classes on all those components of public speaking. In aggregate, I'm okay now, right? Like, I, I can do that, and you, then again, then it's practice, and you do it over time. So anyway, my point here is, uh, startups, whatever skill, and startups are a skill. Figure out what set of skills you need to acquire. Some you'll be good at acquiring because you have the talent. The other one, you're just gonna have to grind it out more than others may, but it's doable. It's a doable thing.

   28. SPShaan Puri1:17:42

       One question that I have-

   29. DSDharmesh Shah1:17:43

       If I can do it, anyone can do it. That's my point.

   30. SPShaan Puri1:17:45

       I love that framework.

Episode duration: 1:28:24