My First Million

"I'm reading this book called Stolen Focus because I'm basically like incredibly depressed by the fact that like I get 10,000 notifications a day and it's like impacting my mood."

"I've been using Suno a lot. I won't bore you with my Suno track. I'll send it to you after this, but like I make a lot of music in Suno now and it's incredible fun. Like I if you've ever had any level of a music itch, you got to get on Suno."

"Forget this little like beat maker thing I showed you in Muse Art. Like Suno is the real deal where you can actually make good songs."

"Co-work is it's like a junior worker that you could be like, 'Hey, can you analyze this data? Hey, can you create this plan? Hey, can you make a presentation out of this?' You hand off work to in coworker."

"So I've been I was using Claude Code all week or Claude co-work. I don't even know the difference to be honest. I think Claude Code is one thing and co-work is an easier way to use Claude Code."

"So Google keeps releasing these like really powerful things but they suck at marketing them and so if you just kind of poke around what Google's got they actually kind of have better tools for a lot of things. So there's this thing called Notebook LM."

"Oh my god, dude. I barely type anymore. Do you use it on your cell phone? It's so good on the phone, too. So, Whisper Flow is pretty amazing. It's an app that basically does just amazing text to speech."

"Farcon is working on a tool like this called Nebula. It's an app that you basically go in, you connect your Slack, your Gmail, whatever you want to connect, your Google calendar, and it just knows it's like, cool, if you give me your calendar, I know what meetings are coming up. I'll just create prep docs for you."

"So, have you seen ChatGPT's pulse feature? Yeah, I pay for it. It's expensive, but it's pretty great. But it's cool, right? It knows what you're already trying to do and it's like, cool. Every day I'll just proactively search for stuff."

"I want to give it a shout because you know a lot of people know about Claude and these other things and I thought this was a pretty cool site. So, if you go to doanything.com, you'll see it."

"I had a policy where you could return any item, even if it was used up to 365 days after. I got a new wardrobe every year because I just sent all my clothes back on 340 days."

"When my kids ride in our car, we have a Tesla and Tesla has AI built in. We just pop the AI open and we're like, 'Hey, we're playing guess the animal.'"

"I was a skull guy. I loved tobacco."

"When I started this podcast, I wrote a Google doc and I said the stated plan was probably nobody will listen to this."

"He sees a dollar bill on eBay that it's Michael Jordan's face in the middle... he puts them up on eBay and he starts averaging 100 bills sold per day"

"I just have in my Kindle highlights and I just kind of want you to talk about them."

"So I'm reading this book. Can you see this? The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie."

"I bought this thing. I don't use it. This is like an anti-endorsement. I don't use it. I think it was kind of junk."

"Justin Mayers has an amazing company called Lightwork. They come to your house and they kind of inspect it to figure out where things are not healthy and where they are."

"What I would do is I would treat Berkshire Hathaway as the index currently dollar cost average into the Berkshire class B shares."

"So, it's this guy Fabian posted this and his app is called Glyph glyph.app. I haven't actually tried to use it to make one of these, but I thought that the demo was unbelievable."

"I think the guy from Athletic Brewing Co. on the podcast before. Yeah. They're awesome."

"You were like hey get these horse mats. Go to this barn website. And I bought them. They're amazing. They're great."

"Jesse Cole from Savannah Bananas. We had him on the podcast, you know, unbelievable story. He made minor league baseball essentially something that has a 3 million person wait list for tickets."

"There's this thing called Kaggle Competition. It was a startup that raised $12 million. It was eventually bought by Google. According to their website, they've had 19 million engineers compete in their competitions."

"Google has spun out this company that is basically trying to cure all disease. The headline is solve all disease. We're entering a new era of drug discovery."

"So I watched this documentary called The Thinking Game. It's on Prime Video if anybody wants to go watch it. I'd heard good things from some smart people."

"It was as if you just sent people a Google doc, the same Google doc over and over and over again"

"At the time, I think it was a $30 million a year business. How big is it now? I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they said they did 6 million in January alone."

"The book is called Traction by this guy named Gino. Gino, by the way, Sean has asked to come on a whole bunch."

"He created this thing called 50 Scanner right when the iPhone got started and he made eight figures. I think he was making like $5 million a year repeatedly for a very long time."

"He saves up $3,000 and he starts a company called Appliance Traders Limited. And the idea is he's going to import AC from the US, AC units, and he's going to go door-to-door selling them himself."

"He goes and he sees Club Med and he's like, 'It's good, but it's a little too Spartan. Like I feel like I'm going to like make a mess here and I'm in trouble if I do that.'"

"He rebrands the Bayrock to Sandals because he's like that already sandals like embodies relaxation and like being on the beach."

"He buys the airline, takes full control, like vertically integrates the experience, and he's like, 'Look, the airline was a tough business. It's a bad business.' But he had an advantage, which is he owned the resorts."

"Sam, do you like TikTok? Genius program."

"I was reading this book called the Caesar Palace Coup. And in about 2018, all these hedge funds had owned little bits and pieces of Caesar Palace, which I think was the largest casino hotel management company in the world."

"It's like a Teal Fellowship run by the government."

"You ever heard of DeepSeek? They were in the news recently, created that big algorithm, didn't even have access to the best chips, and somehow outperformed all of the OpenAI models. Genius program."

"The Buffett index stock market valuation versus GDP, he likes it at about 90%. It's at 210%."

"Can I tell you about this Elon Musk podcast? Did you listen to this Cheeky Pint episode with Elon?"

"I think we're going to see a Kumon for focus for kids. I think kids are going to be impacted by this where they're going to learn like exercises and stuff for focusing."

"It's Elon's competitor to ChatGPT"

"Have you ever used Grok? It's Elon's competitor to ChatGPT, which is the product is called Grok."

"XAI came into the AI game like 7 years late and became a $250 billion company."

"He made it the opposite of Microsoft. So he's like what's the opposite of Microsoft? It's macro hard. And basically what he's doing is he's building what he calls human emulators."

"Tesla's building Optimus which is the robot that can do any of the work that a human could do and once the robot can build more robots that's the infinite money glitch."

"Pavle is the founder of Telegram, which is like one of the biggest messaging apps in the world."

"Tesla's building like their own GPUs to like the equivalent of the Nvidia chips. And he bought huge orders of Nvidia chips and told Jensen like, 'Give me everything you got.'"

"Tesla obviously worth more than the next 20 car companies combined."

"SpaceX, trillion dollar company."

"I think we're going to have a Marie Kondo for the mind. An influencer who's all about the tidiness of the mind."

"profgalloway.com. No mercy, no malice is the blog which I read. I love and so you just wrote up two blog posts this week"

"Simon Properties is killing."

"The guy who started Grey Goose started it when he was in his 70s. Before that, he had brought Jägermeister to the US and made it popular."

"Before that, he had brought Jägermeister to the US and made it popular. He created the Jäger bomb and got like Jägerettes, the girls who would go around bars pouring the stuff down college kids throats and he made it the party drink."

"And by the way, he didn't even make that. He just used this off-the-shelf thing called Kling that does like video transitions and he's like, 'Oh, what if I just plug video transitions into a slide deck? Will that work?' And then boom, it worked."

"All right, forget ChatGPT. That's old news. You talk about ChatGPT. My mom knows ChatGPT."

"Garrett is the founder of Pipe Dream, which is a very cool company. They're basically these guys are building like underground delivery tunnels."

"They have this first thing called goods which is like an autonomous it's kind of like Door Dash or Instacart but it's like the fastest grocery pickup in the world."

"you know a lot of people know about Claude and these other things"

"We sent everybody in the company the same email, but with one slightly different space somewhere in the email. We were able to create like a unique fingerprint for everybody in the company."

"I think a Shopify store, something like that, WooCommerce, and I flew down to North Carolina"

"I could just tell you like what this thing called Shopify is and I could tell you that you probably might want to buy some ads"

"Kalshi based on the way they're regulated because prediction markets are regulated by commodities or something like that."

"Ultra, founded in 2025, just raised $1 million to scale non-nicotine focus pouches."

"This thing is incredible. So he was telling me about this and I thought it was pretty fascinating."

"They're now doing over two billion a week in just sports betting volume."

"If you look at all of Berkshire's deals over the 50-60 years that it was doing it, if you remove the top five, its returns fall to average."

"I'm starting a new service, rental people who do nothing. You rent him out and he'll go hang out with you. And he says nothing. It's pretty much a silent companion, completely non-physical, nonualual, basically an introvert for hire."

"The second book that he did is called American Buffalo and it's this amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history. It gets pretty popular."

"So then he creates this website called meateater.com. MeatEater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on the sports channel and it starts working out."

"So he bought this drug called Darapim and he increased the price from like $13 to $500."

"I met the founder of Grammarly and I remember talking to this guy Max and I was like oh you're just a you're a genius you are legitimately better than me"

"He also owns one of, if not the largest mortgage company in the country. So, he owns United Wholesale Mortgage."

"Jamie from Ring was there. He's like, we're in this home security aisle. Jamie, tell us the story of Ring, but standing in the Ring aisle holding the Ring product."

"I once met the founder of Chipotle and he said anybody in food service can make a billion dollars if you can figure out how to get a minimum wage employee to treat the customer as if it's their guest."

"I've been to Ramp, you know, Ramp the credit card company which is like a take over the world startup. I've been to their office"

"He initially started a company really cool company but it was also in the kind of housing design space called Samsara. And it's basically like backyard ADUs."

"It was the founder of Brex and so he had just sold his company same day for five billion"

"he's telling us about like how he's just been tinkering with Claude code and how he's relearning to code basically through AI"

"I remember talking to like one of the founders of WeWork, not Adam, but the other guy, Miguel."

"I remember talking to the founders of Casper and all these like great companies"

"Mario the founder of Oscar when I talked to him I'm like yeah you're you're like 1% the 1% of the 1% of IQ"

"James Clear is there and James Clear has written his book is like the number one selling book in the world over the last 5 years all categories"

"Have you seen Air the movie about the Jordan signing?"

"Bill Bowerman has this famous book called The Men of Oregon."

"Airbnb I think did a great job of this. They made a hotel seem like the generic choice."

"Have you seen how Netflix is famous for values? I was looking up what the values actually are and it's like 18 of them."

"Nike was explicitly a running company. It started in the not popular or cool niche."

"I haven't read Shoe Dog by the way which I know is like supposed to be mandatory. I started it and I was like eh."

"I invest in this company, Superpower, and I think Superpower is going to try to do this."

"How do you create like a Gym Shark athlete where you basically sponsor all these Instagram famous people."

"Nick owns a company called BPN that sells protein."

"You can just go to Office Max and like do this"

"This channel was started by one person in Romania. It's a channel with one video. So, this guy just hit it and quit it."

"he went to Fast Company. And if you go look at Fast Company, he says, 'How we got our first 2,000 users doing things that don't scale'"

"I remember on E*TRADE it was $9.99 to just buy and sell a stock. And Robin Hood got rid of that."

"Robin Hood built a hundred billion dollar company off of free trade free trades, commission free trades. So don't pay $9.99."

"I have this book on my bookshelf called Steal Like an Artist. And this book is basically about how most of what we think is original is a remix or a straightup copy of something that came before it."

"before I invested in Beehive, I was listening to your Spotify playlist. I don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth hacks, but you made one of the best work music playlists called Big Desk Energy."

"Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt did this a long time ago. I think Product Hunt now is probably a little underrated, but there was a time about 10 years ago where Product Hunt was the shit."

"when we got acquired by Twitch, EMTT, who's the founder, now we're probably whatever 12, 13, 14 years into the company's existence."

"The ebook, Time to Heal, Young"

"Have you seen the average customer value or a customer order go up because of you? So what you're saying by the way is like a world famous uh it's the rule of reciprocity. It's Robert Cialdini's book, Influence."

"And last summer there was like the run clubs. Everyone's meeting at run clubs. Like I haven't met a single couple that met through the run club."

"So if you go to foamparty hats.com, this business started in 2017. Grace Rojos and her son Manuel Rojos create this thing and they've built basically a million-dollar plus business now off of these novelty foam hats."

"They got on Shark Tank and they gave up 25% of their company for 100 grand, right? So like you know this deal with Mark Cuban."

"He wrote the Psychology of Money, Same as Ever, the art of spending money."

"He wrote the Psychology of Money, Same as Ever, the art of spending money."

"We had our first computer was a IBM PC XT."

"Back then there was this thing called the yellow pages that they'd throw on your doorstep and that's how you would find businesses."

"You remember Microsoft Kinect, like the camera that you put on your Xbox, and it could watch you play and somehow interact with that, I believe, was heavily developed by one of these competitions."

"So he was building they Europe had the equivalent called Theme Park and he built Theme Park with this guy. He became a smash hit when he's 16 years old."

"Cursor basically said they didn't make the model. They were like, 'Let's take Claude, but we'll just wrap this in a tool that programmers can use that will be very useful for programmers.'"

"They end up getting 90% prediction accuracy and they basically solve the single protein folding question."

"It is the reason that OpenAI exists. It is the reason that ChatGPT exists."

"This company called Bullfrog, which made like the most popular computer games at the time in Europe. They were the number one production company of games."

"He started this company called DeepMind. DeepMind got bought by Google and DeepMind is basically Google's AI play."

"They created this program called AlphaGo. So AlphaGo basically what they did which was this is kind of nerdy but I liked hearing how they did it actually."

"Steph says people always ask me what I think about when I'm shooting. And he goes absolutely nothing."

"Michael Dell has this great line in his autobiography where at the time he's 19 years old."

"I just thought I can create the Chipotle of sushi."

"He sells Meetup.com to WeWork. The price was rumored to be 200 million."

"He sells Meetup.com to WeWork. The price was rumored to be 200 million."

"While he's working at McDonald's, Crain's, which is a business publication, they want to do a story on Scott."

"The S&P is trading at historic highs. 97% of the time, the S&P has traded at lower valuations relative to earnings."

"He tried a Lucid and he's like it was way too complicated. I hated it."

"Let's take Hampton for example what's the limiting factor in Hampton thought exercise."

"So here's what the site looks like. So it's called bio to notion it because the output is going to be a notion page. So here's an example. I had this book about Ted Turner. I uploaded it and the output which I'll show you in a second. It takes like 5 minutes."

"We host this annual event called Hoop Group with Mr. Beast, and we're hosting it in about a week."

"Not just the doorbell, but then we did the flood light camera. Even the neighbors app is a huge social network for crime and safety in neighborhoods."

"I launched a company, and it was called Milk Road. And Milk Road's story is very simple. I wanted to create the best crypto newsletter in the world."

"As you know, a long time ago, I was running a business called birthdayalarm.com. It had been going for 20 plus years, printing millions of dollars a year."

"I did this episode called How Elon Works. I think it's the most downloaded episode of Founders by far."