SPEAKER_02
While you're listening to this podcast, you're probably doing something else too. It's cool, we get it. When you're having conversations with your customers, the same is probably true for them.
They're messaging their teams, they're mentally planning date nights, so growing conversations beyond the moment can be challenging. So HubSpot helps you go beyond the moment by connecting you and your teams, giving you access to the same exact data and helping you see the full customer picture. With powerful tools that connect marketing, sales, ops and service, HubSpot's powerful CRM platform powers you and your teams to transform your customers' moments into extraordinary customer experiences.
Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. Can non-technical people apply there, you think?
SPEAKER_01
Of course, every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road.
Let's travel never looking back.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, this episode is gonna be awesome. And then there's a story behind this. I don't know if I told you this story, Sean, but basically my wife, Sarah, she about four or five years ago.
So my wife is like pretty type A, went to an Ivy League school, isn't particularly risk, doesn't like taking risks, doesn't want to, like she's someone who's gonna rise up in a big company and be an executive one day. And she wanted to, she was like, I wanna join a new company and I wanna make a lot of money. And she was, Sarah's gonna be 29 next week.
So she was what, 25. And she said, I wanna join a company where I can make some money. And so we made a list of a bunch of companies where we thought if she was given, let's say $250,000 of stock that would invest over four years, we made lists of places where that stock could like 10X.
And that's how she eventually, she applied and got a job at Airbnb that was like five years ago. And now they're, I think when she joined, what was her last valuation before they went public? Like 18 or 20 billion, I think. And now their valuation's like a hundred, I think.
So what's that, five X maybe? So it did okay. And we, you and I were talking and I-
SPEAKER_01
I think you're underplaying it. It did better than okay. Let's just frame this fully, right? So joined a multi-billion dollar company that already had 3000 something employees.
SPEAKER_02
No, it wasn't that big. I think it had 1200, but yes, it was big.
SPEAKER_01
All right, so over a thousand employees. So not joining a risky startup, not buying a lottery ticket. And so she knew this was gonna have some gain.
It's just a question of like some value. It's just a question of how much got a job. And she wasn't like an exec.
So it was kind of like an achievable thing. Like she came in as like, I don't know, like a mid-level manager. Is that fair to say?
SPEAKER_02
Mid-level, yeah, I would say.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's cool.
SPEAKER_01
Right, lower to mid. So it didn't even come in as a hot shot. And before the age of 30 was worth, it was a multi-millionaire because of the stock that appreciated from this thing, right? From joining Airbnb, right? So self-made multi-millionaire.
Self-made multi-millionaire without eating shit as a startup founder, right? Where you're stressed and you're making no money and you might fail all the time and all that stuff. And you have to make payroll and all that good stuff. And so had to kind of like cushy, every day got to go in and pick which flavor of soy milk she liked from the company fridge and like had health benefits and had all the things that you get, the good things you get at a company.
Plus got to see it grow, right? So I thought, wow.
SPEAKER_02
By the way, I cannot confirm or deny the multi-millionaire. We can't completely pull up our spot. Or the soy milk spot shouldn't drink soy milk.
But the point is, the point is, is that Airbnb was, like they pay very competitive, they recruit people from Google and Facebook. So they pay competitive salary. You get very competitive and wonderful benefits.
You work really hard, but it's not a startup of 20 people where you don't have any resources. So you have resources to get help. And so the idea with this, we're calling this Sarah's List.
We should come up with a cuter name one day. But the idea here is that we made a list of companies that are cushier than like a 20-person startup, but still have wonderful upsides. So you can make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits, and there's like a five, 10, 15 X upside.
SPEAKER_01
So low risk, great reward. You're not gonna become a billionaire doing this. That's okay.
Most people don't really care about that. So when I heard this, when we were talking, I was like, oh, wow. Like, I think of myself as the hustler, but this is the ultimate hustle, right? You know, and not in a bad way.
What I mean was like, this was the hack. This was the lowest, low effort, low risk way to get a great outcome. Meaning didn't have to work 120 hours a week.
Didn't have to like carry the whole company on their back. Didn't have to like pick a winner. And it's really hard to pick early stage winners.
It's like, no, pretty clearly it was gonna be a winner and still walked away with a great outcome. Or, you know, so it had a great, great outcome. I just thought, wow, that's actually fantastic.
I think there's a lot of people who would love that path. There's some people who wanna be Elon Musk. They wanna go change the world.
There's some people who wanna make a billion dollars. There's some people who wanna just have, go sit on a beach and do nothing, right? But there's a lot of people who would love this. Hey, let me work at a great company with really smart people working on a cool product.
And let me build, you know, financial independence without risking it all like a degenerate gambler. So to me, we got Craigslist. We got Angie's list.
What's the one with the child predators? I don't know what that one's called. Like Molly's list or something like that. We got whatever, Molly's list.
And now we have Sarah's list. And Sarah's list is the companies that we think you could go join today. They're already valued, you know, over $250 million.
They have, we think a low risk profile, but if you stayed there for four years and you came in as a mid-level person and you got your grants, which is like 50,000 in stock every year or something like that, that that could make you a self-made millionaire or multi-millionaire.
SPEAKER_02
That's the fun. And before we get into this, everything that we're gonna say, it's not like financial advice or anything. All the information that we have, it's basically what we've just read online or rumors that we've heard amongst friends.
None of it, so like everything is here to say and a lot of predictions, right?
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yeah, we could be wrong. But we thought it'd be fun. You know, like we're not gonna go take these jobs, but there's a lot of people out there who would love to know, hey, what would you all recommend? We know it's not a guarantee.
We know it's not set in stone. We know this is just a prediction. But hey, some prediction is better than nothing.
So we'll go on the record and we'll see how these play out. All right, so we each did a research. We got five.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so you go, so we have five. I've got more than five, but let's go you go, I go, and then we'll go back and forth.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great. Okay, I'm gonna save my best one I'm gonna bring in second. I'm gonna first jab, just feel you out, see how strong you're coming in, but my best one is coming next.
My PowerPoint is coming second, okay? But for the first one, my first one that I'm gonna present for Sarah's List, my nomination is Flexport. Okay. Okay, what's Flexport? So Flexport is a company that you use when you are shipping things. So for example, my e-commerce company, we ship things.
We need to arrange between an international supplier, we need our goods to go from their factory to our warehouse. Well, how do you do that? You gotta go to a bunch of shipping carriers. You gotta say, hey, when do you have a boat leaving? My ready date is August 3rd.
Do you have a boat August 3rd? What's the price? They get some quotes. So what Flexport does, this is a job called freight forwarding. Flexport is basically software that does this thing that used to be done pretty manually or with very old clunky software.
They made modern slick software that does this freight forwarding thing, right? So you go online, you could see all your quotes, you book your boat with a simple click, you pay the fees, it's all very nice and then the notifications come through. And basically it is modern freight forwarding software. So Flexport's currently valued, last public valuation was about $3 billion.
The SoftBank put in a billion dollars at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation. It's got about 2,500 employees.
These are about, so about 2,500 employees and they're in a huge space. So global shipping is massive. It's only getting bigger, the bigger e-commerce gets.
And what they did was there was all these small mom and pop freight forwarders and they just sort of like did what many great companies do. They sort of take a fragmented market with low NPS and they build a best in class product that's integrated. And so you don't have to deal with kind of the mom and pop telephone call game that you would have otherwise had to do.
SPEAKER_02
And the founder's pretty amazing. His name is Ryan Peterson. I've hung out with him once or twice and I've read a lot of interviews with him.
He's very charismatic. He once said that this company's either gonna be worth zero or a hundred billion dollars or something like that. He's like, this is gonna be all or nothing.
And he's pretty, he's very, very good.
SPEAKER_01
We should compile an e-book of quotes like that that's like talk dirty to me. The VC edition. It's like, what are some offhand things you can say as a founder that just get every investor to like salivate? And they sometimes sound dumb.
Like why would I say my company's either gonna be worth zero or a hundred billion? It's like, but that's exactly what a VC wants because that's how their economics work. So we should just, and you can just cherry pick these phrases and they're like pickup lines for VCs. And we should just make a little e-book out of those.
SPEAKER_02
But that's a great one. All right, next one. I'm gonna go first.
Mine will be easy as well. Zapier. So what they do, it's always really hard for me to explain what this company does, but once you use it, you immediately get it.
And I'll give you a use case. So basically what they do is they connect APIs. So for example, when the hustle first started, we had, I didn't wanna buy like greenhouse or one of these like really $500 a month applicant tracking systems.
And so I created a Google form and then I use Zapier to connect that to a sauna. And so every time someone applied to a job, the information was automatically filled into an a sauna board. And that's what we use to track our job applicants.
Another example, and this is like a really simple personal use case, is I had a scale and every time I stepped on my smart scale, it told Zapier and Zapier put my weight into a spreadsheet and I compared it to all my friends' weight and we had a competition. Now that's like a really simple use case, but they do incredibly complicated ones where they'll attach loads of different, so you could build an entire company using basically Google spreadsheets and Zapier. They're interesting for a few reasons.
First, they bootstrapped it to like $70 million in recurring revenue and they did it very quickly. They recently raised a little bit of funding at a $5 billion valuation by, I believe, Sequoia. They currently have 350 people.
My opinion is this is gonna end up a very similar to Atlassian. So Atlassian is an Australian company that went public, I think in 2014. And when they went public, it was like a 15 or no, maybe it was like a $6 billion valuation and they sold widgets to small businesses, software to small businesses and people slept on them and it slowly scaled.
I think today Atlassian is worth $100 billion. I think Zapier is gonna be similar. Wade Foster, the founder of Zapier, spoke at HustleCon and I hung out with him and he was like everything, he was just like perfect.
He was wonderful. There is one downside I've heard through friends of friends that they don't, so their pay is, their remote team, they've been remote from day one, they pay against Chicago market salaries. So they don't pay San Francisco salaries.
So that might be a downside, but I would love to own Zapier stock.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, okay, so what you're saying is, it's a $5 billion company and kind of amazingly, this was at 1.3 million in funding to get to that 5 billion in value, is that right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they basically only raised $1 million in funding and they got that to 60 million ARR. They're probably north of 100 million ARR. They're probably worth, they're worth valued at five, they're probably worth 10 at this point.
I mean, it's like a crazy valuable company. That's insane. They're growing crazy.
SPEAKER_01
You would need them to become a $25 to $50 billion company and you're betting that they can and will do that.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, over the course of four or five years when all your stock would vest, yes, I think that.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, all right, sounds good. Okay, so.
SPEAKER_00
Do agree or disagree?
SPEAKER_01
They've surprised me every step of the way so far, so when you first, it's like, Zappier, I'd be like, oh, cool indie hacker project. And then it's like, oh no, it actually got to like a million dollars ARR. It's like, oh, that's cool, cool bootstrapped software company.
Maybe it can suffer $25, $30 million. Oh wow, they're doing 50 million in ARR? Okay, geez, how many times again am I gonna be wrong here? So I'm just debating, do I really wanna bet against them again? And I think the answer is no, I don't wanna bet against them again. So I think I'm gonna give you thumbs up on your one here, I would include it in Sarah's List.
Flexport, would you have given it the thumbs up or thumbs down to be included on Sarah's List?
SPEAKER_02
Can it be worth 50? Yeah, definitely. Okay, good, so we have to. Keep in mind we're talking about like five years from today.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, five years, exactly. So, okay, so we have two successful nominations to Sarah's List. I'd like to give you my next nomination.
You're gonna hate this one or roll your eyes or something. Okay, Uniswap, do you know what Uniswap is?
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, that's insane to me. Okay, so Uniswap, if you go to like, I don't know, it's Uniswap.org is how you get to the thing.
So Uniswap, what if I told you, let's just play this game. There is a company in the cryptocurrency space and I have an opportunity for you to join. Here's some of the things you need to know about this.
It is, it's bigger than Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and State Street all combined. It has.
SPEAKER_02
Bigger in terms of what, current market cap?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, in terms of current market cap. Okay, let me tell you some other things about it. Oh, is that just market cap? Is that just one of those crazy crypto market cap things? Hold on, let me just tell you a little bit more.
What if I told you it has the trading volume of Coinbase with 50 times less employees? Would that be something you're interested in? Yes. What if I told you that this company is doing 10 billion a week in trading volume? And what if I told you it was doing that with less than 35 employees? What if I told you that it took Coinbase eight years and a thousand employees to get to a billion dollars in revenue? And I told you that Uniswap is only two and a half years old, has less than 50 employees and is on pace to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year. Would that be something you're interested in? Because that's Uniswap right now.
SPEAKER_01
So what do they do? So what do they do? Okay, so let's say you've heard of all the different like tokens that exist. So let's say, have you ever heard of, you know, die or Ethereum or whatever, like all these different tokens, right? There's thousands and thousands of different currencies. So Coinbase, what they're really good at is to say, you have US dollars, you want to go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum, you want to go buy some, you know, some, some Solana.
Great. We'll take your US dollars, we'll connect with your bank and you can buy this crypto asset. What Uniswap does is says, thanks Coinbase, we'll take it from here.
You're kind of slow and expensive. And you, you know, you have all these employees and all this red tape and stuff like that. From here, once you have a crypto token, this Uniswap is how you trade any crypto token for any other crypto token.
So let's you swap between any crypto asset instantaneously and it's what's called a decentralized exchange. Means there is no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It's a protocol that they built.
And all it does, if you go to the website, it just says, what currency do you have? What currency do you want? Here's the exchange rate, push go, and it'll exchange it for you right there. And what they did was the genius of it is normally for a centralized exchange like Coinbase, they have to have a, you know, sort of, they're the market maker. They find buyers and sellers and they match them together and they have to have, you know, a certain amount of reserves themselves to be able to facilitate, to bring liquidity into the market.
What decentralized exchanges do, what DEXs do, that's what they're called, is you have a buyer, you have a seller, and then you have this group in the middle that I can also come in and be a liquidity provider. So I can just go give Uniswap some money and I can earn a portion of the revenue that they make just by providing liquidity into the pool. Oh, cool.
And so they have, it's like a three-sided market. And so they have over $5 billion of liquidity that users just locked up into their market to create the liquidity for their market.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's like a weird lending club type of thing. That's pretty sick, only 30 people. What type of person would be a good tool? Wow, what type of personality would be good to work there?
SPEAKER_01
I don't know, crazy nut, I don't know. But these types of things, it's like, typically these are gonna be engineering heavy things and so you can come and do all the other stuff. So let's say you're a community person, you're a marketing person, you're a PR person, you're whatever, you can go and sort of say, look, I have this skill set that you probably need, but when you're at 35 people and this much scale, they kind of need everything.
They need more of everything probably. And so I think anybody could probably fit in, you just have to figure out how to solve some of their problems.
SPEAKER_02
Do you think they give equity? Yeah, so basically there's a company,
SPEAKER_01
so there's a company and then there's the protocol. The company owns some of the tokens using the protocol. But like, so the company raised a Series A from Andres and Horowitz and Paradigm and a bunch of others.
They raised only a Series A. So I think they've only raised $11 million to date and they've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on $11 million and Coinbase is what, an $80 billion company. So I think this would be a very, very, very valuable group to be a part of.
Now, the economics are different because it's crypto and everything's weird. It's like, what's the valuation? What's my equity worth? I don't know. It's all funky.
You got to figure it out yourself. But there's definitely enough value there and it's growing super fast. It's kind of for a person who's,
SPEAKER_02
I imagine the personality type is like someone who's okay with a little bit, a lot of chaos and some risk. Yeah, and like non-traditional.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, with something that's non-traditional.
SPEAKER_02
All right, I'm going to give you another non-traditional one. This might be one of my stronger ones. So it's called Andrewle.
I think that's how you say it. Do you know what that is? I had it on my list.
SPEAKER_01
All right, you stole it right off me. Andrewle, yeah. Wait, did you really?
SPEAKER_02
Did you really? I didn't see it on yours. Yes. No, it's not written up on here. Oh, sorry, I didn't put my,
SPEAKER_01
I have my own little cheat sheet here that you don't have. All right, great.
SPEAKER_02
So mine's called Andrewle. So I'll tell you a little bit background, but you actually might know a little bit more. So basically it started by the guy named Palmer Lucky.
And the reason why this is interesting is Palmer Lucky started Oculus when he was like 16 or 17 and then he sold it to Facebook for somewhat like a billion dollars, just like a ton. And it's interesting because Palmer Lucky is very controversial. So he's a big supporter of Donald Trump, which is very atypical in Silicon Valley.
He was fired from Facebook and a lot of people, or he was the one who said he thinks he was fired because he liked Trump and he sued Facebook for hundreds of millions of dollars. A million and one. So regardless if you think that's cool or not, he is controversial amongst Silicon Valley folks.
And so he started this company out of Orange County and they, here's another controversial thing. They make stuff for the government. Their first product was an invisible wall basically.
So it was a way to build drones, I believe, to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican American border. So controversial, whatever, we can, we definitely can agree to that. They've raised money and it's worth about $4.
6 billion. They have 510 employees. This would not be good for a liberal person or someone who, like you basically have to be moderate or right of center to wanna work here.
Palmer seems like a fine enough guy, a little quirky, but definitely it's a right-leaning company, which is incredibly normal in Silicon Valley. I definitely think this could be a Palantir S company. The way that I describe what they do, if I'm correct, is basically, if you ever see the movie War Dogs, people or the government says we need blank.
And then people bid and they wait to get it. And then the person, they go, we need some type of vehicle that can fly like a plane, but land like a helicopter. And then people go out and build it.
Well, what Andrel does, I believe, is they build stuff that they think the government needs, and then the government buys it from them and it saves a bunch of time. Is that basically what they do?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so they, yeah, exactly. Their primary revenue source comes from the government. And what they build is like pretty fancy hardware, software combinations.
So they're like, one of their, if you go to their website, it's like Century Tower. It's like this solar powered tower. It's like this giant pole that is used to like, basically monitor a board or right monitor an area.
And it's autonomous. And so there's basically like the hardware to be able to do that. So like top flight hardware mixed with software that makes it like smart, intelligent, work well.
It's like a Nest camera for the government. And so they have drones. They have different things like that.
It's not a huge product line because these things are hard. They probably take tens of millions of dollars to make each one, but they're basically trying to be the kind of like, the most technology forward provider for the US defense budget, which I think is like, hundreds of billions of dollars. I think you have here like $700 billion a year.
SPEAKER_02
And the question is, can, so they're currently worth a little bit over four billion. They raised money from founders fund, I think. Can this company be worth 20, 40, 50 billion in five years? Absolutely.
100%, it definitely can. It definitely can. This guy already built a billion dollar company at the age of like 22, definitely.
All right, your turn.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that's a good one. I had that one on my list. So I liked that one a lot.
All right, Sarah's list is filling up. We got thumbs up there. Okay, I wanna do one that I invested in actually.
Okay, so disclaimer, it's not even really a disclaimer or disclosure. This is actually a flex. Yes, I'm an investor.
Okay, so this company's called Replit. Have you ever seen Replit? Do you know what this does?
SPEAKER_02
Only because you have been telling me for years it's gonna be the greatest.
SPEAKER_01
So I'll tell you how I found them or how I kind of heard about them. So I heard about them from two different places. Anytime these two people talk about something, you're like, oh wait, that's like a winning combination.
So the first is like my teenage nephew is like using this tool Replit to learn how to code. I'm like, oh, okay, never heard of before. Kind of like, that's interesting.
Stuff teenagers use, you should probably like pay attention to stuff teenagers use because those tend to be big companies, whether it's Snapchat or Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. And I was like, all right, so I stashed it away. Didn't really pay too much attention to it.
Second time I heard about it was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He tweeted out a graph of a hockey stick. He goes, he said something like one of the fastest growing, this is one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen.
He goes, he's like, yes, that's over 5 million users. And that may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers, 5 million is a hell of a lot. And that's so true.
Like 5 million programmers on a network is like worth its weight in gold.
SPEAKER_02
Every programmer ever.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so then, so I can't share too much about it, but basically companies value just under a billion dollars right now. So if you're looking at this, you're like, okay, can I, does this end up at 5 billion or more?
SPEAKER_02
What's it do though?
SPEAKER_01
What's it do? So what does it do? Okay, you wanna learn how to code. It's kind of like a sandbox that does a few important things. The first is if you ever, have you ever like gone down path or like, dude, I'm gonna learn how to code.
I bought this Udemy course. I'm gonna learn Python. Have you ever like gone down that path at all? Cause one of the most confusing things that happens is you're like, oh shit, where do I type this? You don't write your code in a Google doc, right? Like you gotta type your code in a code editor.
And like, then it's like, oh great, but you need to install these like Python packages. You're like, what the hell is that? And it's like, you need to like install NPM or like, what the hell is NPM? And then you're like, it's like, oh, you need to deploy. So now you need servers.
And you're like, server, what do we give them one of those? And so it's all just very confused. Just the environment, which is basically like the equipment you need to code, setting up that developer environment in itself is like, for me, it was very confusing. Now I'm like, you know, average person.
So like, if an average person finds it confusing, that means it's too confusing. And so what Replet did was the first day we're like, dude, look, it's just a website you go to. It's already got all that stuff baked in.
You don't have to install anything. You don't need five different programs just to be able to deploy code. Like you write the code here, then you push run, you test it here, and then you push deploy and you deploy it here.
Great, all built into one. So that was really useful for young hackers, young engineers and hobbyists who wanted to like learn this stuff. So the first thing was they made all the stuff you need to learn it.
Then they were like, okay, cool, but this is kind of like a social network because we got all these programmers all writing code. It's kind of like, if you've ever looked at GitHub, GitHub is this big network, it's probably the biggest network of developers. And they all put their code here.
Well, what GitHub did was like, you could fork something. So you put some code, you make it publicly available. I can read it and then I could fork it, make my own version of it, and you'll get notified that, hey, Sean remixed your thing.
So Replet does that like on steroids. So they basically, it's almost like a game. It's like all the different programmers can see what all the other programmers are doing.
They can get inspired by those. They can literally take their code and remix it, make their own version of it, or they can like contribute to each other. And they can take little parts that somebody made.
Somebody made this bouncing ball. Cool, I'm gonna grab that. I don't have to remake it from scratch.
I'll just use their bouncing ball program code and I'll add that to my basketball hoop thing that I'm making. And so it's like a multiplayer little game almost for programmers to be able to like, not just write their code, not just deploy their code, but also find other pieces of code that they can interact with and monetize it. So you can actually launch full apps, full programs on here and make money.
It's like all built in. So the bet here, if you look at their graphs, it's like everything is a hockey stick, like crazy, crazy upwards curve. All right, I'm on board with that.
So I think that's, they do this side by side comparison. Like here's our growth compared to GitHub's growth from zero, your zero, your one, your two, your three, or four. And they're like outpacing GitHub's growth.
SPEAKER_02
All right, I'm on board with that. I think that's a good one. Can non-technical people apply there, you think?
SPEAKER_01
Of course, right? Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being. Yeah, for sure. And in fact, usually those companies, technical companies get built kind of like engineer first.
And so they actually need people that are non-technical to be able to join.
SPEAKER_02
All right, everyone, today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpot's podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners.
So join Steph Taylor, she answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch. Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022.
And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out. It's called Imperfect Action.
You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts. All right, that's a good one. I'm on board.
I'm on board with that one. All right, my turn. This one is similar to Zapier, AirTable.
So AirTable is a Microsoft Excel alternative. It's a Google Sheet alternative. When they first came out, I was like, why on earth? Why on earth would anyone need this? Like Google Sheets works great.
And then I use AirTable, and I realize they're kind of making it their own category. It's very sticky. It's very neat.
Right now, they're valued, since 2021, they raised money at a $5.7 billion valuation. I actually think they could be much larger.
There's another company that I kind of compare them to. They're not quite the same, but I think they're a little bit same in terms of stickiness. And they came out the same time, or they got popular around the same time.
That's monday.com. And they're worth, they went public at like $18 billion. I think that AirTable could definitely do really great.
They currently have 645 employees. The guy who started it, I think his name is Howard Lou. Howie. Howie Lou. And he's kind of like this prodigy genius guy.
That's how they stereotype him in the media. But I've seen interviews with him.
SPEAKER_01
He went to my school. He went to Duke.
SPEAKER_02
Did he? Yeah. I saw interviews with him, though. He was definitely like a prodigy young genius, but he was very wise.
And he wasn't like a wacky weirdo. He was pretty well thought, well spoken.
SPEAKER_01
You want to know something funny? Yeah. So seven years ago. So we were in a mastermind group.
If you remember me, you had a couple other guys. We used to get dinner every month or two or something like that, talk startups. And we would occasionally invite other people in.
And so I have a DM where I DMed Howie back when AirTable was very, you know, it was a lot smaller. I think it was still probably, I think it had just raised money, maybe under $100 million, I think was the valuation at that point in time. And I was like, Howie, you know, love AirTable.
Think it's fucking great. I think it's going to be big. You know, you're a fellow Duke guy.
That's awesome. Hey, I host these mastermind dinners. You should come to one.
And he's like, oh, I'd love to. And we scheduled it. And you were scheduled to go to it.
And then I think you and one other person canceled. And you're like, oh, I can't come. And so I canceled the dinner.
And so I never met him. And like, you know, who knows what could have been. We could have been homies by now.
We could have been invested a long time ago, you know, under $100 million. Did you hang out with him? No, that was the excuse. I had been made.
I was like, I do these as excuses to hang out with people. Right? I don't want to say, hey, I'd love to meet you. I was like, yeah, great.
I don't love to meet you. I don't want to ask him to coffee. But I was trying to invite him to something cool.
I was like, hey, we do this founder thing.
SPEAKER_01
I'm sorry, dude. All right. So I have one of those first to work.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because Excel is like the there's this great quote, which is like every SaaS company you actually compete with Excel. You don't compete with other SaaS companies you compete with Excel because people just use Excel for everything. And so yeah, I think that like, I don't know what Excel's market cap would be, but I think Excel's what I don't know what it would be.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, Excel is like AirPods to Apple. Like AirPods would be $100 billion company on its own. That's what Excel is.
SPEAKER_01
Exactly. So if Excel is $100 billion company, I think that the best threat to Excel is going to end up being worth 20, 30. I think there's a pretty good chance of that.
And so I like this a lot more. It was recently at $1 or $2 billion. I liked it a lot more there than at 5.
7, but like, we didn't do the episode then we did it now. So OK, so I'll give you one that's very, very similar real quick, Figma. So Figma's same idea.
Oh, I have that one too. I have that one too. Instead of, I don't do it quick because people already know Figma, but I would put it on the list.
The way what Airtable is doing for Excel, Figma's doing for Photoshop. So it's the younger, slicker, cloud-based, sexier version of design software. And it's kind of eating Photoshop's lunch.
And I don't know what it's worth now. What is it, $7 billion now? It's like.
SPEAKER_02
No, it's so in July of 2021, they raised $200 million at a $10 billion valuation. But that sounds like a lot. But to the listeners, Andy, you, Sean, how much is what's Adobe's market cap? So Adobe, I believe almost all the revenue at this point is from Photoshop, right?
SPEAKER_01
Well, it's the creative cloud, which is basically a bundle. You're like, I want Photoshop. But buy fireworks and buy all this other shit that we bundle in with creative cloud.
SPEAKER_02
OK, so tell me what you think it is.
SPEAKER_01
I would have guessed Adobe's market cap is, I don't know, $150 billion, something like that. What is it?
SPEAKER_02
It is $315. And if I'm not mistaken, that might be one of the. Let's look it up.
It might be one of the 50th. Let's see, Adobe would be one of the biggest companies in the world. So Adobe is the 30th largest company in the world.
So when you think about how big this can be, you think $10 billion, that's so much money. Well, Adobe's one of the biggest companies in the world. A figment's going after it.
Totally should be on this list.
SPEAKER_01
It's like all the business trends. It's like first, unbundling. It's like, well, creative cloud brings in $12 billion a year.
Well, let's unbundle the most valuable part of it, Photoshop. And let's do it differently. OK, what's different? Second trend, cloud-based.
Third trend, multiplayer. When I'm using Figma, my mouse is moving around. Your mouse, I'll also see what you're doing on the same canvas.
That's really cool. And so they're piggybacking off all these macro shifts and doing it. Just for, by the way, if you think, oh, it's already at $10 billion, is it really going to 5x? Last five years, Adobe has 6xed.
So Adobe was trading at $100 a share. It's now at $660 a share in five years. But that's at Adobe's large thing.
That's their growth rate. Figma's growth rate should be in the next five years much faster than Adobe's was in the last five. And so I think there's a fairly good chance of that.
In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies that are on this list. This is a great list to be on.
SPEAKER_02
All right, my turn. So I agree. I had to think about mine, so I completely agree.
So we're about 100%. So Rippling, that's my next one. Rippling, very boring company.
I used it. It's a payroll software provider, but it also manages devices and gives you permissions to different stuff. So basically, if you're a small startup and people sign up to work at your company, I can easily track which person has which computer, and I could pay software through there, and I could do HR management and issue health care stuff to people.
Why it's interesting? The founder is named, what's his name? Parker Conrad. So he has the controversial past. He started Zenefus, which was at the time one of the fastest growing companies ever.
He got fired because the culture was crazy. People were having sex in the hallways and being bro-y and shit like that.
SPEAKER_01
And so this is kind of it. He was like, oh, in order to do this HR thing, you have to have this compliance training. It takes 60 hours.
Well, cool. I just created a macro that will go through the training for you. Just push the enter key every five minutes or something like that, and you'll be done in six hours instead of 60.
Like shit like that, that was a little bit like, oh, that's actually slightly illegal, I think.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. But the good news is he has experienced, also good news is that he fucked up. And so you would think that you'd learn because he got ousted.
So I kind of like that. I always like that in a company where someone is like, it's their second time around. And they've already been mildly successful.
I think that's actually a good thing. Here's why I think this company is interesting. So they were last valued at $1 billion, $1.
3 billion. And I use them, and they're amazing. I've used them for years.
SPEAKER_01
It's an every company problem. Every company on board is new employees, and needs to get their computer set up, needs to get them connected to all the systems. It's every company problem.
And that's why it's kind of genius.
SPEAKER_02
And so Workday, which is in the space, is worth $67 billion. Paychecks, which is just a payroll provider, is worth $40 billion. So I don't think that their valuation is still true.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think they're their own category, which is why it's even better. If you said does Rippling end up? I think Rippling, if it's at $1 billion now, I think it's maybe one of the best candidates to like 50X. On this list.
It's one of those like, you know when Square went public, Square went public at like, I think, $3 billion or $2 billion valuation? Something like that.
SPEAKER_02
Now it's like $150.
SPEAKER_01
Now it's like $100. Square after an IPO, which was again, de-risk, de-risk, de-risk. Now it's liquid.
It's already had like a 30, 40X since then. And so that's like, wow, that's going to get some insane appreciation on your stock. And so I think Rippling is one that, if you told me this 30 to 50X is, I'd say of the things we've said on this list, that might be the number one candidate so far.
SPEAKER_02
All right. So then we've got a hit. And when I used the product, it did everything well, but it was still pretty clunky.
So I think a lot of your product designer, if your customer support sales, I think these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff. So that's my pick. All right, your turn.
SPEAKER_01
OK, I'm going to do one that's a little culture-
SPEAKER_02
By the way, I think we're fucking, these are hits, I think.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think so too. All right, so here's one. Open store.
You know what open store is? It's new, isn't it? It's new. OK, so Keith. This might not.
SPEAKER_02
This might not. This might not. Well, no, this might hit, but this might be too early.
But go ahead.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so OK, so what is this? So first, let me say who's the founder. So the founder is two kind of powerhouses. Now, I don't know how much of their time they're spending on this, but one is Keith Reboy, who was the CEO at Square.
He was part of the PayPal mafia. He's a big time VC. He's a total dick on Twitter.
Entertaining dude. I enjoy. He's very smart.
And he's an asshole on Twitter, which I find to be hilarious. And then this other guy, Jack Abraham. Jack Abraham was kind of like a wonder kid, built a company, sold it to eBay pretty early on.
Was like kind of a hotshot at PayPal, spun out, and he has his own studio. And so they together came together, and they made Open Store, which is a riff off of Keith Reboy's other previous, last company that's now worth $5 billion, Open Door. So what Open Door did was, you want to sell your house? Don't go through the whole like dog and pony show.
I will buy your house now. You don't have to stage it. You don't have to fix it up.
You don't have to hire an agent. You don't have to do anything. Just sell me the home.
I'll just give you a price right now, and you could sell it today. So I give you liquidity in this house market, instantaneous sales. Open Store is the same thing for e-commerce.
They're saying, you want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a day, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data, and I'll just give you an offer right now.
And so what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores. And so they raised, I think, their first round maybe was at a $250 million valuation. So to get your 5X here, you have to bet that it becomes a billion dollar company.
What this is, Track Record, Square, Open Door, with Jack Abraham's Track Record, is a very good shot that this ends up being worth more than a billion dollars. This space is very hot. So do you know Thrasio? We've talked about them before.
It's the one that Thrasio was the first hot company that was rolling up Amazon businesses, businesses that sell products only on Amazon. They're called FBA, fulfilled by Amazon companies. And they rolled them all up.
Do you know if Thrasio is valued at right now?
SPEAKER_01
It's like 5 or 10? They're going to go public at a $10 billion valuation. I think they might be the fastest company to a $10 billion exit ever. I think they're up there.
SPEAKER_02
It's like three years old or four years old.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, three years old and very capital efficient and how they went there, because they used a lot of debt to buy these companies, because the companies already are profitable or producing a lot of revenue. So they're able to use big debt to do this. And so open store is doing the same thing without the Amazon style.
It's for Shopify. And so I think that this model, this open store model, is one of the fastest, easiest, and fastest ways to build a billion dollar company. And I think that this company at $250 million, I see a lot of value in this pick here.
Yes, it could go to zero. This could also not work. This has higher risk than the other stuff on this list.
So that's the disclaimer. It's much higher risk. But I think the reward is a lot higher here too.
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so this, I agree this could 10X. This borderline wouldn't be considered part of the list because they just launched. No, it's because they just launched.
It's a year or less, right? It's July 15, 2021. So this wouldn't fit in the category of being like a cushy gig. But I'm cool with adding it, but.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think it might be on the like, hey, you're in the batter's box. You're not in the batter's box, you're in the on-deck circle, right? We're just waiting for you to mature. You gotta season up a little bit in order to be on this list, given the criteria of the list.
SPEAKER_02
Also, but we could swap it. So Keithard Boy has another company that's incredibly interesting. I believe it's called FAIR, F-A-I-R-E.
SPEAKER_01
He's just an investor in that one.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I didn't add it to the list, but it's a wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. So you could just basically, it's almost a little bit.
SPEAKER_01
It's a genius idea, dude. I used it recently. For my brand, I was like, oh yeah, we should sell wholesale too.
I was like, okay, so what am I gonna do? Go contact every brick and mortar store and say, hey, would you like to carry my brand, my online brand in your store? It's a good brand. Here's the details. Here's my catalog.
I made it in Excel and I have to update it weekly. And then here's my pricing. And then here, just go to my Shopify store and just buy some stuff.
Like it's like you have to string together five tools to set up wholesale. Fair is basically like you want wholesale, list yourself as a company. The brick and mortar stores can all like just choose to buy from you.
Your catalog is stored here. It just takes for that whole problem. I think it's like a $15 billion company.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I don't know if that can 10X, but it's doing really well. And I didn't do research on it for this project, but I tell people if they wanna look, whenever people ask me this question of where they should join, I say that company sounds incredibly interesting. All right, we'll do maybe one or two more.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, one last one on yourself. All right, I'm gonna do one that I also, I'm an investor in this one. So there's the disclosure.
It's called Next Health. And the reason why I think it's cool, it's basically the very simple dumbed down version. It's almost like Shopify for doctors.
So basically when you go to a doctor, you have to fill out a form. And they've automated the form. So you just fill it out online.
But then if every other doctor uses the same, uses Next Health, all your information is on that platform. And so it's much easier. And so you have basically one medical record.
And also they've opened it up to third party developers who can build apps using your health data and your whole health record. And you can see interesting stuff. An example, a very tiny example is if you're on Smile Direct Club and you wanna find out where an orthodontist is, then you're by who could fit you for your orthodontist.
They say, hey, here's all the doctors in Next Health that are in that network. Just click here, you're good to go. And that's like a third party app that whatever.
They are worth $500 million. Their CEO is young, 26, 27. I've gotten dinner with him.
He basically has told me, and I don't exactly remember how he said it, but he was like, yeah, I kinda wanna take over the world. Like he was like, I've thought about- He picked lines. Yeah, he was like, yeah, he was like, well, I think he told me his parents are from Bangladesh.
And I think he goes, you know, Bangladesh is an interesting country because it has a really large male population and it has a low unemployment rate. So if I wanted to take over the world, I think I could go there and rally the young men and we could build our own army. And I think that'd be a good place.
And it's like, yeah, it's like well thought out. And I was like, you're nuts. I love you, I'm in.
So Next Health is interesting to me. And they've raised $150 million, I think. And so it's big enough that they, maybe they've only raised $50 million.
It's big enough that it's a little bit settled and they can pay well. Right.
SPEAKER_01
All right, you wanna bring it home? You bring it home with one last one? I'll bring it home with one that's a little bit unorthodox. I think we said a lot of popular names. Here's an unpopular name, One Trust.
So One Trust is a company that specializes in making your company GDPR compliant. And- Oh my God, the most boring shit on earth. Valued at $5 billion.
You know, you have to sort of endlessly keep up with privacy laws are different in all these different countries. You have GDPR for Europe, US is gonna have their own version of this, other countries are gonna have their own version of this. And they're always gonna evolve.
And they have the customers. And they're gonna basically continue to service these customers. And for the companies, you have huge, huge risk.
Cause it's like, if you're not compliant on GDPR, it's like fines that are like, you know, multiplied per user or something like that. It's like your fines can be exorbitant. And nobody wants to deal with this.
Nobody wants to become an expert of this. Nobody wants to throw huge amounts of engineering and design and policy headcount towards doing this. It's gonna be much easier to like buy a solution and pay for somebody else as you're covering your ass insurance to take care of your GDPR needs.
I think it's one of the fastest growing companies in the country right now. It's called One Trust. I think they're based in Atlanta, if I'm right.
I might be mixing them up with another one. There's actually two companies that are both billion dollar companies in this space. I love these companies.
I want to invest in these companies. And if I, you know, was gonna send somebody to go work at one of the, work at a company that has this profile, this would be one of them. I think it's a good contender for Sarah's List.
SPEAKER_02
All right. I think that's the list. That's, I think this is, to a listener applying to jobs, could be one of the most life changing episodes.
This is good. I think this is a really interesting idea. When we, when I used to have this product called just jobs where I would write companies that do this and I would pay users, people would pay to have access to it.
This is gonna become maybe a recurring segment. We'll see. This is pretty interesting.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I told you the thing I wanted to do with this was, I'm gonna curate 50 companies that meet this criteria. And I'm gonna basically create a job board from this. And the thing with the job board is you can't just be a company who wants to come, list on here.
No, only these 50 companies that are curated can post on this job board. They have to pay to do it. But, but, but, or if they don't pay, they're just on the list, but no jobs will show up.
And so I want to have a running job. So we take this segment idea, but basically the reason I had a bunch of these companies listed is because me and Ben have been cooking up, oh, we should launch a job board. And when we launch a job board, what would add some value? Well, if I could curate companies that I think people should work for, it is not an original idea.
I think you did something like this. There's just a bunch of people have done things like this, curated companies that you think are cool. And you turn that into a product.
And so we're gonna do that with a job board pretty soon. We're gonna launch that pretty soon with Palette.
SPEAKER_02
Sick. Well, that's freaking awesome. Good episode.
SPEAKER_01
All right, man, I gotta run.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world.