Shaan Puri

Shaan Puri says Moda Communities makes money by charging dealers for access to buyers. A dealer pays $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 a year to list watches, cars, gold, and jewelry, and only after an interview plus a second member's vetting.

The founder started a Facebook group for watch buyers and sellers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2018, because he had nowhere good to buy and sell a watch. Puri messaged him and heard the company now has more than a dozen full-time employees and 600,000 members across 20 or 25 communities. Watch groups split under $10,000, over $10,000, and, he believes, a super-fan group above $100,000. The page says Moda runs 23 Facebook communities. Puri guesses revenue

Sam Parr says BNI is a networking group that puts local business owners who do not compete in one room to trade leads. A chapter can mix an accountant, an HVAC company, a realtor, a garage-door service, a lawyer, and a landscaper. The room is a shared opportunity: one member refers landscaping jobs, and another refers legal work. He used to watch chapters meet at the YMCA, about 30 people, and each person had to bring a lead, such as a new neighbor who needed garage doors.

He thinks membership is about 800,000 people, with dues in the low thousands of dollars a year. He has met the CEO, a woman from Texas, and the group had just been acquired. Shaan Puri says the price he heard was a rumor

Shaan Puri says putting the same toys in a mystery box made 7X the revenue of letting shoppers pick what they wanted off a shelf.

A friend in the toy business had been selling at Walmart and Target the ordinary way: a shelf of choices, and people took what they wanted. The same products went into a mystery box and revenue hit 7X. Shoppers got less choice and risked getting something crappy, which sounds like the opposite of what should sell. A major IP holder said customers really like choice. The data across category one, two, three, four, and five showed the mystery box overperformed over and over.

The pull is an old one. Gacha got so popular in Japan that they had to ban it, a toy form

Shaan Puri says Candy Crush has 82 million monthly actives, and all the revenue comes from 4% of the players. The other 96% are the cost of doing business, the cost of finding the whales.

His co-founder at Bebo had been chief technology officer at AppLovin, the biggest advertising network for mobile games, and saw what a game pays to acquire a player, what the player is worth, and which targeting gets them to spend more. Someone who spends heavily in Candy Crush is highly likely to spend heavily in Block Blast and Farmville. People who started Farmville, and people who make Candy Crush style games, laid out the economy as sources and sinks, hard currencies and soft currencies, and a plan fo

Shaan Puri says a whale customer is the small set of people who spend thousands of dollars a year, and that sliver drives a shocking share of the revenue in collector businesses and in ordinary businesses too.

Candy Crush has millions and millions of players, but 80 to 90 percent of the revenue comes from those heavy spenders. They make up for the free players and for the players who pay $2.99 to remove ads. The same pattern shows up in video games, Pokemon card collecting, and marketplaces. At Twitch, whale viewers subscribe to tons of channels and spend like someone buying a bottle at a club. Gifting subscriptions let a viewer give away 200 subscriptions to random people in a chat, about

Bill Perkins says his family plans in time-bucket periods rather than one someday list. While his son Kai is under five, they want to live in another country, particularly Japan, and they are deciding whether that stay is a summer, a year, or two years. The larger questions, where to settle, which culture to learn, and which activities matter, stay open. Day to day they are often catching events and moving them, because the travel schedule is already full.

Shaan Puri says he now blocks three days a year to think about how to spend the other 99 percent. He tries to picture the most exciting version of the year, puts dates on it, and then makes those dates happen. Perkins treats that kind of

Bill Perkins says he wrote about this because he was very afraid of wasting his life, more afraid of that than of losing money or status. Money is a tool. Shaan Puri reads a passage from the book: death wakes people up, and the closer it gets, the more awake they become. Near the end they ask what they have been doing and why they waited so long.

The picture is a well. People pump, scoop out a tiny cup, take a sip, and go back to pumping. The water rises for a whole life, and they are still thirsty because the life went to pumping rather than drinking. Timing matters because some experiences only work at certain ages. You cannot water ski at 90. You can make more money later. You cannot mak

Shaan Puri says the investors he has heard, including Howard Marks and Ray Dalio, tend to win in one of three ways. Superior temperament is the pattern of staying greedy when others are fearful and handling swings. An informational edge is understanding a market, or where it is going, better than other people. Straight arbitrage is buying one side and selling the other when the prices do not add up, until the gap closes.

Bill Perkins says his natural gas desk was the first two, not arbitrage. People who study every driver of supply and demand still fail if they cannot stay stoic through losses, because fear shuts down clear thinking, and trading does not hand out five wins for every loss. T

Shaan Puri says his happy place is the boys, the people he wants to spend a bunch of time with and find excuses to be around. He picks work by three questions: which projects bring the best out of the group, which bring something new out of them, and which have some meaning in the world.

On meaning, he draws two paths. One is making people have a lot of joy. The other he leaves unsure, saying maybe have them be great in a way they were not otherwise, like pushing people. Shaan Puri thinks people aim far too low. If he can help people aim a little higher, toward going for it and whatever their version of going for it is, he would feel really happy.

He says he does not know the next step for

Shaan Puri says a trainer told him, in the middle of an argument, to ask what they are trying to do here. The question is about the relationship, separate from the disagreement that started the fight. Even if the surface fight is Mexican food versus Italian food, he means I love you, you love me, a great time, and an awesome relationship.

The sooner Shaan brings his own awareness to whether he loves the other person, whether he wants the relationship to be amazing, and that they are on the same team, and away from the wrongs of the situation, the edge goes off. It is never really the situation. It is how people are reacting in the situation. He says the difference between a reaction and a r

Shaan Puri says that as guys get a little older and touch some success, the promise was that fears, insufficiencies, and the need for validation would be sated if the castle got big enough or the mountain climbed high enough. A lot of people arrive and find the win did not fix the problem. Something was achieved, and a much bigger challenge is waiting. The fuel source has been spent and the destination has been reached. What follows is the founder's existential crisis: where to go now, and how to get there.

He says he is pretty sure Andrew Wilkinson told him about a men's group made up exclusively of nine and 10 figure founder exit people, living in the most salubrious version of PTSD imagi

Shaan Puri says the move from wild man to great king happens when a king stops serving only his own needs and takes on a kingdom. He wants the people in the kingdom happy and thriving. The kingdom can be a family, friends, a neighbor, strangers on the internet, a community, or people with a rare disease he decided to serve. Fierce wild energy goes toward something worth more, in meaning, than comfort and lifestyle.

A baby cares only about milk, a diaper, and a nap, and cries without them. Shaan says care might later reach appearance or grades, then more of life. Each new care forces growth to meet the new need. He applies the idea to getting bullied and deciding to build a self: the person

Shaan Puri says the thick and meaty version does not have to be that serious. Change the music behind a video and people feel totally differently. Put a laugh track behind the piece and people think it is funny and start laughing more. People are not as sophisticated as they hope to believe.

People picture themselves as intellectual creatures, then the music still moves the feeling and the laugh track still gets the laugh. Accepting the limit hands over new tools, so the piece can be played other ways. Heavy work and deep work stay available, and sometimes the move is to sit down and grind, but neither mode can run all the time.

Life is not supposed to be a grind. Shaan Puri says the other

Chris Williamson says plain success is low skill because a formula can get you there, while success kept connected to the rest of life is much closer to art than to science.

Chris Williamson is much more impressed by success done with balance and fun. Success is hard, and it is nowhere near as difficult as doing it while having a good time, being a good person, feeling good, staying in a community, helping family, and not using people in a transactional way. No formula shows how to build a good business and keep a good marriage, how to avoid denying parts of yourself, or how to turn past pain into anything other than a chip on the shoulder that becomes an identity. The vacancy after achieve

Tom Hardy says Charles Bronson told him to cut a little piece of himself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow and move on. While Tom Hardy was training for the movie Bronson, the first time he spoke to Charles Bronson he laid out a pattern with women he could not break. Tom Hardy says he probably had a relationship with his mother that had infiltrated all his relationships with women.

Charles Bronson used to leave message after message, going back about three years, right through message 18. Tom Hardy finally picked up at six o'clock, just after he split up with his girlfriend. He said he was not in a good space. He could not be with a woman and he could not be without one. He

Shaan Puri retells the opening of Robert Bly's Iron John story. The prince is a good boy headed for the throne: he dresses properly for court, says please and thank you, and listens to his parents. A golden ball, a gift from his father and his favorite toy, stands for the boy's vitality and life energy. The ball rolls into Iron John's cage. Iron John will give it back only if the boy lets him out.

The boy has no key. Iron John says the key to the cage is under the mother's pillow. Robert Bly says that for every good boy, the key to the wild man sits where the mother rests her head at night, among her hopes and dreams for him. Mothers do not dream of a young boy becoming a pirate or a wild m

Shaan Puri says courage is feeling fear and then going through with the action anyway. People assume motivation means wanting to act or knowing it will go well, and they assume courage means no fear, uncertainty, or doubt. He says both are the same move: feel it, then go through it anyway. Nobody calls a person courageous for taking a sip when nothing is on the line. The same sip looks brave only when that person is actually afraid.

Shaan Puri's son would not walk into jujitsu, tennis, or basketball. The boy was born during COVID and froze at the door: let go of a parent's hand, meet a stranger, join a bunch of kids. Shaan Puri had driven him, paid, and gone inside the last three times. A t

Shaan Puri's singing teacher did not sing until high school. He was afraid to sing and thought he could not. He grew up a black guy in a city where black guys like him played football, and singing was treated as gay, something you do not do. He got made fun of, assumed he must be bad, and felt even worse for liking singing than for being bad at it, so he shut it down.

After he moved schools, he waited for his ride in an empty practice room while talent show auditions went on. He liked the song and sang along. The choir teacher poked her head in and asked if it was him. He asked her to be honest about whether he could sing, and she asked who told him he could not. He has been on American Ido