#220 - 12 Startups That Can Make You a Millionaire (Sara's List)

Can non technical people apply there, you think? Of course, right. Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non technical roles, whether it's again marketing, community, sales, whatever whatever, wh whatever the roles will end up being I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'll put my lawn in it like my days off on a roadless travel, never looking back. Okay, um, this episode is gonna be awesome. And then the 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 she's someone who's gonna rise up in a 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 uh Sarah's uh Gonna be twenty nine. uh next week. So she was what, twenty five? And she said, I want to 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 two hundred and fifty thousand dollars 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 Wha what was their last valuation before they went public? Like eighteen or twenty billion, I think, and now their valuation's like A hundred, I think. So uh it what's that? Five X maybe? So it did okay. And We and you and I were talking and I didn't think you're underplaying it. It did better than okay, let's just frame this this fully, right? So

joined a multi billion dollar company that already had three thousand something employees. No, it wasn't that big. I think it had twelve hundred, but yes, it was big. Over a thousand employees. So uh you know not join a risky startup, not buying a lottery ticket. And Uh so so she knew this is 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 exact 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? Mid level, yeah, I would say. Yeah. Lower to low like lower to mid. Right, lower to mid. So it didn't even come in as a hot shot. And before the age of thirty

Was worth Mm it was a multimillionaire because of the stock that that appreciated from this thing. Right, from from from joining Airbnb. Right. So self made multi millionaire. Self my made self made multi millionaire without Eating shit as a startup founder, right? Right, where you're stressed and you're making no money and you might fail all the time and all that stuff, and uh you have to make payroll and all that good stuff.

And um You know, so so had to kind of like cushy, you know, every day got to go in and pick which flavor of soy milk she liked at the 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 so I thought By the way, I am I I cannot confirm or deny the multi million dollar I I we can't I can't completely blow up our spot. Or the The soy milk spot. Shouldn't drink soy milk. But the the point is the point is is that Airbnb Was

Like they they pay comp very compet you know, 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 twenty people where you don't have any resources. So you know you have resources to 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 it's uh the idea here is that we made a list of companies that Or N cushier than like a twenty person startup, but still have wonderful upside. So you can make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits. And there's like a five, ten, fifteen X upside.

So low risk. Great reward. You're not going to 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 Um 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. Uh and it's really hard to pick early stage winners. It's like, no, pretty clearly he was gonna be a winner, and still walked away with a great outcome, or you know, still had a great, great outcome. I so I thought, wow, that's

That's actually fantastic. I think There's a lot of people who would love that path. There's some people who want to be Elon Musk. They want to go change the world. There's some people who want to make a billion dollars. There's some people who want to just have go sit on a beach and do nothing, right? But 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, uh you know, financial independence without risking it all at like a you know, like a degenerate gambler. So To me, we got Craigslist.

We got Angie's list. What's the one with the the child predators? I don't know what that one's called. Like Molly's list or something like that. We got m 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 two hundred fifty miljon dollars Um 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 fifty thousand in stock every year or something like that.

That that could make you A self made Millionaire or multi millionaire. That's the that's the fun. 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 uh so like e everything is hearsay and a lot of predictions, right? Yes. Yeah. We could be wrong. But then 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 y'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 we got five. 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. Okay, great. Um, okay, I'm gonna save my best one. I'm gonna bring in second. I'm gonna first jab, just feel feel you out, see how strong you're coming in, but my best one is coming next. My power punch is coming second, okay? But for for the first one, my first one that I'm gonna present for Sarah's list, my my nomination.

Is Flex port. Okay. Okay. What's Flexport? So Flexport is a company that you use When you are When you are shipping things. So you 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 our warehouse. Well, how do you do that? You gotta qu you got to go to a bunch of sh uh shipping carriers. You gotta say, Hey. When are you when do you have a boat leaving? My my I'm my ready date is August third. Do you have a boat August third? 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, you know, like very nice, and then then the notifications come through. And basically it is Modern freight forwarding software.

So Flexport's currently valued last public valuation was about three billion dollars. Um the Softbank put in a billion dollars at a three point Uh three point two billion dollar valuation. It's got about twenty five hundred employees. These are abouts. So you know, about twenty five hundred employees. And they're in a huge space. So global shipping is is massive. It's only getting bigger the bigger e commerce gets.

And um And what they did was there was all these small mom and pop freight forwarders And they just sort of like did what what many great companies do. They they sort of take a fragmented market with low NPS. And they build

a best in class product that's, you know, integrated and so you don't have to deal with kind of the the mom and pop telephone call game that you would have otherwise had to do. And the founder's pretty amazing. 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 uh This company's either gonna be worth zero or a hundred billion dollars, or or or something like that. You know, he's like this is gonna be all or nothing. Right. And he's pretty he's Very, very good. We should compile an ebook 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 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 that they're like pickup lines for VCs and uh and we should just make a little ebook out of those. But that's a great one. All right, um, next one. Uh I'm gonna go first. Mine will be easy as well. Zapier. Uh, 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 we didn't I didn't want to buy like greenhouse or one of these like really five hundred dollar 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 filmed. filled into an Asana 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 scale 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 uh using basically Google spreadsheets and Zapier. Um Well they're a interesting for a few reasons. First. They bootstrapped it to like sixty to or seventy million dollars in recurring revenue and they did it very quickly. They recently raised a little bit of uh funding at a five billion dollar valuation by uh I believe Sequoia. They currently have three hundred and fifty people.

Um, my opinion is this is gonna end up very similar to Atlassian. So Atlassian is an Australian company that went public, I think, in two thousand and fourteen. And when they went public, it was like a fifteen or no, maybe it was like a six billion dollar valuation and they sold uh widgets to small businesses, software to small businesses, and people slept on them and it slowly scaled. I think today at last thing is worth a hundred billion dollars. I think Zap Year is gonna be similar. Wade Foster, the founder of Zap Year, spoke at HustleCon and I hung out with him and he was like Everything I I he was just like perfect. He was wonderful. Um there is one downside. I've heard through friends of friends that they don't they so their pay is they they're a remote team. They've been remote from day one. They own 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. Yeah, okay. So so what you're saying is

It's a five billion dollar company and kind of amazingly this was it was at one point three million in funding to get to that five billion in in value, is that right? Yeah, they basically only raised one million dollars in funding and they got that to sixty million ARR. They're probably north of a hundred million ARR. They're probably worth They were rest valued at five, they're probably worth ten at this point. I mean, it's like a crazy valuable company. That's insane. They're going crazy. You would need them to become a twenty five to fifty billion dollar company, and you're betting that they can and will do that.

Yeah, over the course of four or five years when it all your stock would vest, yes, I think that. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Okay. So uh Do you agree or disagree? Uh

They've surprised me every step of the way so far. So uh you know, when you first talk uh it's like Zapier, I'd I'd be like, Oh, cool indie hacker project. Then it's like, Oh no, it actually got to like a million dollars ARR. It's like oh you know, that's cool, cool bootstrap software company, maybe you can sell for twenty five, thirty million dollars. Oh wow, they're doing fifty million in ARR? Okay, uh jeez, wha how many times again am I gonna be wrong here? So I'm just debating. Do I really want to bet against them again? And I think the answer is no. I don't want to bet against them again. So I think I'm going to give you.

Thumbs up on your on your 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? Can it be worth fifty? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Keep in mind we're keep in mind we're talking about like five years from today.

Yeah, five years, five years, exactly. Yeah. So Okay, so we have two two two successful nominations to Ceres 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? No.

Oh my God, that's insane to me. Okay, so Uniswap. Uh if you go to like I don't know, it's uniswap.org is how you get to to the thing. So you 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 here's some of the things you need to know about this. It is um It's bigger than Deutsche Bank credit suisse and State Street.

Um all combined. It has um Bigger in terms of what? current market cap. In yeah, 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 fifty times less employees. Would that be something you're interested in? Yes. What if I told you that this company is doing ten billion a week In trading volume. And what if I told you it was doing that with less than thirty five employees?

What if I told you that it took Coinbase eight years and a thousand employees to get to a billion dollars in revenue? I told you that Uniswap. He's only two and a half years old, has less than fifty employees. And it's 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. And

In So what do they do? So what do they do? Okay, so let's say you've heard of all the different like um tokens that exist. So let's say have you ever heard of um, you know, DI 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. Um

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. uh and you ha you know you're you have all these employees and all this red tape and stuff like that. From here, once you have a crypto token, this is Uniswap is how you trade any crypto for any other crypto token. So it lets you swap between any crypto asset. instantaneously and it's what's called a decentralized exchange means

Um, there is no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It's a protocol that they built. Um, 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 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 they're the market maker. They they 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 what decentralized exchanges do, what DEXs do, that's what 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 have 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 over five billion dollars of liquidity that users just locked up into their market to create the liquidity for their market. Yeah, it's like a it's like a it's like a weird lending club type of type of thing. That's pretty sick. Only thirty people. What type of person would be a good tool Wow. What type of personality would be good to work there? Uh I don't know, crazy nut. I don't know. You know, these types of things that it's like you typically these are going to be engineering heavy life things. And so you can come and be, you know, 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 thirty five people and this much scale, they kinda need everything. They need more of everything, probably. And so I think anybody could probably fit in. You just have to do that. how to solve some of their problems. Do you think they give equity? Yeah, so basically there's a company. So there's a company and then there's the the protocol. The company own some of the tokens using the protocol, but um

Like so so the company raised a series A from Andreess and Horowitz and Paradigm and a bunch of others. They raised only a series A. So they I think they've only raised$11 million to date. And they've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on eleven million dollars. And Coinbase is what, a eighty billion dollar company. So um So I so I think, you know, 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 it's all funky. You gotta figure it out yourself, but There's definitely enough value there. It's kinda for a person who's 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 uh not non-traditional. Okay with something that's non-traditional. All right, I'm gonna give you another non traditional one. This this this might be one of my stronger ones. So it's called uh Andril. I think that's how you say. Do you know what that is?

I had it on my list, alright. You stole it right off me. Wait a minute. Did you really? 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 I have my own little cheat cheat sheet here that that you don't have. All right, great. So mine's called Andrel. So um

I'll uh I'll tell you a little bit of background, but you actually might know a little bit more. So basically it's started by the guy named Palmer Lucky. And the reason why this is interesting is Palmer Lucky started Oculus when he was like sixteen or seventeen and then he sold it to Facebook for some what, like a billion dollars, just like a ton. And It's interesting because Palmer Lucky is very controversial.

So he's a uh a big uh 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 million and one. So regardless if you think that's cool or not, he is controversial amongst Silicon Valley folks. And so we 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 uh a way to build drones, I believe, to keep uh 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 four point six billion dollars. They have five hundred and ten employees. This would not be good. for a liberal person or someone who like you basically have to be m be moderate or right of center to want to work here. Uh Palmer seems like a like a fine enough guy, a little quirky, but definitely it's a right leaning company. Um, which is an incredibly normal in Silicon Valley. I definitely think this could be a Palantir esque 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 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. I is that basically what they do? Yeah, so they uh yeah, exactly. Their their 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 websites like Century Tower.

It's like this solar powered Tower is like this giant pole that is, you know, used to like, you know, uh Basically uh monitor a border, right? Monitor an area. And uh 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, you know, smart, intelligent, work well. You know, it's like a nest camera for the government. And so, you know, they have uh drones, they have different 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 um they're basically Trying to be the kind of like

the most technology forward provider for, you know, the US defense budget, which I think is like, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. I think it's what you have here like seven hundred billion dollars a year. And the question is can so they're currently worth a little bit over four billion. They raise money from founders fund, I think. Can this company be worth twenty, forty, fifty billion? In five years. One hundred percent. It definitely can. Um it definitely can. This guy already built a billion dollar company at the age of like twenty two. Definitely. All right, your turn. Okay, that's a good one. Uh I had that one on my list, so so I like that one a lot. All right, Sarah's list filling up. We got re uh thumbs up there. Okay, I want to do one um

I'm gonna do one that I invested in actually. Okay, so disclaimer. It's not 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? Only because you have been telling me for years it's gonna be the greatest. So um

So I'll tell you how I found them or how I kinda heard about them. So I heard about them from two different places. And 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 it before, kind of like, that's interesting. Uh

Stuff teenagers use, you should probably like pay attention to stuff teenagers use because Those tend to be big companies, uh, you know, whether it's Snapchat or you know, um Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. And I was like, all right, so so so the yeah, I stashed it away, didn't really pay t too much attention to it. Second time I heard about it.

was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. A graph of a hockey stick, he goes Uh he said something, you know, like one of the fastest growth you know, this is one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. He goes, he's like, This is yes, that's over five million users. And yeah, that may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers Five million is a hell of a lot.

And um and that's so true. Like five million programmers on a network Is like worth its weight in gold. Um every programmer ever. Yeah. So and so then uh 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 uh it does this end up at five billion or more? What's it do, though? What's it do? So what does it do? Okay, you want to learn how to code. It's kind of like a sandbox that does A few important things. The first is if you ever try have you ever like gone down path where you're like, dude, I'm gonna learn how to code. I'm gonna I bought this Udemy course. I'm gonna learn Python. Have you ever like gone down that path at all? 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? It's like you need to like install NPM. We're 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 was very confusing. Now I'm like Yeah. average person. So like if if an average person finds it confusing, that means it's too confusing. And so

What Replica did was the first they were 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 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. 'Cause we got all these programmers all writing code. It's kinda like if you've ever looked at GitHub.

GitHub is this big network 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 Replit does that like on steroids. So they're 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'll I don't have to remake it from scratch. I'll just use their bouncing ball. program, you know, code and I'll in add that to my basketball hoop thing that I'm making. And so it's like a multiplayer um little like game almost for programmers to be able to like Um, not just Not just write their code. Not just deploy their code, but also um

Yeah, like uh 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. Um 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 and then scale. So I think that's and they they do this side by side comparison, like here's our growth compared to GitHub's growth from zero year zero, your one, your two, your three, your four, and they're like outpacing GitHub's growth.

All right, I'm on board with that. I think that's a good one. Um can non technical people apply there, you think? Of course, right. Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non technical roles, whether it's again marketing, community, sales, whatever whatever, wh whatever the roles will end up being. Um yeah, for sure. And in fact, usually those companies, technical companies get built kinda like engineer first. And so they actually need people that are non technical to to be able to join. All right.

That's a good one. Um I'm o I I'm on board. I'm on board with that one. Um, all right, my turn. Uh this one uh is similar to Zapier, Airtable. So Airtable is a 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 they I realize they're kind of making it their own category. It's very sticky. It's very neat. Right now they're valued uh since two thousand twenty one, they raised money at a five point seven billion dollar valuation. I actually think they could be much larger. There's another company that I kinda

compare them to they're not quite the same, but they're I think they're a little bit same same in terms of stickiness, and that's and they came out the same time Uh they got popular around the same time. That's Monday dot com and they're worth they went public at like eighteen billion. I think that Airtable could definitely do really great. They currently have six hundred and forty five employees Um

They the guy who started it I think his name is Howard Lou. Howie. Uh Howie Lou. And he's kinda like this Prodigy Genius guy. Like that's like how they Stereotype him in the media. But I've seen interviews with it. Did he?

Yeah. I I saw interviews with him though. He was definitely like a prodigy young genius, but he was very like wise and like he wasn't like a wacky weirdo. He was like pretty th well thought. Uh well spoken. You want to know something funny? Yeah. So seven years ago. So we were in a mastermind group, if if you remember me, you and a couple of 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. Right, DM'd back when Airtable was very s you know was was a lot smaller. I think it was still probably

W I think it had just raised money, maybe Under a hundred million dollars, I think was the valuation at that point in time. And I was like Howie, yo love air table, think it's fucking great, I think it's gonna be Be big. Um, 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 uh you were scheduled to go to it and then I think you and one other person canceled and 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 investors. Yeah. A long time ago, uh you know, under a hundred million dollars if we did you hang out with them? No, but that was the 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 just say, Hey, I'd love to meet you. It's like yeah great. I don't love to meet you. Uh I don't want to ask him to coffee, but I was trying to invite him to something cool. Like, hey, we do this founder thing. It's great. My bad. Howie. I'm sorry, dude. Um all right. So I have one last person. Yeah, uh yeah,'cause Excel is like the there's this great quote which is like

Every SaaS company you actually compete with Excel. Uh you don't compete with other SaaS companies, you compete with Excel because people just use Excel for everything. And um And so yeah, I think that like I don't I don't know what Excel's market cap would be, but I think Excel's market I don't know what it would be, but it's a dude, Excel is like AirPods to Apple. Like AirPods would be a hundred billion dollar company on its own. That's what Excel is. Exactly. So i i if Excel is a hundred billion dollar company, I think that the

the best threat to Excel is g gonna end up being worth, you know, twenty, thirty pr pretty I think there's a pretty good chance of that. And so I like this a lot more. It was recently at one or two billion. I liked it a lot more there than at five point seven, but like, you know We didn't do the episode then, we did it now. Um so Okay, so I'll give you one that's very, very similar real quick. Figma. So Figma is. I have that one too. I have that one too. Instead of you know and I'll do it quick'cause people already know Figma, but I would put it on the list.

Uh You know, the way Airtable what Air Airtable's doing for Excel, Figma's doing for Photoshop. So it's the younger, slicker, cloud based. uh sexier um version of Des uh design software and It's kinda eating Photoshop's lunch and um

I don't know what's worth worth now. What is it, seven billion now? It's like No, it's uh so the in July of two thousand twenty one they raised two hundred million dollars at a ten billion dollar vote uh valuation. But here's that sounds like a lot. But So the listeners and to you, Sean, how much is uh what's Od uh Adobe's market cap? So Adobe Uh mm, I believe almost

All the revenue at this point is from Photoshop, right? Well, it's the creative cloud, which is basically a bundle that you're like, I want Photoshop like, but buy fireworks and uh you know, like buy all this other shit that we like bundle in with creative cloud. Okay, so tell t tell me what you think it is. I would have guessed Um Adobe's market cap is I don't know, a hundred fifty billion dollars, something like that. What what what is it? Um it is three hundred and fifteen.

And if I'm not mistaken, that might be one of the Uh let's look it up. It might be one of the fiftieth. Let's see, Adobe would be would is it's one of the biggest companies in the world. So Adobe is the thirtieth largest company in the world. So when you think about how big this can be, you think ten billion dollars that's so much money. Well Adobe's Yeah.

one of the biggest companies in the world. Uh Figma's going after it. Totally should be on this list. It's like it's like all the business trends. It's like first unbundling. It's like, well, Creative Cloud brings in twelve billion dollars a year. Well, let's unbundle the most valuable part of it, Photoshop, and let's do it differently. Okay, what's different? Second trend, cloud based, right? Uh third trend, multiplayer, right? Like 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, right? Um, and so they they're they're they're piggybacking off all these like kind of macro shifts and doing it right. Just to just sort of like, by the way, if you think, oh, it's already at ten billion. Is it really gonna five X?

Last five years, Adobe has six X. So Adobe was trading at a hundred dollars a share. It's now at six sixty a share in five years. And that's at Adobe's large thing, you know, 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 um and so I I think there's a fairly good chance of that. In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies, uh that are on this list. This is this is a great great list to be on. Alright.

My turn. Uh so I agree. I had to think about mine, so I completely agree. So we're about in a hundred percent. So uh 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, um If if you're a small startup and people sign up to your to work at your company, it you I can easily track which person has which computer and I could pay software through there and I can do HR management and issue healthcare stuff to people. Why it's interesting, the founder his name's What's his name? Parker Conrad. So he has the controversial past. He started Xenophys, which was at the time one of the fastest growing companies ever. He got fired because he kinda the culture was kind of crazy. People were like having sex in the hallways and kind of being broy and shit like that. And so this is kind of a He he was like, Oh, you know, in order to do this HR thing, you have to like have this like compliance training. It takes sixty hours. Well, cool. Here I just I just created a macro that will go through the training for you. Just push the enter key every, you know, five minutes or something like that, and you'll you'll be done in in six hours instead of sixty. Like shit like that. That was a little bit like oh. That's actually like slightly illegal, I think. Yeah. But the good news is he has experience

The also good news is that he fucked up. And so you would think that you'd learn because he got ousted. So I kinda like that. I always like that in a company where someone is like it's their second time around and they're they've already been mildly successful. I think that's actually a good thing. They were here's why I think this company's interesting. So they were last valued. at one billion, one point three billion dollars. And I use them and they're amazing. I've used them for years. It's an every company problem. Every company onboards new employees and needs to get their computer set up, needs to get them connected to all the systems. It's a every person every company problem. And uh that's why it's kinda genius.

And they're uh so workday, which is in the space, is worth sixty seven billion dollars. Paychecks, which is a uh uh just a payroll provider, is worth forty billion dollars. So I don't think that this their valuation is still true. I think they're their their own category, which is even why it's even better. Like if you said does Rippling end up I I think Rippling, if it's at a billion now, I think it's Maybe one of the best candidates, uh to like fifty X on this list.

Right. It's one of those that like you know when Square went public Square went public at like I think three billion or two billion valuation, something like that. Now it's like a hundred so Square after it IPO'd, which was again de risk, d risk, de risk. Now it's liquid. It's already had like a thirty forty X since then. Um, and so that's like wow, that's you can get some insane appreciation on your on your stock. And so I think Rippling is one that If you told me this thirty to fifty X's, I'd say of the things we've said on this list, that might be the number one candidate so far.

All right. So then uh we're we're we're we're we've got a hit. And when I use the product It did everything well, but it was still pretty clunky. So I think a lot of if you're product designer, if you're customer support sales, I think these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff. So that's my pick. All right, your turn. Okay. Uh I'm gonna do one that's a little short. We're fucking these are hits, I think. Yeah, I think so too. Um

Alright, so so here's one. Open store. You know what open store is? Uh it's new, isn't it? It's new. Okay, so Uh he's This might not this might not w this might not well no, this might hit, but this might be too early, but go ahead. Yeah, so okay, so what is this? Um

So first let me say who's the founder. So the founder is is two kind of powerhouses. Now I don't know how much of their time they're spending on this, but one is Keith Raboy, who was the C OO at Square. He was Part of the PayPal Mafia, he's a big time V C, he's a total dick on Twitter. Entertaining dude. I I enjoy his he's very smart. And he's an asshole on Twitter, uh, which I find to be hilarious. And then this other guy, um

Jack Abraham. Jack Abraham was kind of like Wonder Kid, built a company, sold it to eBay pretty early on. Uh was like kind of a hot shot at PayPal. spun out and he's has his own like studio. And so they together came together and they made Um

They made open store. Which is a riff off of Keether Boy's other previous last company that's now worth$5 billion, Open Door. So what Open Door did was You wanna 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 a price right now and you can sell it.

Two days. 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 DAG, 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're they raised, I think their first round maybe was was uh at a two hundred fifty million dollar valuation. So to get your five X here. You have to Bet that it becomes a billion dollar company. What this guy's track record square open door

Uh, with Jack Abraham's uh track record. It's a very good shot that they send up. be it being being worth more more than a billion dollars. This space is very hot. So do you know Thracio? The we've talked about that before it's the one that Thracia was

was the was 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 uh they rolled them all up. Do you know if Thrasso's valued at right now? But

It's like five or ten. They're gonna go build public at a ten billion dollar valuation. I think they might be the fastest company to a ten billion dollar exit. um ever. I I think I think three years old or four years old. Yeah, three years old and you know very capital efficient 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 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 on this list. So that's the that's the disclaimer. It's much higher risk. But I think the reward is a lot higher here too. Okay, so this I agree this

Could ten X This Borderline wouldn't be considered part of the list. Because they just

No, it's'cause they just launched. They're they're it's a year or less, right? It's July fifteenth, two thousand twenty one. So this wouldn't fit in the category of being like A cushy gig? But I I'll I' I I'll I'm cool with adding it, but Yeah, I think I think it might be on the like, hey, you're on you're you're in the the the batter's box. You're not in the batter's box yet, 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. Also, well but we could swap it. So Keith or Boy has another company that's incredibly interesting. I believe it's called Fair. F A I R E. He's just an investor in that one. Yeah. I didn't add it to the list, but it's an uh wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands, so you could just basically

Uh You it's almost like it's a But I I use the 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 in Excel and I have to update it weekly. And then here's my pricing. And then Here, uh 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 to buy from you. Your catalog is stored here. It just takes care of that whole problem. I think it's like a fifteen billion dollar company.

Yeah, I don't know if that can Ten X, but It's doing really well and I didn't do research on it for this pro project, but I've uh I tell people if they want to look f when whenever people ask me this this question of where they should join, I say that company sounds incredibly interesting.

Um all right. We'll do maybe one or two. One last one. Yeah, well not. Alright, I'm gonna do one that I also I'm an investor in this one, so I'm there 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 all online. But then if every other doctor uses the same it 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 like uh your your whole health record and you can see uh interesting stuff. An an example, a very tiny example is if you're on Smile Direct Club and you f wanna find out where an orthodontist is nearby who could fit you for your orthodontist, they say, Hey, next here's all the doctors and 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 dollars. 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 want to take over the world. Like he he was like, I I I've I thought about Yeah. He was like, Yeah, at uh he was like, Well, I think he's from I think he told me his his parents are from Bangladesh. And I think he goes, You know, Bangladesh is is an interesting country because it 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 pl and it's like Eli like he had this like well thought out and I was like, You're nuts. I love you. I'm Id. So next health is interesting to me, and they've raised uh a hundred and fifty million dollars, I think. And so it's big enough that they uh maybe they've only raised fifty million dollars. It's big enough that it's a little bit uh settled and they can pay well. Right. All right, you want to bring it home, you bring it home with one. I'll bring it home with one one that one that's a little bit uh unorthodox. I think we said a lot of popular names, uh here's an unpopular name. One trust. So one trust is a company that specializes And making your company GDPR compliant.

And Oh my God, the most boring shit on earth. Valued at five billion dollars. Um, you know, you have to you have to sort of endlessly keep up with priv privacy laws uh 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 um They have the customers, and they're gonna basically continue to service these customers. And for the companies, you have huge, huge risk because 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 and policy uh headcount.

towards doing this, it's gonna be much easier to like buy a solution and pay for pay for somebody else. as your cover 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. Um 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 send somebody to go work at one of the work at a company that has this profile, this would be one of them. So I think it's a good contender for Sarah's list. All right.

I think um I think that's the list. That's I I think I think this is this c uh to to a listener applying to jobs, this could be one of the most life changing episodes. Yeah, this is good. I think this is a really interesting idea. When we when I I I used to have this product called just jobs where I would write companies that do this and I would pay users to people would pay to have access to it. This is gonna become maybe a recurring segment. We'll see. This is pretty interesting.

Well, I I told you the thing I wanted to do with this was I'm gonna curate fifty companies that meet this criteria. And I'm gonna basically create a job board from this. And the 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. Uh they have to pay to do it. But And but but uh 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, uh, 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, this is not an original idea. I think you did something like this. This is a bun 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. Uh we're gonna launch that pretty soon with Palette.

Sick. Well that's freaking awesome. Good episode. All right, man, I gotta run.

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