Facebook

Palmer Luckey: sold Oculus at ~19, sued Facebook and won, now builds for the military

Sam profiles Anduril founder Palmer Luckey: started Oculus around 16-17, sold it to Facebook for ~$1B, was fired (he claims for liking Trump), sued Facebook for hundreds of millions and won, then built a defense-tech company in Orange County making border-surveillance hardware.

“So basically it started by the guy named Palmer Luckey. And the reason why this is interesting is Palmer Luckey started Oculus when he was like 16 or 17, and then he sold it to Facebook for some, what, like a billion dollars, just like a ton. And it's interesting because Palmer Luckey 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 and won.”

Reboot PatientsLikeMe as a simpler, mobile-first condition community

Shaan pitches rebuilding PatientsLikeMe (which raised $150M) as a simpler, mobile-friendly community connecting people with the same medical condition. Shared suffering is deeply bonding and sticky; he'd seed it from Facebook groups and grow via Google AdWords on problem-intent searches.

“I bet that there's an opportunity to like reboot the sort of like PatientsLikeMe idea and just do it simpler, more mobile-friendly. And I think you'd be doing a lot of good in the world, plus be building a very valuable app around community where, and maybe you could start this with Facebook groups.”

Steal thisBuild a mobile-first community where people with the same rare condition find each other, seeded from Facebook groups and grown via problem-intent search ads.

Import-export framework: take a Big Tech internal tool and sell it to everyone

Shaan describes a repeatable startup pattern: engineers who built internal tooling at a giant (fraud detection at Facebook, synthetic data at Palantir) spin out and sell that same capability to every other company. He calls it his import-export framework.

“Similar story, by the way, ex-Facebook guys who were dealing with the spam problem at Facebook spun out and created Sift Science. So if you have any platform, they'll help you fight fraud and spam. And using the same stuff that Facebook was building internally, they exported that idea. This is my old import-export framework.”

Steal thisSpot a tool Big Tech built internally to solve its own pain, then build the standalone version for everyone else.

David Choe took $50K of Facebook stock to paint their office, made $200M+

Sam tells how artist David Choe, hired by Sean Parker to paint Facebook's early office, chose $50K in stock over $50K cash because he's a gambler. After the IPO that wall art was worth roughly $200-300 million.

“Sean Parker goes, "Well, you want $50 grand in cash or $50 grand in Facebook stock?" He goes, "Well, I'm a gambler. Give me the stock." He takes the stock and it's worth like $300 million a few years after Facebook goes IPO.”

After Apple's opt-out, Facebook only catches 60% of ad conversions

Shaan explains Apple's App Tracking Transparency gutted Facebook's targeting: once users tap 'no' to tracking, Facebook only sees about 60% of conversions from its own ads, missing the other 40%.

“Like even when you send a— show a Facebook ad to somebody, they click it and they go buy a product from you, Facebook's only catching like 60% of those conversions. It doesn't know about the other 40% 'cause they've opted out of tracking or it didn't work.”

Say no to everything, then go 100% all-in on the wave

Sam's life strategy: default to 'no' on almost everything, then when you spot a genuine wave (Facebook for BuzzFeed, Facebook Live for Cheddar's $200M exit), go fully all-in. It's high-risk, fails more often than it works, but the risk/reward skews heavily in your favor.

“You say no to most everything. Then when you see the thing that you're like, this is it, you go 100% all in on it. Um, and, and so there's a few examples of this. So, uh, and, and when you go all in on it, it's a high risk, but it's high reward type of thing. So examples are you become BuzzFeed and Facebook gets popular. You launch an entire media company. Um, BuzzFeed, Cheddar did this as well. They launched an entire media company off Facebook Live and they sold for $200 million.”

Steal thisDefault to no, conserve focus, then commit 100% the rare time you spot a real wave.

Bet on toys that win small with a 'who knows' path up

Shaan explains his optimism heuristic: back ideas that can clearly win at small scale but have a 'who knows' path to huge, because big winners (Facebook as a Harvard-only network) almost always start with a humble level of ambition that progressively grows.

“I like things that for sure can win at the small scale. And there's a, hey, who knows, uh, path that you can go down because I think most things that end up quite big, um, they typically will start with what looks like a kind of humble, humble level of ambition, right? Facebook, it's a college network. For Harvard.”

Steal thisFavor ideas that can clearly win small but have a credible 'who knows' path to massive — and let ambition grow progressively rather than demanding it upfront.

Facebook's aha moment: 7 friends in 10 days

Shaan explains the 'aha moment' concept — the point a confused new user first gets real value. Facebook found that seeing 7 friends within 10 days made users super sticky; Mint's is seeing your finances laid out automatically.

“For Facebook, what they found was 7 friends in 10 days was the aha moment. So once you saw 7 different friends on your feed, and if you could do that within 10 days, you were like super, super sticky.”

Steal thisFind your product's 'aha moment' (Facebook: 7 friends in 10 days) and engineer onboarding to drive every new user to it fast.

Both hosts' wives were self-made millionaires first

Shaan and Sam both note their wives were liquid millionaires before they were. Shaan's wife went to an Ivy League school, joined Facebook, and was making six figures out of college while he was a near-broke founder making $20K his first year.

“I'll say it. I mean, my wife was a self-made liquid millionaire before I was, right?”

You're early even when you're late: megatrends run longer than you think

Shaan's core thesis: even in 2010 when Google/Apple/Facebook looked mature, buying them would have 10x'd your money — Google's revenue went from $5B to $55B. The lesson is that real megatrends (internet, mobile, cloud, crypto) have far more room to run than they appear, so feeling 'late' is usually wrong.

“2010, when I graduated, Google's revenue was $5 billion. Today, its revenue is $55 billion. And you could do the same thing with Amazon, with Facebook. And if you had just bought those companies back then, you would have made 10x your money, right?”

Steal thisWhen something is a genuine megatrend, ignore the feeling that you're late — they compound over 20-30 year arcs.

The strategy too stupid to sell: just buy FANG and hold

Shaan relays Peter Thiel's point that simply buying FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) in 2013 and holding would have 6x'd your money and beaten almost any money manager — but advisors can't recommend it because it's too simple to justify their 1% fee.

“if you had just put your money into FANG, which were obviously great companies that were technology companies that were growing, and you didn't even need to know how fast they were growing, but if you just said, these are solid companies that, you know, seems like everybody in America is using their products, you would have made 6 times your money in the last 8 years. And he goes, that would beat the performance of almost any money manager or hedge fund or investment banker that you're thinking of working with.”

Steal thisDefault to the embarrassingly simple buy-and-hold strategy; complexity in investing usually underperforms.

The law of increasing returns: build a positive flywheel

Shaan's core investing filter is whether a business has a positive flywheel where each new user makes it more valuable to everyone else, citing Amazon (selection, price, delivery), Facebook, and Uber. He contrasts this with e-commerce, where every new dollar requires equal or more work.

“It's this one theory, which is, does it have a positive flywheel? Which means the more people who use it and the longer it's around, does it become more and more valuable? There's something called the law of increasing returns. And so I want to be in a business that's like that.”

Steal thisPick businesses where each new user or merchant makes the product more valuable to everyone else, so momentum compounds instead of resetting.

Best ads blend in, not stand out: you compete with the feed

Shaan's UGC advertising principle: on Facebook or Instagram, your ad isn't competing with other advertisers, it's competing with the scroll, memes, and influencers. The winning move is to look like native content rather than to stand out as an ad.

“You're competing against the scroll. If somebody's just going to scroll right by your ad to the next piece of, like, entertaining content, right? Because you're It's you're here trying to sell a product and the next person is trying to make the person laugh or click the like button and then keep scrolling. So, you know, you're competing against a meme, you're competing against an influencer, you're competing against like, you know, some model in her bikini on Instagram.”

Steal thisMake your ads look like native feed content (UGC) instead of polished commercials, because you compete with the scroll, not other advertisers.

Beeroll could be a 9-figure UGC-ad business

Shaan estimates Beeroll is doing $1-2M a year now but predicts it could become a nine-figure business by capturing a slice of the multi-billion-dollar Facebook ad market that needs better-converting creative at scale.

“I think they're probably doing a couple million, $1 or $2 million a year is my guess. And I think that this could easily be, you know, a 9-figure business. Why? Because you're taking a subset of the Facebook ad engine, right? Facebook— people are spending billions and billions of dollars on Facebook advertising.”

Print media revenue collapsed from $65B to $17B after 2008

Balaji cites the 'Print Media Disruption' chart: after the 2008 financial crisis, print media advertising revenue fell from around $65 billion to roughly $17 billion while Google and Facebook went vertical.

“After the financial crisis, print media dropped the revenue from like something like $65 billion down to like $17 billion while Google and Facebook were just going vertical like this, right?”

Spoken: internal podcasts (and newsletters) for companies

Shaan pitches building the 'high school newspaper for your company' — internal media tooling. Spoken (getspoken.com) does this as private internal podcasts; he discovered the need when Facebook block-booked a recording studio for its internal manager podcast.

“So building tools for companies to better communicate, building— basically build the internal high school newsletter, uh, news— high school newspaper, I think is what we called it. What is the high school news— newspaper for your company?”

Steal thisBuild the MailChimp/ConvertKit for internal company communication — newsletters, podcasts, announcement dashboards.

Suli sold a Facebook-apps company and poured it all into Facebook stock

Shaan marvels at Suli, who sold a forgettable Facebook-apps company for $1-3M, then recognized the platform underneath was not silly and aggressively bought pre-IPO Facebook stock plus Florida real estate while immediately starting his next business.

“He aggressively started buying up Facebook stock back then before it was public. And then he did. And then he went to, you know, in Florida and he bought a bunch of real estate. And I just thought, wow, this guy's really like conducting himself.”

Why Clubhouse will fail: the growth-vs-retention catch-22

Shaan predicts Clubhouse fails because it serves two incompatible jobs: content (great growth, terrible retention) and chilling/making friends (great retention, no growth, since you don't recruit friends to a make-friends app). He forecasts a pivot, a Facebook acquisition, and the founder quitting.

“So any platform where the value prop is to make friends, I'm not gonna bring friends. So now you have sticky retention, but now you have no growth. And in the other world, you had fast growth but no retention. And so you're stuck in this catch-22. And so then, just to kind of round it out, you eventually get disillusioned. You realize this shit's not gonna work. You try to pivot. You eventually sell the company to Facebook.”

Wish.com started as a Facebook-ads tool, not a marketplace

Sam tells how two ex-Google AdWords builders created an ad network (ContextLogic) doing what Shaan just described for Facebook; to test it they sold Alibaba junk, the ad tech was so good they kept it as their edge, pivoted, and became Wish.com — public at a ~$12B market cap.

“And they eventually renamed that company. Company Wish. That is how wish.com started. It was started because they were creating exactly what you're describing, and it was so good they say, no, this is our competitive advantage. And so now they're public— this is 10 years later, I think— they're publicly traded with a $12 billion market cap.”

Homeschool stack: file the paperwork, keep records, supply the curriculum

Shaan breaks homeschooling (2.5-3M US kids, doubling with COVID) into a three-part software stack: a Stripe-Atlas-style filing service for state paperwork, a record-keeping app for documenting kids' work, and curriculum/worksheets to teach day to day.

“So if you want to homeschool your kid, first, each state has a different process to like establish yourself as like a legal homeschool person. So I have a friend who started their business doing Stripe Atlas, one of the previous ideas for homeschooling. So like, hey, just type in your kid's name and birthday and all that, and we will file the homeschooling paperwork for you. You don't have to figure out what the state of Georgia requires you to do for that.”

Steal thisBuild a homeschool stack: automate state filing, record-keeping, and curriculum delivery.

Zuck vs Systrom: the acquisition that starts as 'let's partner' but means 'sell or die'

Shaan reads the leaked Zuckerberg-Systrom messages as a coded negotiation: acquisitions open with 'we should partner / integrate Open Graph more deeply,' but the real subtext is Zuck signaling Facebook's own photo app could crush Instagram unless it sells.

“So first of all, any acquisition, it always starts with like, we should just work together more closely. Like, yeah, we should discuss like a partnership. And both sides kind of know what that means. He's like, you don't really want the partnership, but you can't just say, I want you to buy me or I want to buy you. And so it often starts with that.”

The D2C-ification of everything: get on the shelf of Facebook

Shaan's thesis on DTC brands like Sunday Lawn Care: instead of fighting for shelf space at Target or Home Depot, get on the 'shelf' of Facebook, and exploit that legacy brands like Raid are stuck in the past while tastes shifted toward clean, non-toxic alternatives.

“Like, let's just get on the shelf of Facebook. Okay, we can control that. We can push a button, we can put ourselves on the shelf. That's the first piece. The second piece is, hey, consumer tastes have changed, but these brands like Raid and whatever, they're stuck in the past.”

Steal thisPick a tired legacy category (lawn care, pest control), launch a clean/non-toxic D2C version, and acquire customers via Facebook instead of retail shelves.

Bebo's $850M sale: the last girl left at the dance

Michael Birch sold Bebo for $850 million at the absolute peak of social networking. Facebook was too expensive to acquire and MySpace had already sold for $500M, so Bebo was the only target left; a year later it might have sold for half or less. The lesson: that you succeed isn't luck, but how much you succeed often is.

“Sold that company for $850 million. The timing was perfect. Social networking was at its absolute peak. Facebook was too expensive for anyone to buy. MySpace had already sold for $500 million, so they were the only girl left to ask out to the dance. They got a very high bid from a big bidder. That same company a year later might have sold for half the amount or less.”

When the world moves one way, the opposite becomes the opportunity

Shaan's heuristic: the more everyone piles into a channel, the better its opposite becomes. Facebook's public permanence created demand for ephemeral Snapchat; as marketers flood digital ads, neglected channels like print and direct mail get a better ROI.

“which is that when, um, when, when, when the whole world moves one way, it actually creates the opportunity back for the other thing. And so like a great example of this is when Facebook got so popular and Facebook was like, everybody's on it.”

Steal thisLook at where everyone is piling in, then bet on the underused opposite channel for cheaper differentiated ROI.

A curated D2C super-retailer that halves brands' acquisition costs

Shaan pitches an Amazon-like destination curating the 2-3 best D2C brands per category, acquiring customers centrally and taking a ~15% cut. Since brands typically spend ~30% of revenue on Facebook acquisition, a 15% fee cuts their customer-acquisition cost in half.

“You market to them all the different products and you get a 15% cut of everything you sell for these people. Because hey, they're gonna pay Facebook for that customer anyways, they might as well pay, you know, a little bit less for you. 'Cause average store might be spending about 30% of their revenue on customer acquisition through Facebook. So if they can get a customer for 15%, they've, you know, they've cut their acquisition costs in half.”

Steal thisBuild a curated multi-brand store and charge a ~15% cut so brands acquire customers cheaper than via Facebook.

'The Marketing Game': a SimCity-style simulator to learn Facebook ads

Shaan pitches a gamified Facebook-ads simulator—not a course—that dumbs down the ad UI so users get reps driving growth. Pick from pre-made creatives, set targeting, hit go, and see simulated returns.

“It's a game. It's called The Marketing Game. It's basically a simulator that, that dumbs down the Facebook ad UI and UX and just like like it gives you a chance to get reps at driving growth through marketing.”

Steal thisBuild a gamified ad simulator that lets beginners practice campaign decisions and see simulated ROAS without spending real money.

Start with a Facebook group to find the real problem

Shaan's playbook: when your instinct says there's an opportunity but you don't know the product yet, start a Facebook community. You hang with customers daily, learn the real problems and insider lingo, and build trust and a list to sell into — as Bala did by partnering with the biggest nursing group on Facebook.

“creating a Facebook group is an awesome way to go because then you get to just hang out with your customers every single day. You get to find out what the real problems are. And when you do have a product ready, you've built up a reputation and trust and a list of people to sell into.”

Steal thisBefore building, start a niche Facebook group to learn the real problem and earn a warm launch list.

Geek Squad Local: hyper-local teen franchisees, app-dispatched

Shaan's hyper-local franchise model for home-tech help: recruit 15-18 year olds via Facebook to run their neighborhood, teach them 3 tasks, run demand-gen Facebook ads, and dispatch the nearest kid via a 'Mayday' button — paying them ~$20/hr while keeping ~$20/hr margin.

“hey kid, hey, you know, 18-year-old kid, 17-year-old kid, maybe actually even 15, so you can get a few years out of them as they build this business. But basically say, hey Hey, you can run it for your local, like, neighborhood and area, and you can make, you know, $40,000 a year doing this, or $30,000 a year, which will sound like a million dollars a year to, you know, a 16-year-old kid.”

Steal thisRecruit local teens as franchise operators and dispatch them on-demand via an app for home-tech jobs.

Productize the Buy Nothing Project (1.2M users, no product)

Shaan pitches building a real product around the Buy Nothing Project, a grassroots local gifting network where neighbors give and request items for free. It already has 1.2 million participants across 25 countries and 6,000 volunteers, but runs on Facebook groups with no dedicated product.

“And this thing is actually pretty huge. Like it's a grassroots community. There's 1.2 million participants in this project on 25 countries. There's 6,000 volunteers. It's like pretty insane. And so if you can, you can search on Facebook and you can only join one Buy Nothing group.”

Steal thisBuild a trust-layer app for local gifting economies — add verified memberships and facilitated pickup/shipping on top of the Buy Nothing model.

Joining Facebook at $15B because '$150B is still a 10x'

Many had written Facebook off as already-giant when Elman joined in 2008 at a $15B Microsoft valuation. He still saw a 10x: a path to $150B market cap and 500-700M users, with the Facebook platform becoming as unavoidable as Google and SEO.

“Facebook had, let's call it, 70 million monthly active users. It had been valued at $15 billion by Microsoft a few months before I started. It wasn't like I was a genius for joining Facebook when it was a couple of college kids and just networks in college. I still went back and I said, "Look, at $15 billion." I think this can be a 10x. I think it's a $150 billion market cap company, and so my stock will grow 10x at least, and the user base can easily get to 500 to 700 million people”

Peter Thiel's $500K Facebook bet grew tax-deferred in a retirement account

Sam recounts that Thiel invested his early $500K Facebook stake through a retirement account (later clarified as a self-directed IRA), so the enormous gains grew tax-deferred. Erb explains assets inside a retirement plan aren't taxed until withdrawn, and people now do this with crypto, gold, art, and real estate.

“He was the former founder of PayPal. And that his investment— he put $500K into Facebook and he put it in through like an IRA or something like that. Like he's been investing out of a retirement account so that his gains in Facebook were tax-free, essentially.”

Steal thisHold rapidly appreciating assets inside a self-directed IRA so growth compounds tax-deferred until withdrawal.

Leak-proof all-hands via per-stream invisible watermarks

Building on the Facebook all-hands leak story, Shaan's killer feature for an all-hands product: give every employee's video stream and every memo a unique invisible watermark or cryptographic fingerprint, so if a recording or screenshot leaks, you instantly know who shared it.

“I think what you have to do is you have to unique watermark every single stream. So what the technology is going to do, let's say it's an all hands video, it's piping video to every single stream, but there's a sort of invisible watermark or cryptographic hash or something that if this got shared, you would know who shared it.”

Steal thisMake 'leak-proof' the wedge feature: fingerprint every individual stream and document so any leak traces back to the source.

The painter who took Facebook stock for graffiti and made $100M

Sam recounts artist David Choe being asked to paint graffiti on Facebook's early office wall; offered $50K or $50K in stock, he took stock — and it eventually turned into roughly $100 million.

“He, uh, the painter David Cho. They're like, hey, can you paint Hey, paint some graffiti on our wall. And he goes, yeah, all right, it's gonna be 50 grand. And they go, how about 50 grand in stock? And he goes, oh yeah, okay. And so he made $100 million off of it.”

The 125-pound salesperson running ads with a team in the Philippines

Shaan reframes 'sales' for the digital era: the salesperson he wants is someone behind a laptop with Facebook Ad Manager open and a few offshore creatives, controlling a quarter-million-dollar monthly ad budget rather than wining and dining clients.

“The salesperson I want is, you know, 125 pounds, soaking wet, sitting behind a laptop with Facebook Ad Manager open and has, you know, 3 people in the Philippines and in India making ad creative for a product that they don't even know what the heck it is. And they're controlling, you know, a quarter million dollar a month budget. That's the salesperson.”

Startups die of starvation, not murder

Shaan argues founders shouldn't fear being killed by big competitors. Most companies die because they never got enough customers (starvation/suicide), not because rivals beat them (homicide).

“I always used to say it's starvation that you die from and not murder. And like starvation being you didn't get enough customers. And so like, really you should just be focusing on that. And why didn't you get enough customers? It's not 'cause all the customers went to Facebook or Google. It's like, because the customers didn't know about you, didn't care about you, or tried you and you sucked.”

Steal thisStop obsessing over competitors; obsess over why customers don't know you, don't care, or tried you and bounced.

Know one channel cold and buy businesses that have never used it

Shaan's edge for acquirers: master a single growth channel (e.g. Facebook ads) and the product traits that win there (scroll-stopping, value clear in under 3 seconds), then buy profitable businesses that have never run that channel and flip the switch.

“So like there's a lot of these that they're just not doing one channel. And if you know that that channel works, if you have experience in that channel, let's call it Facebook ads or Google AdWords or influencers or whatever, whatever's your, your, your growth thing. And you, you know, the characteristics of the type of business that works there, right? So let's say it's Facebook.”

Steal thisMaster one acquisition channel, then buy profitable businesses that have never run it and apply your unfair advantage.

Castles don't fall, the fertile soil just moves

Shaan's mental model for why incumbents like the FAANG companies rarely get unseated: nobody crosses the moat and takes the castle. Instead someone finds more fertile soil 10 miles away, builds a new castle there, and the old one becomes irrelevant. Bitcoin, Uber and Airbnb didn't look like Google or Facebook, so the giants missed them, that's why Facebook chases crypto with Libra.

“It's that somebody finds a small little shack on another piece of land, you know, 10 miles over, and that land actually has more fertile soil, and then your castle becomes irrelevant. Nobody cares about taking your castle over. Everyone's more interested in that soil over there.”

The Forbes list says brand acquisition beats real estate and funds

Tai argues that studying the Forbes list reveals where wealth concentrates: the first real-estate name is #102, fund managers cluster at the bottom, and brand acquisition or founding is the most correlated activity. He cites Zuckerberg's Instagram and WhatsApp buys.

“nobody makes money on the top of the Forbes list from real estate. Number one, the first American that shows up on the Forbes list from real estate is number 102. Number 102. In fact, the most correlated activity with building wealth is brand acquisition or brand founding. But brand acquisition is massive if you look at the Zuckerberg's really been an acquirer, and without Instagram, he would— and WhatsApp, Facebook would be worth a third at best.”

Steal thisStudy the Forbes list for what actually correlates with wealth instead of trusting your intuition about real estate or funds.

How Facebook crowdsourced its translations from users

Instead of paying to translate its site, Facebook open-sourced the work to bilingual users who volunteered to help, getting translations done faster, cheaper, and more accurately while building a better product for everyone.

“Facebook actually took the opposite, which was they just open sourced it to some degree. They basically said, hey, if you're a user and you speak both like, you know, English and whatever the national language is, like, "Can you help us?" And all of the support poured in and so they were able to basically tap into the user base and get all of the translations done and also get it done much more accurately, faster, kind of more scalably, whatever.”

Steal thisDesign a feature where users do work that improves the product for all users.

LaunchDarkly exported Facebook's feature-flag tool to every SaaS

Facebook built an internal feature-flag system to roll features out to 1% of users, then ramp. Ex-Facebook people spun this out as LaunchDarkly and sold it to every small company that could never afford to build it themselves, raising over $50 million.

“And so LaunchDarkly was like, you know, a couple of ex-Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever— I forgot the internal name of that tool at Facebook. It's like, let's call it whatever, codename Medallion. It's like, oh, we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SaaS company that exists. And these guys have crushed it. They've raised over $50 million”

Find your retention 'magic moment' and force every new user to hit it

Facebook found that friending 10 people in 7 days predicted ~85% retention. The playbook: identify the single action that predicts a retained user, then re-engineer onboarding so every new user is pushed past that threshold fast. Slack's version was 1,000 messages sent.

“And I was like, well, at Facebook, like, I think if I remember correctly, it's like if you get 10 friends in 7 days or something, right? If you like friend 10 people, then like there's like an 85% chance, whatever the number is.”

Steal thisFind the single action that predicts retention, then re-engineer onboarding so new users can't avoid doing it fast.

Put a Facebook-style engineering bootcamp inside old-school companies

Facebook runs an internal 8-9 week developer bootcamp that turns finance people into Facebook engineers. Shaan's idea: a service company that goes into legacy enterprises (Visa, PwC) and installs that bootcamp, training their teams to work like Facebook's, a people-heavy but high-margin business.

“I think that would be a way to do it, is to go to big old school companies and say, look, we put the Facebook boot camp inside Visa and we will train you, train up some people here, and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook. And that would be, I think, a dope business.”

Steal thisPackage an elite company's internal upskilling bootcamp as a service for legacy enterprises.

The myth of the omniscient founder: Zuck nearly sold to Yahoo

Shaan punctures the folklore that great founders always knew, noting Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel tell tidy visionary stories. In reality, Zuckerberg actually agreed to sell Facebook to Yahoo for ~$1B and only walked when Yahoo tried to renegotiate down to ~$650-750M.

“Zuckerberg actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell to Yahoo for, I think, $1 billion or $900 million. And it was going to happen. And then like a week later or so, Yahoo came back and tried to renegotiate the deal down to $650 or $750 or something like that. And Zuckerberg was like, all right, fuck this.”

Suli quit, got bored, and rode the Facebook platform launch to millions of users

Shaan tells how Suli quit Microsoft, moved home, and the day he quit Facebook announced its developer platform. To knock off the rust he built a silly superlatives app ('which friend ends up in jail'), it went viral to tens of millions of users, and Naval flew him out to invest.

“And so he builds a Facebook app that was stupid. It was like a superlatives app, like which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or whatever. Boom, goes viral. He ends up with tens of millions of users. And that changed the trajectory of his life where Silicon Valley starts calling him and Naval flies him out to San Francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that. So he took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched.”

Steal thisWhen a major platform opens its developer API, build something on day one to ride the early distribution wave.

Liquid Death launched on Facebook before it had any product

Knowing no one would fund a 'negative name' water brand, Mike de-risked it by proving the concept on social first. A $1,500 video plus ~$3,000 in Facebook ads got 3 million views and more followers than Aquafina in three months, plus inbound DMs from 7-Eleven franchisees and major NYC distributor Big Geyser, all before any product existed.

“We shot a $1,500 video and then We just put it on Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, just Facebook. We put maybe, I don't know, $3,000 in paid media behind the video. And then cut to 3 months later, we have more Facebook followers than Aquafina. The video has 3 million views.”

Steal thisValidate a risky product as a concept on social media before you build inventory; use the traction to de-risk the raise.

The 'New Zealand business': self-sufficient, no platform risk

Wilkinson's favorite holding, Dribbble, exemplifies his ideal: a 'New Zealand business' that is self-sufficient with no intermediary or gateway. Designers type Dribbble directly into the URL bar, so there's no Google or Facebook risk, and the captive community can be monetized many ways.

“I always say you want a business to be like New Zealand, right? So New Zealand is in the middle of fucking nowhere. Nobody's paying any attention to it. It's quietly successful. It's totally food and energy independent. It could get cut off from the rest of the world and people would eat and be fine. And it's away from nuclear war. Right. And so when I think about a business, I want a business that there's no intermediary, there's no gateway, and you have a fully self-sufficient society.”

Steal thisFavor businesses where customers come directly to you, so no platform (Google, Facebook) sits between you and your audience.

Buy blue-chips on sale, keep dry powder

Shaan's takeaway from people who lived through dot-com and 2008: downturns start great startups and put assets on sale (stocks 50% off, real estate 30% off). He eyes Amazon, Facebook, and Google as blue-chips at a discount, while stressing you can't time the bottom—so having dry powder matters.

“But companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, I think they are on sale. I think they're a discount. It's like, you know, get these blue chip companies 15% off, 20% off. It might get up to 30, 40% off. And those are opportunities for— because I asked a bunch of people, I said, hey, you know, you saw the dot-com boom and bust.”

Steal thisHold dry powder so you can buy blue-chip companies at 20-40% off during a crash, accepting you can't call the exact bottom.

A Facebook board seat pays $350K-$700K for ~4 meetings a year

Sam guessed sitting on Facebook's board pays $5M/year; Shaan corrects it to roughly $350,000 to $700,000, mostly in stock, for essentially attending quarterly board meetings. Sam notes pros stack multiple boards as a side hustle of the rich and prestigious.

“Okay, that's high. It's much lower than that. So it's more like $350,000 to $700,000.”

Levels.fyi: crowdsourced comp data as a simple, defensible product

Shaan highlights levels.fyi, built by a remote-work champion (LevelsIO), where employees anonymously submit role, level, base, stock and city, creating an increasingly reliable comp dataset that is the best way to know if you're underpaid or what you'd make elsewhere.

“So it's this dataset of people anonymously putting in their compensation, and the dataset gets richer and richer. So it's actually a fairly reliable resource to say, oh, you know, should I go work at Facebook or Google? I think I'm this level. I can see the pay difference between the two.”

Steal thisCrowdsource a proprietary dataset in a domain where companies keep people in the dark; each submission makes it more valuable and harder to copy.

Win a market by flooding a new, underpriced ad channel before anyone else

Bradford explains that every dating app that got huge hacked a brand-new acquisition channel before it was understood or expensive: Facebook News Feed, Google Mobile Ads. Plenty of Fish's Markus would stuff a country's channels at launch so any dating search returned only his app.

“all the people that got big all hacked an acquisition channel that was new, and they used Facebook News Feed before it got regulated. They used Google Mobile Ads before they got— anyone knew what they were doing. Marcus knew Facebook Ads inside and out, and when they launched countries, he would just— from what I heard, I tried to read all these people's secrets, but what I heard is they would just basically stuff the channels where you spend so much money no one else can compete.”

Steal thisFind a newly opened, underpriced ad channel and dominate it before competitors notice the arbitrage.

Zuckerberg said he'd have built Facebook in Boston, not the Bay Area

Chicola opened a second office in Austin after a board member noted SF isn't the only place to hire engineers. He cites Zuckerberg saying he'd have done Facebook in Boston, and a Chaos Monkeys anecdote that only one of Facebook's first 30 employees besides Zuckerberg remained — evidence that Bay Area housing costs push talent to job-hop.

“I know I saw some interview once where Mark Zuckerberg said if you could go back in time, he would have done Facebook in Boston. I don't know if he meant it, but he said it, which is a big thing to say, um, for a guy like that. And I was reading one book, I think it was Chaos Monkeys, I talked about Facebook, and the guy said that when he got to Facebook, he met somebody who was employee number 29 of Facebook, and that he or she was the only person of, of the first 30 other than Zuckerberg that was still there”

Steal thisOpen a second engineering office in a lower-cost city to retain talent past the vesting cliff.

The 'buy the brand' growth hack a16z used to launch big

Daniel Gross explains how Andreessen Horowitz launched fast: they bought secondary stakes in Skype and Facebook and put those logos on the site, the borrowed-credibility equivalent of 'I invested in Apple and Amazon.'

“what they did is to get big quick, the testosterone they took, the human growth hormone they took is they did a called buy the brand strategy where he went out of the gate and he put up on his website, you know, Skype and Facebook. I think they bought secondary in both companies, which is not too far from me saying, ah, welcome to my venture capital fund.”

A $200M deal vaporized by one Facebook algorithm change

Sam tells of a friend whose media company was about to sell for $200M last January; Facebook changed its algorithm and the company was out of business by March. He uses it as the cautionary tale for any business built on one platform, like Firefly on Uber/Lyft.

“I know a guy who had a company that was about to sell for $200 million. Last January, Facebook changed their algorithm, and it went out of business in March.”

Build a rocket ship on the back of a rocket ship

Shaan cites VC Josh Elman's talk: platforms give you easy early growth, but you must build escape velocity to get off them before they change the rules. While exploiting a platform's advantages, you should equally be planning your escape, the way Zynga did off Facebook.

“hey, it's great when these platforms are around, you can go get some easy growth on top of them, but you gotta make sure you're building escape velocity to get off them quickly because you will not survive living off them.”

Steal thisExploit hot platforms for early growth but engineer escape velocity before they change the rules.

He logged into friends' Facebooks to buy cheap campus ads

As one of Facebook's first advertisers, Sheel realized early campus ads were priced per school. So he collected the Facebook passwords of friends at big universities like Michigan and Ohio State and posted ads as them to grab the cheapest ad space.

“So what I did at that time was I got friends who went to the University of Michigan and like Ohio State, and I was just like, what are the biggest universities that I have friends at? Because that's gonna be the cheapest ad space. So I got their Facebook passwords and I posted as if I was them, right? These ads. And that, that ended up being like amazing. Clever.”

1,800 applicants for the Facebook sales role she landed

Simpson says the hardest part of working at Facebook was the interview gauntlet: roughly 1,800 applicants and 8 rounds of interviews for the job she got. The job itself was easier than her prior startup work because she was selling a known product.

“I mean, frankly, the hardest part of working at Facebook was by far the interview process. So there were about 1,800 applicants for the job I ended up getting, which is, you know, very, very low percentage hit rate.”

Waking up terrified of complacency pushed her to quit Facebook

Despite a comfortable, well-resourced job, Simpson woke up every morning afraid she'd make nothing of her life by getting too complacent. Getting deep into Bitcoin gave her the push to leave faster than she otherwise would have.

“I remember waking up every morning terrified that I was going to make nothing of my life in terms of what I wanted to do because I would get too complacent. It was a distinct— like every morning I had that feeling. And so I knew I needed to leave. I think I probably wouldn't have left as quickly as I did if I hadn't gotten really into Bitcoin.”

Why Bebo lost to Facebook: real identities and the messy middle

Birch pinpoints two reasons Facebook won: Facebook insisted on real identities while Bebo let users pick symbol-filled names that made friends unsearchable, and Bebo tried to occupy a middle ground between MySpace self-expression and Facebook quality. They were also always in catch-up with far less funding and ~10x fewer engineers.

“They insisted on real identities and we didn't. We were more sort of, we were trying to be the kind of self-expression of MySpace, but with kind of product quality of Facebook and engineering of Facebook. That's where we were trying to kind of position it. And we thought that the middle ground would be the winning ground.”

Your email list is a pirate ship; building on Facebook is renting an apartment

Sam refused to build The Hustle's audience on Facebook or other platforms, comparing it to building a business in a rented apartment where the landlord keeps raising rent. Instead he calls his email list a 'pirate ship' where every subscriber is wind in the sails.

“I knew from day one that would be a horrible idea. It's like, I've always wanted to be independent, and I felt that building an audience on the back of Facebook was like building a business in a rented apartment where the landlord raises the price every quarter. Like, that's a horrible idea. And so I called my email list my pirate ship, and every subscriber was a little bit of wind in our sails.”

Steal thisOwn your distribution: build your audience on email you control, not on a platform that can raise prices or change the rules on you.

He built the top soap opera blog without watching a single episode

Ramon started a soap opera news blog despite never having watched an episode, can't code, and writing in a second language. He picked the niche purely from Facebook engagement data, not passion.

“Nobody will guess this and nobody believes it when I tell them. I started a blog about soap operas. It's a news blog that will write about the running soap operas.”

Test 10+ niches with cheap Facebook pages, double down on the engaged one

Ramon spun up 10-12 Facebook fan pages on different topics (pets, marijuana, soaps, politics), drove cheap likes, and posted to measure engagement. Soaps and politics stood out; he dropped politics and built around soaps.

“I started 10, 11, 12, I forgot, different fan pages about different topics. So one was about pets, marijuana, soaps, politics. And I would just drive some traffic to it or build some likes paid and then post some random pictures and then see the engagement. So some fan pages really bomb. I had 10,000 fans, I post a picture and I get 2 likes or whatever, right? Okay, horrible engagement. But there were 2 topics that really stood out. One was soaps, the other one was politics.”

Steal thisSpin up a dozen cheap topic pages, measure engagement, and only build the business around the niche that overperforms.

First 30-40K Facebook likes cost under 1 cent each

Ramon bought only the first 30,000-40,000 fan page likes at below one cent per like; after that the page grew organically and he didn't pay for traffic again until a year later.

“I only bought 30, the first 30, 40,000 likes at below 1 cent per like, so it was very cheap. After that was all organic.”

A silly Facebook 'Superlatives' app hit 1 million users in a month

Ali and a Georgia Tech friend built a Facebook app where you assign joke superlatives to friends. They hoped for 100 users; within a month a million people used it and their servers melted.

“So we made a bunch of really funny superlatives, like most likely to wear a bunny costume for no apparent reason, most likely to get conned by old ladies in Las Vegas, things that we just thought were kind of offbeat and funny that you would want to give to a friend. And, uh, that friend would go to the app and give one back to you.— So we launched on the Facebook platform and within a month, 1 million people had used it and our servers were melting.”

Test 10+ niches with cheap Facebook fan pages, double down on engagement

Ramon launched 10-12 Facebook fan pages across different topics (pets, marijuana, soaps, politics), bought a few likes, posted random content, and measured engagement. Soaps and politics stood out; he killed politics and went all-in on soaps.

“I started 10, 11, 12, I forgot, different fan pages about different topics. So one was about pets, marijuana, soaps, politics, and I would just drive some traffic to it or build some likes paid and then post some random pictures and then see see the engagement.”

Steal thisBefore committing to a niche, spin up several cheap fan pages, post test content, and let engagement data pick the winner.

Track every single ad daily in a spreadsheet to learn Facebook ads

Moiz Ali got good at Facebook ads by logging every ad's click-through rate, CPA, and ROI in an Excel sheet every single day, finding product-market fit on Facebook after Google Ads failed.

“I created this Excel spreadsheet where every day I tracked every single ad I had, the click-through rate, the, you know, CPA, the return on investment. And I start doing that every day starting, you know, probably August 2015 or maybe September 2015. And like that's really how I started getting good at Facebook ads. I was tracking every single ad we ran on a daily basis.”

Steal thisLog every ad's CTR, CPA, and ROI in a spreadsheet daily until you internalize what works.

A 2-week Facebook app hit 1 million users and melted the servers

Ali and a friend built a Facebook app called Superlatives in two weeks, hoping 100 friends would use it. Within a month a million people had used it and their database was melting because they knew nothing about architecture.

“So we launched on the Facebook platform, and within a month, a million people had used it, and our servers were melting. We didn't know anything about database architecture, so our database was melting. The app was going down all the time.”

Under $1,000 spent to build a ~$9M asset

Ramon bought his first 30,000-40,000 Facebook page likes at under a penny each and spent under $1,000 total before the page grew organically, then sold the resulting site for nearly $9 million.

“You spent under $1,000 total unpaid for this website, built that asset up into something that you were able to sell for almost $9 million. So that's a tremendous, tremendous type of return.”

Don't put all your traffic eggs in one basket

After Facebook crushed publisher reach, Ramon made traffic diversification a core principle. He never wants to be 100% dependent on Google, email, or push; email is the most reliable channel but everything can change overnight.

“Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And, and, and Yeah, still to today, like when I buy or sell or buy, start a site, it's like I want a diverse traffic. Traffic, yeah. I don't want to be 100% depending on Google, 100% even email, or 100%, you know, a push notification. From all these, the email is still the best bet”

Steal thisDiversify traffic across Facebook, Google, email, and push so one algorithm change can't kill your business.

How Druckenmiller flipped from Bitcoin skeptic to buyer: the 86% diamond hands

Druckenmiller long called crypto 'a solution in search of a problem,' but Fed money-printing during the CARES Act gave it a problem to solve. The clincher came from Paul Tudor Jones: when Bitcoin fell from $17,000 to $3,000, 86% of holders never sold, proving a base of religious-zealot holders behind a finite-supply asset.

“Then the second thing that happened is I got a call from Paul Jones, and he says to me, uh, do you know that when Bitcoin went from $17,000 to $3,000 86% of the people that owned it at $17,000 never sold it. Well, this was huge in my mind. Here's something with a finite supply, 86% of the owners are religious zealots. I mean, who the hell holds something through $17,000 to $3,000?”

Don't build on rented land: the email list as a pirate ship

Sam refused to build The Hustle's audience on Facebook, comparing it to renting an apartment where the landlord raises rent every quarter. He called his email list his 'pirate ship' with each subscriber a bit of wind in the sails.

“I've always wanted to be independent, and I felt that building an audience on the back of Facebook was like building a business in a rented apartment where the landlord raises the price every quarter. Like, that's a horrible idea. And so I called my email list my pirate ship, and every subscriber was a little bit of wind in our sails.”

Steal thisOwn your audience channel (email) instead of renting reach from a platform that can change the rules.