Reinventing Home Ownership and Concierge Businesses With Sam Parr | Where It Happens

0:00[Music] what's going on greg good to be here dude it is good to be here dude i've been uh i've been thinking about all this stuff going on with squid games you seen the show i mean who hasn't well i haven't seen it why haven't you seen it dude i cannot do the whole thing with subtitles why all of these freaking international shows that come out that everyone goes crazy for they're amazing i'm sure they're great parasite like two years ago i can't watch them can't do it but why i can't for me tv movies all this stuff it's like the ultimate relaxed activity end of the day i want to be able to unwind i

0:48cannot watch it while having to read it just doesn't work it doesn't work for me so you're one of those people that you basically you you like watch the office before bed and you just want to turn family guy family guy yeah as crazy as that sounds no one watches family anymore family is amazing that's like the best unwind thing i can't do it with all these shows i'm actually shocked to be honest because i feel like you're a content guy well i feel uncultured because of it because everybody is doing squid games right now it's like netflix just announced 900 million dollars of value was created from it the budget was like

1:19a couple million bucks it's insane totally nuts you don't haven't watched it and i don't think i ever will watch it but you don't find that you're like behind the world like behind everyone's watching it and you're just yes yeah for sure but dude the water cooler doesn't exist anymore it's not like you know back in the day you had to have watched this stuff so that you could go to the water cooler and have the conversations with people we're not in the office what i mean what do you mean the water cooler is twitter that's true the water cooler is twitter i do feel bad i'll go like

1:45read stuff about about all these shows and everyone getting hyped about them and i literally have no context i just know it's like hunger games in south korea it's the whole premise of it so how do you get your content i don't know man i i just watch i like read stuff watch things but like tv international tv it's just not my thing okay yeah i dig it there capchase is the financing solution for fast growing startups their main product capchase grow allows you to tap into future revenue today so that you can reinvest in your business and scale more quickly there's no dilution ever and setting up is as easy

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3:00even have a raising platform where they will connect you with other investors out in the ecosystem have you tried mercury i have and let's be honest when you log into traditional banking websites and apps it's hideous when i go into mercury it's like a walk in the park so i love using it feels fresh and i can't use anything else you should definitely check it out at mercury.com it will completely change the game for your banking experience i guarantee it um dude so let's dive into it man i know we don't have that much time what are we drinking yeah what are we drinking ah all right

3:39well it is 10 a.m so i feel like a little bit of a degenerate here we've got a hibiki japanese whiskey today are you a japanese whiskey i love japanese whiskey i'm gonna pour you a little bit it's okay let's get myself a sticker okay so you're saying that you you know you get the stiffer pour and i'm a lighter

3:57guy look at you man you're six nine 135. cheers well i'll drink to that i'll drink that that's good it's pretty good it's light it's a good taste it's smoky it's very smoky yeah yeah it's good um so i've got an idea i want to run by you today okay what do you got um it's related to this whole thing that's happening in the world that's changing with the home economy okay you know like airbnb happened i don't know i honestly have no idea when airbnb started 10 years ago say it's a 100 billion dollar company now massive business everybody's like doing the whole home sharing thing

4:37it became this you know it became this reality now you have covid happens all these people leaving the cities buying new houses especially young people so this whole new generation of homeowners like you know 24 to 30 year olds going and buying new houses interest rates at the floor so it's almost free to go buy a house have all these new home owners but there's a huge issue that's happening with it what's the issue so if you're like me you have no freaking idea what it takes to actually manage a home you have a house i do have a house i just got a new house my biggest issue

5:12with the entire process it's not like buying the house it's not mortgage like all that i get it it's kind of a pain in the ass but the reality of it is like the gutters what the hell do i do with gutters in my house i don't know when they have to get cleaned i don't know like air filters all of this random stuff that is around the house that i'm supposed to know how to fix as an adult like our generation we never learned that stuff it wasn't like we sat in schools or parents taught us these things like i knew how to mow the lawn

5:39and do some basic stuff around the house but the reality is most of these things our generation has no clue how to manage i mean i live in miami in miami and i just found out that you have to change your ac filter once a month literally once a month ac filters i don't even know where they are yeah i do not know i had a house in california owned it for 18 months never changed the ac filter once and when we moved out it was one of the things when the buyer was buying the house of like how often have you changed the ac filters and i had no clue what to

6:12say dude i was literally on youtube like how to change an ac filter and i'm watching like these youtube videos i don't know when how you know i'm like embarrassed i'm like embarrassed to call my parents and be like how do you change an ac filter yeah so yeah so tell me what's the idea what do you think okay so first off there's two ideas that you one just that you sparked for me someone needs to do like some sort of paid newsletter youtube something that just like teaches you how to be an adult because i have no clue how to be an adult and we don't learn anymore like

6:40there's all this random stuff that happens but okay here's my idea and i want to pitch you on it i want you to tell me if it's stupid too okay because like i'm super high on it i want someone to start it if it's not me and i'm gonna go fund it so all these young people moving out buying houses when you're young and you live in a city we're in new york right now if you have an apartment in the city and you're living in an apartment when something goes wrong there's just a portal there's like a website you log into for the building and you go type in

7:04what your issue is you have ants say you find dance you go type in hey i got ants the next day you go to work someone has shown up and fixed this for you you literally just had someone that came in and while you're gone an exterminator showed up and fixed it because the building has some provider and they deal with it and there's a portal and you have like your owner your home manager that basically just does that through this portal that does not exist for home ownership and i've looked into it i've tried to find it for myself literally doesn't exist there's no central body central

7:34authority where you can just have someone that runs all of these things for you so break down to me like how it would work like how much money would it cost what would you get out of it so here's walking through it yeah so what i want is a home manager like i literally want a concierge who runs my entire household and i don't i mean it in terms of like both the proactive stuff like we talk about ac filters gutter cleaning uh i don't know like lawn landscaping if you end up having a pool like pool person all these things are proactive that you know you have to do

8:10once every three months you just have to go do them i need that done i also want reactive if i have ants if i find cockroaches in my house i need someone to show up asap i'm not i mean my wife's not messing around with that kind of thing neither am i actually i'm actually more scared of bugs than she is but if i have something like that i need someone to show up right then and i don't want to have to spend all the like energy and stress figuring out in my new town who is the best ant guy that's not going to overcharge me or like a sewage

8:36backup who's the best plumber that's going to show up and do this so you need both the proactive and the reactive and i think what you do is you set up a business where you basically say we're going to charge like it's like an amazon prime model charge you making up a number 500 bucks a month and that is just to have access to this service and then basically you get access to via this service all of their primary providers that get you all of these things so you have someone that's automatically coming and cleaning your gutters doing the filters doing the like monthly or quarterly checkups that you

9:08need done and then also if something ever goes wrong and you need the like reactive asap sunday night sewage backup emergency you can plug it into the portal and you have your single point of contact your concierge that just shows up and they will go get the person for you you know big angie's list is as a business it's like it's billions right yeah is it owned by isc or is that a separate business i don't know all i know is it's big it's insane it's old school so are you are you talking about like basically a modern-day angie's list that you know is more curated you know what i mean i

9:41haven't thought about angelus it's an interesting one to point out so i've experienced angie's list uh my experience with it is that it sucks my experience with it is that you go like i was trying to find someone to clean our house and i went and plugged in information on the house whatever and basically what happened was i got a bunch of spam calls because they just i don't know if they sell out your data or if they just farm you out for quotes but basically you end up with a hundred people contacting you sending you quotes doing all this stuff and the quality of it is just not controlled you

10:10might have the reviews on the site and stuff but it's not the concierge experience that i think young people want i just think our generation what makes me so excited about this idea is that our generation is used to curated concierge-like experiences and we're willing to pay for it in general and i think you could just like price tear something out depending on where it was and depending on the level of the offering where people would pay i mean i would gladly pay for just a single person that i knew i could contact to handle anything is this a rich person's problem like is this one

10:43of those business ideas that are is just going to be for wealthy people and not for regular people the first time i thought of it it's a good question i think it's a fair question i think it would crush it in really wealthy markets like if you went to the hamptons where i said i'm going to do this and i'm going to charge 2 000 a month for people and it's like their second homes that probably exists if i were to guess i would guess that the second home version of this exists and there's people in um there's people in the hamptons that do this i think the

11:10most interesting thing and the most interesting way to pursue this would actually just be to go to like home builders and do it in the mass markets where you have a home builder like a richmond american or like a toll brothers and they're building 500 houses in one area you go to them as a sales strategy and say hey you offer this for free for one year you pay us but you offer it for free as a sales incentive for one year and all of your customers are going to be on it they're going to love it they're going to value it at some amount or it looks

11:40like you're giving them something and now i get a ton of customers i'm super happy your people that just bought your houses are super happy because they're getting this amazing service really quickly i think it's really cool dude i have an idea okay what if you cut in the ho the home builders into the deal yeah that's the idea right yes you give them like i don't know 10 points on it for a year two years three years it's basically what you're saying is basically like hoa like homeowners what's that homeowners association i think that's it right association for you know homes right so it's like that 500

12:19a thousand dollars a month yeah and then you're just like okay homebuilder you're about to you know build this whole community of 500 homes a thousand homes yeah give them some incentive yeah and it's just like additional revenue for them i i totally i like that i like that piece too yeah i think it's just like the the idea that people will pay so much money to not have stress when you think about like as a business and you're launching a business you're trying to solve a customer problem fundamentally it's like what problem am i solving and what are people willing to pay to have that problem solve for them the problem

12:49here is stress i don't want to have to think about all these things on a weekly basis and right now i do right now if someone comes to me and says like oh your gutters whatever there's something wrong we had a sewage backup brand new house we got this brand new house and a sewage backup on a sunday night at 6 00 pm and that is the worst headache you could possibly have you're about to go into the week and there's something there's stinky water all over the basement like it's a terrible experience and i don't know who to call i'm like google searching how to find a plumber

13:15right now it's a pain and so to just have someone that you know you can text or call and it could be like a fake portal but it's literally a sas business that i think you just have services tied on to and so if you like really went down the rabbit hole on it i think what you do as the company is you have this 500 a month or whatever it is a pure profit coming into the system you take that and you go to all these service providers in the different regions and you say we're going to pay you 20 above what you get on a market rate because we

13:43have all this profit coming in we're going to pay you way more but you have to be on call for us and so if you get a call from whatever this company's called you're turning down everything else and coming straight to our place because then you effectively guarantee capacity within a region which is so critical to this model like i need it to be the case that i'm paying this 500 a month that person shows up right now when i go and call okay so let's just say you wanted to do this idea yeah like how do you get it done like where do you start

14:10you know like um what's your what's your thinking like so that yeah there's two approaches to this type of thing i think you could go the like vc-backed extravaganza you go and try to raise a ton of money and go blow it out nationally i think the more interesting way to do something like this candidly is to go ultra regional and say i'm going to start this in westchester county making up a place could be wherever it could be marin in california it could be i'd probably start in an area that either had a lot of home builder density or it had a lot of affluent um affluent people and

14:46basically say okay i'm gonna start there i'm gonna build out because the key thing with this it's like it's an operations challenge you have to build out the provider capacity really really quickly and sign them up to these type of deals because without that like you can build the whole portal you can have it look nice it looks fancy it's sexy it's great but if it doesn't work with actually getting the providers out when you need them out there it just doesn't function but i think it's like an operations challenge i think you really just need to get these pockets of regional density and you can expand

15:13pretty quickly because it's profitable from day one so would you do the vc model or do you think you'd sort of bootstrap it yeah get one city like to me it feels like this is one of those businesses that i read on like techcrunch that like raises you know goes from like it goes from zero to you know billions really quickly yeah so if it's a billion dollar business i should not be here right now and i should go start this um i think so i would probably go with start regional do one region prove it out because i think it's cash flow positive from day

15:48one i think you could go sign up if you went talk to 10 providers in that area and then went and signed up 100 households paying 500 a month i mean it's immediately profitable business where you're making a bunch of cash that's coming in day one because it's a monthly thing and by the way like the way i would do it is that 500 is just the cost of doing business as a customer you're not actually you still have to pay if a plumber shows up or you still have to pay if someone shows up you're just paying it's like amazon prime you're paying for the right to have this

16:17single point of contact this to me sounds like an idea potentially that's really good on paper but is really really hard to execute why do you think it's hard to execute dude like you have to call you have to have like minimal viable service providers right so you have to have an exterminator you have to have a pool person you have to have like you have to go to each vertical vertical and just like sign these people up and i'm wondering like if i was trying to start this because i actually think it's a good idea but if i was trying to start this i would just

16:51maybe maybe just focus on like you don't want to have mice or ants in your in your house like pay 500 300 a month 200 a month whatever it is and we'll take care of it like what like why don't you prioritize like this is my product hat here i'm like okay what are the two three four five things that people need the most yeah like the big you know you call it the stressors right like what are what's the big stresses that people have as homeowners in westchester that you can basically bundle to a 500 a month program so you would cut down the atomic

17:28unit to being like sitting within the actual product level yeah with a single vertical of type of people yeah sorry not a type of people a single vertical of service that's being provided like extermination or extermination sounds like a bad way of saying that you know what i mean getting rid of ants right extermination extermination of the rodents or whatever you have in your house okay so you would cut it down to that level see because i would just i think you have to go broad-based with it well i think a lot of people have ideas and like this is like one of those ideas that like yeah

18:00it like makes complete sense but it's then like sitting down executing it's an ops problem it's an ops problem no doubt yeah i think if you but if you found an amazing ops person to go do this you could go do it i'm pretty and i'm pretty sure it could be a profitable business within a single region and you could run it as like a few million a year business in a small region and be in a great spa how does this idea fail um if you fail on the ops piece of it if you are like if you fail to find a good person to actually consolidate and

18:33manage the relationships with the providers so it's not actually a good experience for the customer then i think you completely fail i flip it on its head though like i go with this whole idea of the reverse test i saw this framework recently it's like the reverse test which basically says if something were to start working in this way would you ever go back to the prior way that you did this and for me this totally passes the reverse test where i think if i had this and i could pay 500 a month and someone just took all of my headaches of home ownership away because i had a single point of

19:02contact would i ever go back to the prior way of doing it for free absolutely not actually i i think first of all i love that yeah it's a great frame it's a great framework the other thing is the other framework that you kind of were talking about which is like how to come up with startup ideas is one way to do it is you put this lens as to what are people's stressors in every in everyday life right and you start with an archetype so you're like the 30 year old you know new yorker who lives in westchester like what are the stressors that they have today

19:37and how do i come up with ideas to like deal with that yeah like that's like i feel like people don't do that enough it's one of the best ways of coming up with startup ideas is like talk to your uber driver right about what stresses them out what part of running your business as an uber driver stresses you out is it getting cash quickly well all these businesses started literally to fix that because people were getting money every other week and so there was businesses that started right you can go on reddit and just like look up things endlessly for what's stressing people out it's a really really cool way of

20:05figuring out ideas i feel i feel like people like people don't go into uber's enough and just like dude i take a you should take an uber every day and just like ask them questions it's like mark your research you spend spend 10 bucks on an uber and be like hey like what's stressing you out like what's going on it's one of the best ways of learning is just talking to random people that you meet on a daily basis it's like the ultimate intellectual curiosity to me is actually just going and talking to these people and seeing what you end up learning about their lives how they run their life how they

20:31run their business etc it's pretty amazing cool so what do you what are you thinking about this business you you know you doing it or i do i think it's sick yeah i'm not gonna lie i mean i've been i've been riffing on this for like three months and i either want to fund someone to go do it so if there's someone in our community that has an interest in pursuing this i seriously think i would be interested in funding it especially if you have a good ops guy to run it i'm all in on this um if not i might go do something like this i

21:02don't know how much time it would take and you'd have to find a good ops person but i think it's pretty interesting i here's okay i'll tell you what i like about it i'll tell you what i don't like about it yeah i like what i like about it it's like that uber model yeah right like start in one city start with like you know uber i'm sure you know like it started black cars san francisco right then they're like okay uberx then they're like okay uber pool then they're like okay food delivery and then they're like neo let's go to new york let's go to london let's go you

21:30know i love that you're stealing my whole road map right now i'm sorry dude you know but i think that's what it is it's the uber playbook right you're tr you're basically saying i want to do the uber playbook but for home sharing and i love that because vcs love that vc see that and they're like okay scalable i'm in and so i love that piece about it what i don't like about it is i feel like i hate to like put you on the hot spot man but i feel like you haven't like you haven't picked your community you haven't picked your vertical you have to start like maybe

22:06like your homework should be like should i focus on westchester right like i feel like if uber would have started in pa you know in paris or london um as uberx yeah it wouldn't have worked yeah so like the starting point in product building is so key yeah so i love this idea i think it's really interesting i like your pushbacks i think we should bring someone in to hammer us on it a little bit more all right let's bring in sam to jam on this we've got our friend sam parr joining us sam is a bunch of things he started a multi-million dollar media company that you sold you're the

22:46co-host of one of the most popular podcasts on the air my first million also a property owner and someone who's experienced a lot of the troubles that i'm talking about here so sam just to bring you up to speed really quickly what we're talking about is this idea i have for a home concierge business so it's basically this idea that young people have no idea how to manage anything in their house we weren't raised to understand any of the things about being an adult so i would much rather pay someone 500 a month to handle all of it for me have a portal where they deal with all sorts of air

23:16conditioning gut or whatever but also someone that i can immediately call to fix ant problems sewage backups whatever it is that's going on so we want to get your take on this as someone who has dealt with a lot of things within home ownership etc um let's just jam on it there was this company that was doing that for offices that i used to use was it called alfred right yeah hello alfred basically if i remember correctly i used it for my office um when we owned offices in san francisco and austin and it was basically like a platform where you logged in and all your vendors were on there and i could

23:51really easily organize who that is and i could like hire them to come do stuff i think you could do that for your home one thing that i've always thought was interesting was basically have you guys um ever had um what's it called an inspection so when you get in when you buy a house you get this inspection like have you ever been in your house and there's like this weird switch where you're like i have no idea what the switch does or dude i literally have 500 of those switches in my house yeah you're like i don't know what the switch does or you have um like when you have to change

24:20your air filters in your ac you're like all right i changed these two but then like six months down the line you're like oh whoa there's a filter right there i had no idea that was even there like so that stuff got to happen and when you i always thought it was odd when you get your home inspection i'm like why did they not give this to me in like a wikipedia style thing that i could just type in like what the hell does this do where is this thing and basically my home inspection i think i paid 350 for it i ended up getting a pdf and it was

24:45okay i mean it's a pdf that was like 80 pages it was so long and i'll me and my wife will like scroll through that sometimes and we're like wait what is this like like this window apparently needs to be changed every certain amount of time something has to change and i've always wished that i had like reminders and things like that and that's a little bit related to this because there are a lot of things that break and you're like i have no idea what the hell this does and so there's this company called inspectify that was i was curious about they're doing okay but basically they

25:11help you find home inspectors but i've always wanted a more of a digital component for my home inspection and then i was like because i thought about this idea a lot and i'm like i wish i had this alfred hello alfred component where i could very quickly hire ex-vendors to just come and fix this [ __ ] because i already know that every six months i need to replace blank blank blank i just have to dig through this 80 page pdf to figure out what it is it's literally like shazam for your home pick up stuff on yeah that would be step one immediately give you exactly what it

25:40is what you need to do with it when you need to maintain it whatever it's kind of cool what do you think ray so i have a crazy inspection story okay so a year ago i ended up buying this house in canada i told you about it yeah and it's in a small town i don't know anyone um and i somehow find this this inspector to inspect it i inspect it and he says the words were like it's perfect it's that's you know it's a it's an in french it means like it's a beautiful building like there's nothing wrong with it sends me the pdf all in french whatever i

26:21would have preferred in english but whatever i get it and it's like 10 on 10. fast forward you know house closes a week later um i see this note on the fridge and it says this guy named hector so i call and he's the handyman so i call this like handyman and i'm and i'm like hey can you help me with um you know with some stuff he was like oh by the way did they fit did they fix like all the rot in in the house and i was like what are you talking about man he's like i literally painted over everything and the house is rotting like it's gonna

26:59f literally the house is gonna fall apart any moment and i call back the inspector la belle battisca and he was like oh sorry like you're on your own and i had to literally gut the house build the frame in peak covid buy lumber at literally the peak and redo this 3 500 square foot house because my inspector couldn't inspect you know anything well there's no standardization within the inspection market so to sam's point on that inspection idea it's brilliant i think the inspection i didn't know that no there's no state dude it's some random person that comes out and has to like check different things but if they see something and

27:47they want to call it out as a big flag or they don't it doesn't matter i also think by the way that inspection companies are like in bed with the lenders and the banks because the banks the banks want to be in a good spot in terms of their loan to value and so they have an incentive when they're the ones actually paying for the inspection in the process to have it be under appraised and like when you come in and have an inspection and have an appraiser come in types of businesses out there where you only use one once every five or ten years and so like the service doesn't

28:15matter that much and i've always been fascinated by those because i don't think it's that hard to provide a little bit better service to be a little bit nicer so for example have you guys ever moved cross country i know you have yeah right i just did it just did it couple years ago and so the the cross country move business is incredibly interesting because if you go on and look at reviews it's like unanimously like bad like if like it's always bad and you don't know who's a scam and interestingly often if you hire one guy let's say you're moving from chicago to new york you call chicago you

28:41probably call a new york company that company's actually based in like um you know boston but they're gonna they're gonna actually send that lead to someone else in chicago or new york and so you don't actually know who has your [ __ ] they don't give a [ __ ] if it's actually good or not because they're like dude you're not gonna use this ever again just give us give us the money and so i've always been fascinated by businesses like that of which inspections is one of them and i like to think of things like what's something that you actually use one time but like

29:05i do think if you if you just improve the services a little bit it actually can be a significantly better and i love those types of mom and pop things those type of businesses too i mean the way those businesses operate is generally that they try to sync up with big companies that have executives and people doing cross-country moves and then they provide like quote unquote preferred rates to the big company for people to do reloads and they know it's a crazy business because basically what happened to us was like my wife was getting a relocation bonus for her work to move from san francisco to new york

29:35and they had preferred providers that we were supposed to use when we went and got quotes from those preferred providers it was literally like 25 grand to move cross-country we went and got an outside quote not a preferred provider and it was like 10. and so literally those people are just providing you these massive marked up rates because they know you're price insensitive because it's someone else's money that's paying for it how much stuff did you ship dude i had a whole gym man i had like probably like 2 000 pounds of weights golly like you know that yeah i try i i try owning not a lot of stuff because

30:04like the headache of owning stuff i i cannot stand it was a lot dude so i want to ask you about i know you're in the you're in the kind of home rental uh market i know you own a few homes and you've done this i keep seeing this new model that's come up recently and greg and i were talking about this earlier like this whole idea of like timeshare 2.0 there's this business i've seen it all over the place recently it's called picasso um they raised like three months after after launching they became a unicorn they raised well it was started by the uh zillow founder oh really

30:37exactly right second something i forget his name i think i think it started by the zillow founder and someone else who worked there so like i presumably they have some type of like domain expertise but then they got that like sweet sweet masasan money marked up massively like three months later i think seriously in a year and a half they're valued at like a billion and a half dollars insane raised a bunch of money like what do you think of this whole idea of timeshare 2.0 like are young people looking to flex on 1 8 home ownership of vacation homes flex no but can i tell you what i do so i spend

31:10about i live in new york for about four or five months a year and i rent out so i bought my the house that i'm in right now i bought it in texas and i furnished it and i like emotionally got like i didn't get attached to it because what i do is i rent it out so i rent out my home in texas to a long-term renter typically for eight to nine thousand dollars a month and i my fixed payment including taxes is like four thousand a month and so i profit five thousand dollars a month and i use that money to rent airbnbs uh in new york i'm

31:40currently trying to buy a place in new york that i can do the same thing so i could ideally live cheap although the economics of new york make it incredibly challenging and so i am looking at uh some of these like time share things uh the the i i don't know if it will if it can work out in a busy city like new york because i think there's like crazy amounts of restrictions but time-share businesses typically are great and i think that you're thinking about it a little bit in the wrong way i don't know if you are in the demographic i think that the demographic is people who um

32:11they just want like a really nice two-week vacation i mean most people like just they want to live their life and have a few kids and take uh two weeks vacation a year and and and have have a nice easy life and don't have the ability to go somewhere for four or five months at a time or something like that so i i in a way i do think timeshare it's not a horrible idea my in-laws had a place in our like [ __ ] aruba that they used to do this and they loved it it's so expensive though so like i agree with you i think that timeshare 1.0 like

32:44the idea that you could have a place in aspen that used for two weeks out of the year and it's reasonably priced i get that i totally understand the demographic for that i know there's a market for it because that model has existed forever but this picasso thing when i look at it and you go look at the homes on the site like pull it up i mean it's like you're paying three hundred thousand dollars for a one-eighth ownership or a 116th ownership of one of these places crazy expensive houses and so to me it looks like the type of model where you're like counting on people wanting to status

33:10signal like the whole idea that we're all status signaling monkeys which i actually agree with i think we're all sitting around trying to status signal different things but so you own any other argument i mean obviously you agree with that like that's like me saying it's daytime but my point is like i don't think you can actually flex on owning one eighth of a house and so i don't understand it like why do you go pay one-eighth for this place instead of just getting an airbnb in this place i think it feels good to like quote unquote own a second house but you can't decorate it like you're

33:39removing all the fun of a house well but there's also like this um um utility i mean like have you ever stayed like on airbnb's for a while it's a pain in the ass man finding places that have the good enough internet finding places that you you know are going to be or meet your standards it's a huge pain in the ass yeah but we just talked about that right we just we just talked about how like stress right like we we're trying to avoid stress like going on airbnb like finding going through reviews and it's like who can i trust who can i not trust

34:10yeah but with one of these houses you can't guarantee when you're gonna get to use it so like you're sharing it with eight other people or 16 other people you know the other people no you don't it's in a pool with an llc they create an llc it's kind of a brilliant model in and of itself they create an llc they put some debt capital into it so they can get a leverage return on the actual acquisition of the house you come in with eight other owners that they've vetted to make sure you're legit you go in and buy it and then you basically like fight with these other eight people

34:35for the best weekends and you're only guaranteed one holiday per year every other year or something so you're basically like fighting for when you can use this house but that like i just i just don't honestly i don't get it like i think the fun of home ownership is that you get to decorate it it gets to be yours you get to put your own touch on it this just feels like a glorified airbnb but then it's like an investment class and they're trying to spin it as like part of this new way i'll bet you money that this company is wildly successful you want to make a bet on it i mean they

35:04already are on paper like i i would paper no like if we can agree to some like realistic metric the guy who started it his name spencer he do you know who you know what he's done no what's his background okay so he worked at what's you what's the big pe company called tpg yeah tpg yeah okay worked at tpg then he started a company called hotwire yeah which he sold for which was basically hot wires for travel right yeah sold that for 700 million dollars to iac then led expedia which is like the largest travel company in the world then started zillow which what's i don't know

35:3650 billion 20 billion whatever some huge real estate company now he's starting this so whenever i like invest or look at what's gonna be successful i look at like signals this is not a horse i would bet against i'm gonna bet on this guy i imagine he has some type of intel also dude sahil you live where are you where are you from are you from california i grew up in boston come on don't hit me with that california thing man i'm not a californian you had dunkin donuts this morning yeah i'm a duncan guy i'm a northeast i grew up in missouri yeah okay i don't think my art maybe our

36:04perspectives aren't entirely that different but if i just had to stereotype you as this like grew up in like palo alto but i for some reason my head i thought like you grew up in palo alto it's okay he's got big palo alto energy for sure yeah yeah yeah you do and you got that the the the that big palo alto andrew uh energy hardcore it like i i think that you have to get out of your bubble and go and hang out with like my family in st louis missouri or my family in kansas like not everyone like not everyone has a a beautiful 150

36:37haircut like you have right now first off picasso is the epitome of that dude it's they're selling six million dollar homes it's not a they're not this isn't a time share i agree with you like if this was a time chair business and i actually think the more interesting model is gonna be the ones that come in below market on picasso and do this at a lower price point and say like we're going to create a much more effective interesting time share experience i actually would go along that type of thing i just don't think there are enough people who sit within the band where they can afford to shell out 200k

37:06in cash for a one-eighth ownership of a house and are fine not being able to actually flex on it with their friends we'll sue them because they own money i try not to do public math but uh what so one-eighth of a one-eighth is is what percentage of a year this well like we've got whiskey we've had whiskey there's always one like i honestly don't think there are enough people that are willing to do this are you would you do this would you own one eighth of a really sick house in cabo in cabo no i don't want it like what band of wealth is there person that does

37:38this that's fine but but but but but if i could do this so i am i my family my in-laws live in new york so i spend a lot of the year there if i could do this in new york so let's say one eighth is uh what's that six weeks a year something like that so to rent a place in new york i had it's it's terribly expensive i i spent 10 grand a month to rent a place in new york and it wasn't that nice of a place but it was okay so 10 grand a month is roughly 300 a night 320 a night that's how much like

38:07a hotel costs in new york unfortunately and so if i had to do that for five years i'm looking at 15 000 times five i mean that's a lot of money i'm gonna spend if you're thinking of it as like you're converting rent into equity and i like i think that's a fair way to think about it actually it's like okay i could i could pay this rent as like the airbnb and it's just dollars out the door or i could just make an equity investment into something but it kind of goes to the broader point of like all of these ridiculous assets that people are

38:32investing in now and i know sam and i are kindred spirits on this but like young people right now and especially in a 10 plus year bull market are investing in the wildest things everything has become an investment class and so it's just like i think this all falls into that same box i don't use this so i i i do not view your primary home that you don't cash flow on i do not view that as an investment i view that as the same as a car a lot of people get pissed off when i say this because they don't agree with me but i think like i

39:02don't understand how anyone could disagree but you're the the math suggests that in most cases homeownership that is non-cash flowing is not an investment that is a um a consumable i mean that is something that you use um if you make money off of it you're i think you're lucky but uh i believe the trailing hundred years homes have grown something like three and a half percent a year so they barely keep up with inflation so i think homes are a wonderful place to store value that keep up with inflation and they cause forced savings but it's not a wonderful way to generate cash flow if you want to

39:36generate cash if you want to generate income you should invest typically in public equities which is like seven and a half eight percent a year you should not invest in a home unless it is cash flowing now whenever i say that people are like oh so you don't think real estate is a good investment no i think it's a [ __ ] awesome investment if you are if if you are making money off of it via tenants paying you month uh money every single month yeah i think uh home ownership is actually just good as like a forced checkings account it's basically a checkings account right it's

40:08a for savings right it's like every month i have to like put aside for the majority of people every month i have to put aside you know 1500 2 000 3 000 into this mortgage so i know i need to like save that's that's why home ownership's great it's not like i'm looking at buying a place in miami right now i'm buying it because like i need a place to live right additionally there's that second big factor that people forget like why did i have a 30 or 40 steak last night because it made me happy and i wanted it yes so 30 house because i [ __ ] want it i want

40:41to live this place i want to decorate it and i want to feel nice about it and that's a wonderful that's a wonderful excuse why you should buy a house and for some reason people will rarely acknowledge that i'm like not everything has to make dollars and cents so if i want to buy this place in cabo why because i want to why do i want this fancy car i just want it so anyway i think that's a good enough reason utility if you're enjoying it and it makes you happy do it so i feel like we're on the same page so what we're saying here is

41:09what we're saying is here we want to make money you know well i think what we're saying is it's awesome to have a place that's our own yes and like have our artwork and have our vibe in it which is anti-picasso which is anti-picasso yeah actually sahil i'm saying i think you need to get out of your element a little bit and think beyond he keeps coming to me with this palo alto energy point i'm not from palo alto i just don't think you have to adjust everything with like is this a good asset class like nine out of 10 people you're gonna say asset class and they're like what the

41:38[ __ ] does that phrase mean what are you talking about yeah it's like i'm just doing this because i like it to remix this idea a little bit i would actually buy a house with you sam and you sahel like i don't want to be in an llc with a bunch of random quote-unquote vetted people i agree with that i would actually do this with a bunch of friends and see that would be a little cooler that's cooler because then the like if it was the three of us and like we have our group text thread if the group of us all said we were going to put some money

42:04into an llc go get a loan go buy a place and we would all collectively decorate it and it could be kind of our own we wouldn't care if other people were there when we went because we're all friends that's kind of cool yeah you create a pooled buying model rather than it's just randos that you're buying a place with i wouldn't be against like walking into the house and seeing like a big photo of you know an oil painting of sean poury and his wife just like over there you know doing ranches outside of austin and um i've wanted a ranch but i don't want to live

42:36on a ranch you know i don't wanna but i would like to spend four weeks there and so we've thought about uh collectively like teaming up with our friends um the problem is is that i have like a rule i generally generally try not to do business with buddies because i'd rather have the relationship over uh like the the outcome of what whatever that is um so i actually prefer strangers because it's easier to like tell them i don't like what they're doing um but i understand why people enjoy this and if they were that they were the right type of friends i would be interested in

43:08doing it my father has been asking me to buy a farm with them for a long time and i'm like i don't know man i don't know if i want to if i want to like if i want to get into that can i tell you guys let me tell you a quick real estate story really quick yeah not real estate but kind of related this is just a story for the people listening really quick so sahil and greg are in this room right now filming with these guys who i know adam and jordan they used to host this conference one time i went to the conference it was

43:30held this particular one they always hold at the four seasons one time i went to the four seasons at their conference and i go to check into my hotel this was in vail i go to check into my hotel and the guy at the front desk uh i said something like oh yeah my name is sam parr um i'm checking in um is the room nice and he goes uh yeah i think you're gonna like it and i was like uh okay he kind of had a smug look on his face so i was like i don't know what i'm getting into but i get up

43:53in the room and i walk in and there's like a kitchen and there's four bedrooms there's a fireplace there's a 16 person dining table a movie theater and i start walking around the room and i call them i go hey who else um like stays here like where um like i got who am i rooming with and they're like what do you mean i'm like well like who who stays in this room besides me and they're like sir that's your room and i was like wait i don't understand and they go yeah it's your whole place and so it's the presidential suite at the four seasons in vail it's 4 000 square

44:25feet this this hotel room i swear to god you can look it up bail and aspen or uh wait was the aspen whatever it was or something like that and i was like how much does this cost a night and they go it's like 10 10 grand a night during like in season and i stayed in this fancy hotel so uh it was like the i was like how the hell did i get here i guess they did i think they when they when they rented out the hotel they must have gotten like a huge block of room and for some reason i was dealt this

44:51like room i guess from there and i think this guy he must have i was only 27 or something he must have thought that i was like a mark zuckerberg or something like that and he like gave me this room and he had the smug face and so had palo alto energy not me bro i was so redneck i called them doubt and i go like who's my roommates it had a full kitchen and a movie theater it had a movie theater and had two fireplaces so you have to so if you're listening go google that room that was like the craziest thing i've done in a long time

45:19next time man well they are signing off from the room where it happens we need you back in the room sam so we had a pretty meaty episode let's hit some uh some takeaways here what do you got it's takeaway time you you first so i've got a few so number one home concierge business i know you think i've got some homework to do i think it's a really interesting idea i think if you nail the ops you find a good ops person to roll with something like this and you start regionally i think there's a really interesting business to build around it one of my biggest takeaways is that if

45:48anyone in the community wants to go start this thing seriously hit me up i do want to discuss it i'm very serious about it and then with picasso i just disagree with you guys on this i just don't think there's a big enough market of people that are willing to shell out this amount of money to own 1 8th or 1 16 of the house i just don't think it exists yeah i would say my takeaways first of all i like your idea i like the idea i just think that a lot of people have these startup ideas that are everything to everyone and you're gonna you kind of

46:17have to start with the archetype and then verticalize so for example start with that westchester new yorker 30-something and build a product for them so that's probably number one and on the picasa idea i'd say i actually actually really like the idea around like building something for friends and i think there's something there um like building products for group chats yeah like we all are part of group chats um and let's let's build something for them yeah i think that's it for today good vibes all around really enjoyed the discussion had a great chat with sam so until next time cheers man what are we cheers into

46:58good times to big palo alto energy

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