In this segment of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr recounts his time working out of the Founders Dojo, a chaotic, Erlich‑Bachmann‑style coworking space populated by colorful characters like Dave and a skinny Indian hacker named Raj. Raj built a site called TheWorstDrug.tv that crawled the internet to surface the fastest‑growing GIFs. The algorithm, designed to detect viral content, ended up surfacing almost exclusively hardcore porn GIFs, which the team watched on a high‑def screen in the office, becoming desensitized to the explicit material. Despite attracting millions of monthly visitors and extremely high engagement, the site could not be monetized because ad networks refused to run ads on porn content, leading to massive operating costs and no revenue. A bizarre attempt to sell the site to buyers from a former communist country (Bulgaria/Latvia) fell apart, and the project was shut down. Raj vanished after stealing Sam’s skateboard, leaving the future of his talent ambiguous. The story serves as a cautionary, humorous illustration of how a technically clever idea can be derailed by content policy and monetization challenges in Silicon Valley.
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Do you want to hear a quick porn story?
Yeah.
Okay, so I worked out of this— like, uh, I—
Henry gave a nod of approval.
I worked out of this office called the Founders Dojo, and it was the greatest thing ever. I'll tell another story about it, but basically it was— if you've seen the TV show Silicon Valley, it was— we had Erlich Bachmann. It was an Erlich Bachmann type of guy named Dave, who was a great guy but totally inappropriate and disgusting in a good way, and the office was filthy. And there was this guy, I forget his name, Ritesh and Chris.
Oh yeah, I remember this.
And it was this little skinny Indian guy and he was crazy and awesome and he was like the stereotypical Silicon Valley hacker where he could get a job at any big company and make $200,000 a year, but he was like, no, fuck that, I'm like, fuck the corporate pigs. And so he would sleep at that office and Dave would buy him pizza all the time 'cause he was like, get one to be poor and do this thing. And so he created an app or no, a site, a website that would crawl Tumblr. No, I think all of the internet.
Okay.
For the fastest, for the GIFs that had the highest velocity of growth. And so if a GIF launched, popular GIFs, he would tell you right away which one's going to be the most popular. And then you would see it on the screen and it was called The Worst Drug, theworstdrug.tv. It's not there anymore. And that sounds like a silly thing, but that's not why he did it. He did it because what he was trying to do was A, find the fastest, like technology that could find the fastest growing stuff, and if you would go to theworsttruck.com, you could type in something like dog, and the search feature would autofill like wicked fast, like way faster, and then you would click enter, and it would be bam, a high-def GIF.
It was high-def, it was full screen, and it was like laser fast.
So the technology, it was very like Pod Piper-like. The technology wasn't like whatever Pod Piper did, it was the fact that it was all behind the scenes, It was a bunch of nerds being like, "Yeah, our GIFs load the fastest, and like, look, it's like HD and it happened in nanoseconds." And he would spend nights, and I would come back and it would be just a tiny improvement, but we would all gather around it. Well, so here's the cut, uh, the point of the story. Turns out, the most popular GIFs on the internet, 99% of them, are super hardcore raunchy porn. Like, real raunchy porn, and so—
Yeah, 'cause when I went to the site, it was all porn.
There wasn't like porn and then some basketball GIFs, and then like a funny one, it was only porn, so I was like, "This is a porn site." And so at the office, at the dojo, we would have these huge screens of like his workstation and the way that he sat was everyone could see it and we kind of got immune to it, but it was like the raunchiest shit ever. And we would, he'd be like, guys, check this out. Early in the morning we would come in 11 AM, which was early, and he'd be rubbing his eyes and shit and he'd be like, check this out. And all 8 of us would gather around this high-def screen and be like, and he would type in the word like, like facial and like, he's like, watch how fast this loads. And we were just so immune.
We were like, you're not even looking at the content.
We're like, oh yeah. Wow. You could like see the shine in the liquid. Like it was like, it was so funny. And we would have like these like lawyers come into the office and people who are actually, or like investors who would try to raise money for the other companies. And we would forget that this was on the big screen.
So what happened? So this sounds like what's the end of the story? What is this guy doing now?
What happened to the site? The site, The Worst Drug, got millions and millions and millions of visitors. The engagement was stupidly, like, good. He couldn't monetize it, they couldn't use it. So there were so many restrictions, no ad network would allow him to use it. And so even though the site, I think it was getting at least, for sure, millions, I think maybe tens of millions of monthly uniques, and it made zero money and only cost him a lot of money. And the story ends with like, someone in Bulgaria, or Latvia, like, this like communist, ex-communist country wanted to buy the site and it was all weird. They flew him out there and he's like, wait, these guys are like mobsters. And they ended up like bailing and they just shut it down because it was—
So what does he do now? Now he works at Facebook.
No, I've never seen him. Oh no, my skateboard. I had a skateboard. I left at the office. He stole it and I've never seen him since.
He had to get away, dude.
I've never seen him.
He needed transportation.
Raj, that's his name. Raj. I've never seen Raj from—
I'm going to hunt this guy down because that guy is going to build something amazing. Or it's going to be a very sad ending. But either way, it's going to be not average, not the usual.
He was, he was like, if you think of like this idea of what Silicon Valley is, that was that, right? Wow.
