Shaan Puri reflects on chasing big consumer hits like Elon Musk's ventures versus building profitable but unglamorous businesses. He burned out on his startup Monkey Inferno and now questions whether wanting financial wins and lifestyle improvements is maturity or fear.
Dude, I just want to get wins. Like, I don't need to change culture. Like, I need to change my bank account and my lifestyle.
Like, there's these companies like Tesla and basically a lot of stuff that Elon does, which is like this, like, super sexy stuff. I mean, I'm not interested in it, but it is quite sexy to say you're going to send a, a, a you're gonna go to Mars, or you're creating these cars that are neat and fun. And that whenever I think about these companies, they're like the coolest companies where you create a hype video at the end of the year and you see everything they've done and you're like, oh my God, that's so sick. Like when they created like a video of Elon celebrating one of his rockets taking off, I was like, oh my God, that's awesome. And so anyway, Constellation's not that.
He doesn't do a video of him like looking at his golf club software.
Right, and it's pretty boring, um, but it's still fascinating because it's like a fun puzzle. How do you, Sean, like, where are your aspirations? Like, do you say like, I want to do something that's full of excitement, or do you find excitement in the boring stuff?
I used to be, uh, pretty hardcore about this where I was like, dude, the only thing worth doing— like, if I'm going to spend my time— and I used to be really like, uh, dismissive of people who were wasting their time doing things that were not sort of the peak of the peak. So I was like, okay, if I'm gonna do— why would I do a job when I can own my own business? Then I was like, why would I own a small business when I can own a big business? They're both gonna take up all my energy and my time. And it's like, if I'm gonna do a big business, why would I do a boring thing? Might as well do an exciting thing. And that train of logic made sense to me, and I did that. So at Monkey Inferno, it was, we are here to try to create the next hit consumer thing. We're like, we don't give a shit that that's low odds of success. We want to create the, you know, Michael had created Bebo and which was like sort of like almost Facebook. He had like come within sort of inches of creating a Facebook, but instead ended up in the MySpace pile and, you know, did well financially, but he didn't change culture. And so we were like, dude, we can do this. We can change culture. And so we tried every, you know, messaging apps, live streaming. We tried all these different consumer things and failed like crazy. You know, even things that like kind of worked, they ultimately were not successful because they were so home run driven. They were grand slam driven. So I backed off that and I backed off that maybe because I'm just burnt out. Dude, I just wanna get wins. Like, I don't need to change culture. Like, I just need to change my bank account and my lifestyle. Like, so I don't know to what extent I'm, it's like I can frame it either way. Am I more mature because I'm like, look, I don't have, I'm not as attracted to the sexiness of it. I just wanna build, you know, great things, great businesses. Or am I just fearful and burnt out from failure? It's hard to say for me, right? But my view definitely has changed where now I'm like, oh, that Elon path. I don't know. That sounds like a lot of effort. Why don't I just do this simple thing that's gonna like work?
Yeah. And part of me is like, okay, I agree. And I agree. And I am the same. And then the other part is like, yeah, dude, but you're just kind of being like a puss. Like what would the 12-year-old in you like think is awesome? And every once in a while you got to listen to that. And so I don't know how I feel.
