Sept. 17, 2021
#220 - 12 Startups That Can Make You a Millionaire (Sara's List)
Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) give an updated version of Sara's List, 12 companies with exponential growth potential in lucrative industries that could change your life as a job applicant. Regardless if you're job hunting or not, these products and services have some awesome consumer applications.
Sara's List
Sam's Wife, Sara, wanted to find a company to work for that had exponential growth opportunity
She made a list: Not a start-up with only 20 people, but looking for companies with established resources, budding market fit, and amazing upside (low risk, great reward)
- 5 years ago, Sara chose AirBnB when it had a valuation of ~$20B and it grew to $100B
- She became a millionaire based on the stock grants
Sara's List are companies that are valued at over $250m with a low-risk profile that could make you a millionaire through growth and stock grants over 5 or so years
"To a listener applying to jobs, this could be one of the most life-changing episodes" - Sam Parr
You don't have to be technical to work at a tech company, there are plenty of opportunities.
Flexport (6:59)
- Flexport - modern shipping software that takes on the job of 'freight-forwarding’
- Freight Forwarding: the intermediary responsible for the movement of goods on behalf of the owner
- $3B current valuation, 2,500 employees
- Massive industry; global e-commerce is only expanding
Zapier (9:30)
- Zapier - connects APIs to automate workflows, your information will be simultaneously inputted across multiple applications
- $5B current valuation, 350 employees, bootstrapped with $60m-$70m worth of recurring revenue
- Could grow similarly to Atlassian
- Downside: benchmarks against Chicago area salaries rather than Silicon Valley
Uniswap (13:16)
- Uniswap - decentralized crypto trading protocol; offers the ability to exchange one token for any other token
- Bigger than Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and State Street Bank combined in terms of current market cap
- Crypto trading volume (10B per week) is equal to Coinbase with 50x fewer employees (35 employees)
- Uniswap connects buyers and sellers, the users provide the liquidity, resembles a lending club
- Series-A funding from Andreessen-Horowitz
Anduril (18:07)
- Anduril - hardware and software products designed for national security, for America and its allies
- Anduril creates things that they think the government needs and they end up buying it from them
- Created drones that observe potential illegal immigration at the Mexico-America border
- Some controversy around the founder, Palmer Luckey, for having strong political opinions
- Might not be the best environment for those with a liberal mindset (company goals lean moderate-right)
- The founder created Oculus and sold it to Facebook
- $4.6B valuation, 510 employees
- Anduril creates things that they think the government needs and they end up buying it from them
Replit (21:45)
- Replit - program that bypasses all the setup/installations necessary for coding; you write, run, test, and deploy all in the same in-browser IDE
- Currently has 5 million programmers on the network
- They have married the ideas of open source code and social networking
- >$1B valuation; growth is outpacing GitHub
Airtable (28:39)
- Airtable - platform designed for workplace solutions
- Microsoft excel and google sheets alternative
- Every SaaS company competes with Excel, not other SaaS companies
- Founder, Howie Liu, is known as 'prodigy genius' in the media
- $5.7B valuation; it’s similar to Monday.com which went public at $18B, 645 employees
- Microsoft excel and google sheets alternative
Figma (31:00)
- Figma - cloud-based creative design software for collaborative work
- Photoshop alternative, multi-player software that can help users contribute simultaneously in live time
- $10B valuation, looking to take market share from Adobe (30th biggest company in the world)
Rippling (33:38)
- Rippling - simplified HR software for managing employee payroll, benefits, devices, and more
- Founder, Parker Conrad, is the former CEO of Zenefits which was one of the fastest-growing companies in history
- Did get fired from Zenefits for some company culture issues
- Should have learned from his mistakes. Parker is an expert in the HR tech space
- $1.3B valuation; every single company needs a human resources solution
- Could be best potential to 50x on this list
- Founder, Parker Conrad, is the former CEO of Zenefits which was one of the fastest-growing companies in history
OpenStore (36:35)
- OpenStore - sell your ecommerce business to OpenStore and they take over the product, buy-out option for even the smallest entrepreneurs
- Founders: Keith Rabois (former COO of Square, apart of PayPal mafia) & Jack Abraham (Sold an early company to eBay and worked at PayPal)
- Buying mostly from Shopify businesses, combining the businesses into verticalized product lines
Faire (40:23)
- Faire - wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands
- Helps you get a product into more stores without having to call around; the brick and motor stores decide to buy your product from the Faire catalog
NexHealth (41:33)
- NexHealth - Shopify for doctors; you have one standard medical record that can be applied to the network of available healthcare professionals
- $500M valuation; founder has very high goals for the growth of this company
- Great connectivity with 3rd party applications, can scale the network quickly