Shaan Puri

Puri argued category and positioning are underrated and hard to recover from if wrong.

“I think those are highly underrated and most people are terrible at that. And it's very hard to recover if you have category and positioning wrong”

My First Million: How we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung) (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 9:18

Puri argues positioning is an underrated founder skill that most entrepreneurs skip before rushing to sell.

“I think positioning is super underrated. I don't think most founders know how to do positioning at all”

My First Million: I built a $2,000,000,000 business on vibes (Aug 24, 2026) · Listen from 18:51

Puri argues most people's problem is not strategy or circumstance but a lack of seriousness about what they say they want.

“most people just are – decidedly unserious about the things that they're doing in life”

My First Million: I built a $2,000,000,000 business on vibes (Aug 24, 2026) · Listen from 1:06:08

Puri says selling a company brought relief rather than excitement because M&A processes can collapse at any moment.

“So I'd say definitely felt relief more than excitement, which was surprising”

My First Million: I built a $2,000,000,000 business on vibes (Aug 24, 2026) · Listen from 59:52

Puri said watching Twitch's leader ask simple questions until teams' answers collapsed showed him that base-level understanding is a virtue for a CEO.

“So we got acquired by Twitch, and I got to be at Twitch for two years”

My First Million: Whatnot founder: This is the future of e-commerce (Sep 21, 2026) · Listen from 47:11

Puri cited PayPal as a case where the founders' broad banking vision lost out to the narrow eBay-seller use case that users actually wanted.

“And then here was PayPal, this little tool for eBay sellers”

My First Million: Whatnot founder: This is the future of e-commerce (Sep 21, 2026) · Listen from 18:11

Puri argues that the capacity to feel positive emotions is like a muscle that must be practiced rather than expected to appear at a milestone.

“I think all these feelings are like a muscle. You just never... How many times before this did you feel ecstatic and triumphant and never?”

My First Million: Coach for SpaceX & OpenAI destroys your limiting beliefs for 88 minutes straight (Sep 18, 2026) · Listen from 55:33

Puri says public sentiment toward billionaire AI leaders shows zero trust, partly due to their own poor communication.

“there is zero trust, zero belief in the, that those are our great kings and fearless leaders that we want to get behind. Part of that is because of their own poor communication and presentation”

My First Million: Coach for SpaceX & OpenAI destroys your limiting beliefs for 88 minutes straight (Sep 18, 2026) · Listen from 1:25:15

Puri argues Charity Water succeeded by showing donors exactly where their money went, unlike typical nonprofits.

“if you donated, you get like a GPS tracker of exactly where in the world your thing was going”

My First Million: Decoding Tony Hawk’s mindset in 72 minutes (Sep 9, 2026) · Listen from 3:04

Puri argued founders must alternate between delusional faith and hyper-realism.

“somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder”

My First Million: How we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung) (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 52:27

Puri recounted that his uncle became a top door-to-door salesman by assigning a dollar value to each rejection.

“I put a price on the word no. So he said, if a yes is worth $100 to me”

My First Million: How we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung) (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 35:16