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SP Shaan Puri Shaan Puri Entrepreneur, angel investor and content creator who sold the esports platform Bebo to Twitch and co-founded the Milk Road crypto newsletter.

“I think that using AI in the world of bits, which is basically digital stuff, has very low returns. I think using AI to make content, it's a race to the bottom there. I think using AI to make software, SaaS, make tools, is kind of a race to the bottom. Do it if it's just where your heart is. But to me, that's not where the opportunity is.”

My First Million · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“I think that using AI in the world of bits, which is basically digital stuff, has very low returns. I think using AI to make content, it's a race to the bottom there. I think using AI to make software, SaaS, make tools, is kind of a race to the bottom. Do it if it's just where your heart is. But to me, that's not where the opportunity is.” — Shaan Puri, My First Million

Context

Shaan Puri was laying out where he would build with AI over the next five years. He sets up "AI in the world of things" (drugs, food, homes, materials) as the better opportunity than content or software.

Transcript

My First Million Around 04:56 into the episode
Shaan Puri

Yeah, bananas. I think they only own like 2% of the company now, right? Like seven,

Sam Parr

like 14 or something. But each

Shaan Puri

is like 2.5% or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, you know, on one hand, you see tons of people making hay and you're like, oh, I want to get in on that, but it feels very competitive. On the other hand, you think, well, if I just go build this thing, isn't it going to be obsolete in a day? You know, what's the future of software? So I really started thinking about where would I go if I really wanted to make something happen right now. And so let me show you kind of like my quick thoughts on this. Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been. Michael Scott. And so, you know, the goal is what in four or five years is going to be something we look back at and say, man, that was now was the time that we should have been doing that. Five years ago, the thing to be doing was to go work at one of these model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, so on and so forth. And so using AI to create video like runway, images like Midjourney, text like ChatGPT, you know, those are the things to go build. It was not obvious at the time, but for a small number of people, they did see that. They saw around the corner. They…

Speaker 4

And it was basically like, you

Shaan Puri

know, the guy from GitLab who used, you know, tech, right? AI ⁇ to sequence his tumor to then find, to run through like possible drugs that could do it, to then synthesize them, compound them, research them, ultimately take them and shrink his tumors and get rid of his cancer. The guy cured his own…

Sam Parr

He has a service that you could sign up for. My friend with cancer signed up for it and he's doing great.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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