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Start free trial →My First Million · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Puri tells his cousin, who is choosing his next career move, to write down the five companies he would back with $10 million. He says the exercise changes how a person picks an industry.
…water. And, you know, when Mark Pincus was talking about that, he was basically saying social media was the right body of water to be in back in the early 2000s when he was building social networks and then ended up building Zynga and invested in Facebook and like made a bunch of money doing that.
Right.
And so I was told, I told my cousin, I said, I said, why don't you just write down the five most interesting things that are like most interesting companies you've seen that you think like, if I gave you, you know, $10 million and you were going to, you got to keep all the profits, but you have to invest in these five companies, which five companies would you pick? And he's like, I don't know. And I was like, that's a good exercise to do. It's a much better exercise to do because it gets you to stop thinking like a like a worker and start thinking like an investor. Investors have this incredible benefit that they get to go where the action is. They move where the where the money is to be made, where the opportunity is happening, where the growth is happening. And they move themselves. They're more nomadic than entrepreneurs tend to be or employees tend to be who like to stay in their industry, stay in their lanes. And he did the exercise. He sent me the companies. It was kind of eye-opening for him to be like, oh, yeah, like I really hadn't been thinking. I don't even really know that much about this, but my gut says…
Yeah, you just got to be ambitious. When I see these things, I'm like, I really want that to happen. I'm not going to do it, but I want someone to do it. Well,
we're in a different season, right? When you're in your 20s, you probably would have wanted to go do it.
Yeah, I'm like, I want to watch someone do that. Like we both of