Shaan Puri

Shaan Puri is an American entrepreneur, podcast host, and angel investor who served as CEO of Monkey Inferno and Bebo, sold Bebo to Amazon's Twitch for up to $25 million in 2019, and co-hosts My First Million, one of the most downloaded business podcasts in the United States.³¹⁹ After leaving Twitch in 2021, he co-founded Milk Road, a daily cryptocurrency newsletter that grew from zero to 250,000 subscribers in ten months and sold to Bitfo in December 2022 for a reported eight-figure sum.⁶ His career arc -- from failed sushi restaurant to startup studio CEO to podcast host to newsletter founder -- traces through the Bebo diaspora that connects several branches of the Founders, Inc. network.¹

Early life and education

Shaan Puri was born in 1988 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.¹³ His family moved frequently during his childhood; he lived in as many as nine countries by the time he finished high school, starting high school in Texas and completing it in China, with periods in Australia, Indonesia, and Denver along the way.¹¹³

Puri attended Duke University from 2006 to 2010, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a minor in Chemistry.¹²¹ During his time at Duke, he won over $40,000 in business plan competitions.¹² His team, Sabi Sushi (originally called Wasabi), won the 2010 Duke Start-up Challenge -- the first victory by an all-undergraduate, non-technology team in the competition's history.¹³ Duke named him Alumnus of the Year in 2014, when he was 26 and already running a startup studio in San Francisco.¹¹¹

Sabi Sushi and the path to Silicon Valley

After graduating from Duke, Puri skipped medical school and co-founded a fast-casual sushi restaurant with two friends.¹ The concept aimed to be "the Chipotle of sushi," with fully customizable, assembly-line-style sushi rolls.¹¹³ The venture did not achieve financial viability and eventually shut down.¹

Rather than applying for jobs through conventional channels after the restaurant failed, Puri cold-emailed Monkey Inferno, a startup studio in San Francisco funded by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo.¹ He sent ideas and product suggestions for their portfolio companies until his name was already known by the time a position opened.¹ Birch later told Puri he had identified him before the company posted a formal job listing.¹

Monkey Inferno and Blab

Puri became CEO of Monkey Inferno around 2012, when he was in his early twenties.⁵¹ The studio operated a team of roughly 20 people tasked with generating startup ideas and building them into products using Michael and Xochi Birch's capital.¹⁷ The team typically ran four to five projects simultaneously in fast eight-week cycles.¹³

One of the studio's first major products was Blab, a live-streaming group video chat application launched in early 2015.⁴ The app allowed multiple participants to broadcast conversations simultaneously, competing with Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live.⁴ Blab grew to 3.9 million users in its first year and attracted use from organizations including ESPN and the UFC.⁴¹

Despite the rapid adoption, only about 10 percent of Blab's users returned daily, and archived streams generated almost no viewership.⁴¹⁴ Puri shut down the app in August 2016 and published a post-mortem on Medium explaining the decision: "Blab was great in many ways, but it wasn't going to be an everyday thing for millions. So we're kicking down the sandcastle, and re-building it as an 'always on' place to hang with friends."¹⁴⁴

Bebo: from social network to esports to Twitch

After Blab, Puri's team pivoted Bebo -- the social network that Michael Birch had bought back from bankruptcy for $1 million in 2013 -- toward esports tournament organization.¹⁶³ The pivot followed a brief attempt at Twitch streaming software that competed with OBS and XSplit.³

In its final form, Bebo provided tools for scheduling, brackets, and community management for gaming leagues, with streams running on Twitch while Bebo handled the tournament infrastructure.³ Furqan Rydhan, who had previously been founding CTO of AppLovin, served as Bebo's CTO during this period.³¹⁰

In June 2019, Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo for up to $25 million in a bidding war that included Facebook and Discord; Facebook had reportedly offered $20 million.³⁸ The deal included roughly ten employees and all intellectual property.⁹ Puri's Reddit AMA in October 2013, during the early Monkey Inferno days, had reached the front page when he described the $850 million-to-$1 million arc of Bebo's ownership history.¹⁵

Twitch

After the acquisition, Puri joined Twitch as Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming and Emerging Markets, a role he held from 2019 to 2021.²²¹ He was 32 years old and overseeing mobile live broadcasting and international growth at one of Amazon's largest consumer platforms.⁵²

During his time at Twitch, Puri began angel investing and launched My First Million, but his full-time role remained at the company until he left in 2021 to return to building his own ventures.²⁵

My First Million

Puri co-launched My First Million in June 2019 with Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, under The Hustle's podcast network.¹⁹¹³ The show's format centers on brainstorming business ideas based on market trends and opportunities, with occasional guest interviews.¹⁹ Parr initially provided distribution through his existing audience while Puri handled content creation and production, with revenue split 50-50.¹³ Parr became a regular co-host approximately six months after launch.¹³

The podcast grew rapidly. By early 2021, it was generating over 300,000 downloads per month.¹ It moved to the HubSpot Podcast Network after HubSpot acquired The Hustle in 2021.¹⁹ By the mid-2020s, the show reached over 25 million downloads annually and ranked consistently among the top business podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.¹³

In a 2021 episode, Puri brought on Furqan Rydhan -- his former CTO at Bebo -- to discuss what it was like co-founding AppLovin, which had by then reached a $20 billion public market valuation.¹⁰

Milk Road

In February 2022, Puri co-founded Milk Road, a daily cryptocurrency newsletter, with Ben Levy.⁶ The earliest version was a Google Doc summary of crypto news that Puri and Levy emailed to friends for feedback.⁶ They spent $2,000 to acquire the milkroad.com domain and built the newsletter on the Beehiiv platform.⁶

Growth was rapid. Within three weeks of launch, Milk Road had more than 16,000 subscribers.⁶ Facebook ads drove over 150,000 of the total subscribers at a cost of $1.00 to $1.30 per subscriber.²³ In spring 2022, the team put $1 million of their own money into a public crypto wallet so readers could track the investment in real time; the value dropped 70 percent during the crypto market crash, but signups continued to climb.⁶

By December 2022, ten months after launch, Milk Road had 250,000 subscribers and a 45 percent open rate, well above the industry standard of approximately 34 percent.⁶¹⁷ Puri initiated the sale conversation by asking Levy on Slack: "How much would you sell this for right now?"¹⁸ The same day, Levy had independently begun talking with Bitfo, a media company operating cryptocurrency websites including EthereumPrice.org and BitcoinPrice.com.⁶

The deal closed in December 2022.⁶ The sale price was not publicly disclosed, but it included equity in Bitfo, and investor Suleman Ali described it as an "eight-figure outcome."⁶²² Puri announced the sale on Twitter: "I just sold my 2nd company! (The Milk Road) super happy. -- grew from zero to 250,000 readers in less than 1 year -- self funded & profitable."¹⁷

Investing

Puri began angel investing around 2018 while Bebo was gaining traction.⁵ During his time at Monkey Inferno, he hosted dinners for founders that doubled as networking events and "founder therapy" sessions, putting him in contact with the founders of companies including AppLovin, Airtable, Calm, Loom, and Clearbit.⁵

In September 2020, while still at Twitch, Puri launched the All Access rolling fund on AngelList with the goal of raising at least $1 million in three weeks.⁵ He announced the fund in a tweet. Within an hour, he had $70,000 in commitments; five days later, he reached $1.5 million and temporarily closed the fund because too much money was coming in.⁵ He raised $2.5 million from 73 limited partners in 21 days and had over 100 prospective investors on a waitlist.⁵

None of the 73 LPs had met Puri in person -- the entire fund was raised from his Twitter following and podcast audience.²⁵ The fund reached approximately $4 million per year in deployable capital, with quarterly subscriptions of $6,000 per LP.²⁵ Early investments included Fitness AI, Leda Health, Magic Labs, and Doppler.⁵ The fund later evolved into Shaan and Romeen's Angel Fund, which maintains a typical deal size of around $25,000 and expects roughly ten deals per year.²⁰