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The $657,000 gift no one talks about

The $657,000 gift no one talks about

Joel Hansen
June 12, 2024

Hey,

Welcome back to Stay Curious — a newsletter I write once per week to riff on a few things keepin’ me curious.

On deck this week?

The $657,000 gift no one talks about
How to meet the founder of Superhuman?
Time-poor vs money-poor
What do you take for granted that 5 years ago would've been a dream?

1) The $657,000 gift no one talks about

A couple years ago I did the math. If you account for:

365 days/year
a $100/night airbnb fee
and 18 years of living at your parents’ home

It comes out to $657,000 of a free rent

It’s a big number. And it often goes overlooked. But it’s likely the largest personal angel investment most of us will ever receive in our life, assuming we’re blessed to have this kinda upbringing of living rent free at our parents place.

It was my mom’s birthday last weekend. With my dad, wife and a couple others — we enjoyed a beautiful patio dinner, malbec wine, tasty desserts, the works etc. on a flowery patio.

It was a beautiful moment.

Whenever I’m with my parents, I try to keep that 18-year rent-free gift in mind to always go the extra mile with celebrations whenever possible.

Happy belated birthday mom, I love you. Thanks for the best 18 year Airbnb experience I could’ve asked for.

2) Wanna meet the founder of Superhuman?

Superhuman is an email app. They charge $10-$15/mo to give you a better experience than gmail. Turned out to be a good idea cause now it’s worth $1B.

One of the co-founders is named Vivek Sodera. If you’re a productivity nerd, he should be at the top of your cold email list.

Vivek’s kindly agreed to come be a judge for LOI Venture’s upcoming demo day along with investors from Mantis VC (Chainsmokers VC fund), Hustle Fund, LOI Venture and Worklife VC.

If you’re free June 26th swing by.

3) Time-poor vs money-poor

I now know why Amazon is a $2 trillion company.

Tuesday at 12pm, I drove downtown to pick up a TV from Best Buy and little did I know — was about to find myself in a chaotic maze of parking lot hell including:

coming too early to Best Buy’s pick-up window
losing my car
almost getting t-boned
parking in a location too far from Best Buy
not having my credit card accepted by the payment window

It went on and on.

When I finally left the underground parking migrane and a half, my parking fee was $7. But in reality, I had lost 1 hour + of my time, sanity and peace.

It was in that moment I realized I was time and energy poor from taking on that opportunity vs money poor of paying for 1 hour of parking.

In the future, I’ll always get things shipped to my home.

But I thought the experience was interesting.

If we feel cheated, is it because we’ve:

wasted time
wasted money
or wasted energy

I find my deepest wound is wasting my time, as it’s the only category I can never earn back.