My First Million · Episode Brief
Are tariffs good or bad for founders?
Sam and Shaan use tariff chaos as a prompt to talk about how they actually make decisions when the macroeconomic environment becomes unpredictable.
This episode aired in April 2025, in the middle of the Trump tariff announcement period that sent markets into sharp volatility. Rather than trying to predict outcomes — which would have aged poorly regardless — Sam and Shaan use the moment to talk about their own decision frameworks when operating businesses under macroeconomic uncertainty.
The tariffs conversation is less about policy analysis and more about what Sam and Shaan's actual portfolio companies were doing in response. Sam had exposure to businesses with imported product inventory; Shaan was watching how early-stage companies in his portfolio were adjusting their sourcing strategies. The discussion is grounded in specifics — actual decisions being made in real time — rather than abstract predictions about trade policy.
The Medieval Times tangent is the episode's best bit, and it's worth noting how it happens: Sam notices that Medieval Times (the dinner theater chain with jousting tournaments) is essentially immune to tariff pressure, because its entire value chain is domestic and experiential. This becomes a prompt for a broader discussion of what makes a business tariff-proof — and the answer is the same thing that makes a business recession-proof or AI-proof: the value is in the live human experience, which can't be manufactured offshore or replaced by software.
Shaan's 'process for finding edges' segment closes the episode with the most transferable idea: when everyone is looking at the same visible disruption (tariffs, AI, interest rate changes), the actual edges are usually in the second-order effects that aren't yet obvious. Tariffs make domestic manufacturing more competitive — but the real edge might be in the industrial real estate around domestic manufacturing facilities, or the logistics companies that benefit from supply chain reshoring, rather than the manufacturers themselves.
Key Ideas
- →Sam and Shaan's live response to the tariff announcements reveals their actual decision frameworks: they both moved toward domestic or experiential businesses and away from imported-product exposure.
- →Medieval Times as a tariff-proof business model: the entire value chain is domestic, the product is experiential, and the experience cannot be offshore manufactured or digitally replicated.
- →Shaan's edge-finding process: when a macroeconomic disruption is visible to everyone, the profitable position is usually in the second-order effects rather than the primary one.
- →The useful frame for any macroeconomic disruption: which businesses benefit from the distraction (because their competitors panic), and which are genuinely impaired?
- →The observation that tariff-proof businesses share a trait with recession-proof businesses: they either provide the cheapest available option or an irreplaceable experiential one — the middle is what gets squeezed.
Worth Remembering
The Medieval Times realization — that a dinner-with-jousting theater chain is accidentally one of the most tariff-proof businesses in America — and how quickly it turns into a genuine investment thesis.
Sam's description of what he actually did with his portfolio companies during the announcement week: not a confident playbook, but an honest account of how much uncertainty he was sitting with.
Shaan's process for finding edges laid out step by step — more methodical than his usual rapid-fire style, suggesting these are principles he actually uses rather than things he's improvising.
The moment they agree that most business predictions made during acute macro uncertainty are essentially worthless, and they stop trying to predict and start talking about what they're actually doing instead.