# Micro1 offered Hampton $800,000 for its private data

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/micro1-offered-hampton-800-000-for-its-private-data/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Sam Parr](https://realalpha.app/people/sam-parr/) (Host) · Co-founder, Hampton · Founded the business newsletter The Hustle and sold it to HubSpot.
- Host: [Shaan Puri](https://realalpha.app/people/shaan-puri/) · Co-host, My First Million · Sold Bebo to Twitch in 2019; co-founded the crypto newsletter Milk Road.
- Show: My First Million
- Episode: [We tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous.](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/), Sep 30, 2026
- Moment: 38:29 to 43:42 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/micro1-offered-hampton-800-000-for-its-private-data/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2309

## Quote

> “they offered us **eight hundred thousand dollars** for our data we said no because part of the whole thing of hampton is like it's a private community”
> — [Sam Parr](https://realalpha.app/people/sam-parr/) at [39:38](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2378) · My First Million

## Takeaways

1. Micro1 offered Hampton $800,000 for its company data.
2. It offered Sam $50,000 for each referred customer who signed up.
3. The data deal required sharing private company information with AI labs.

## About this segment

Micro1 offered Hampton $800,000 for Slack, email and other internal data, plus referral fees. The offer shows how much frontier labs value information the public web can't provide.

From “We tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous.”, Sep 30, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[38:42](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2322) You didn't mention this. The thing about buying company data. So like, okay, I think we talked enough about AI assistance. what are the other interesting things going on in AI right now? Micro One is incredible. I didn't do it, but let me give people this story. So Micro One is a company. It's one of these stories that you've heard over and over. That was a huge vouch. They're incredible? What do you mean?

[39:02](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2342) Well, incredible, like a tall mountain. Like, you know, you may not like mountains, but like you look at that and you're like, wow. You know what I mean? Like, so I'm not like vouching for it. I'm just saying that it's, the story's wild. They're going to get clipped. They're just going to run that as an ad. Nope. Don't do that. That's not what I'm saying at all. Too late. They clipped it. I'm very neutral on the business model or the company. It's just how big they got. But basically, I forget what they were doing at first. I think they were doing something involving like VAs or training data, something like that. But then they made the switch and they grew to something like a billion dollars in run rate in a matter of eight months. And basically what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company, Hampton, and they say, hey,

[39:42](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2382) if you plug in your notion your slack your gmail your drive and a bunch of other information and they will give you eight hundred thousand dollars they offered us eight hundred thousand dollars for our data we said no because part of the whole thing of hampton is like it's a private community we're not going to do that but they offered me eight $100,000 to do this. And then they said, by the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you $50,000 for everyone you refer to us. And I got trashed on Twitter because I'm like, these guys offered me this. I think it's not for us because my whole business is that. But I don't think it's wrong if you're an econ brand or some brand where confidentiality isn't one of the main things. Here's my affiliate link. And I got like, I think... And I said, here's an affiliate link

[40:28](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2428) that I get money if you like go through this flow. I think we had 80 people go through that flow. I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got like 50 or 80 business owners saying, I am interested in doing this via my link. And let's just say that eight convert, that's, I can't even do that math, $300,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees. Is that crazy? That is wild. What do they want your, I guess, do you understand what they want exactly so what they want your notion they want your slack they want your whatever what do they actually want in that their business model is that they want all types of data that people that aren't available to the public and they sell it to the large um when people say large llms i imagine there's only like eight of them so like claude chat uh whoever the usual suspects they

[41:20](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2480) will pay let's say a million dollars for it and uh micro one or will give me six hundred thousand let's say. And that's their cut. And they want me to upload all this data because they want to see how my business model works, what customers are saying, how we talk to our employees, all types of information that you can't find public. It's not public. Yeah. Yeah. All the models so far have been trained on the open internet. So what was publicly available.

[41:48](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2508) And they don't want to use the same input for each model train that they do. They want more. So some of their stories of Anthropic buying all these out-of-print books, all these rare books. It's the exact same thing. They built all these scanners that will scan page after page after page of these books. But to do the scanning that fast, they had to shred the binding of it and turn it into just a stack of papers that could be shuffled through very quickly.

[42:15](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2535) So they destroyed all these rare out-of-print books and trained their models off of that. And then they're doing it with private company data. So that's what you're talking about. They're doing it with niche-specific data. They're paying experts to go solve things. So mathematicians, engineers, whatever. Hey, look at these outputs and rank good answers versus bad answers. And that's how they do all their training.

[42:41](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2561) And so it's pretty crazy that private company data is worth that much, right? That's a pretty wild thing. I mean, I would be extremely hesitant to do something like that, as it sounds like you were as well. But damn, that's pretty wild. Yeah, here's their description. Micro One is a data lab to train frontier models. So we're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

[43:09](https://realalpha.app/v/Pfr6qwPZlhE/?t=2589) The founder, I think he's 25. And I think on paper, he's a billionaire now. it's just crazy how much wealth is being created and it's and and guys like you and i we're just getting the we're just getting the crumbs but i'll tell you what i'm a i'm a happy fed mouse off these crumbs because it is just crazy how much money is going around i'm a happy fed mouse