My First Million - If I Had To Make $1 Billion... Here’s The Business I Would Start

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Episode 528: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) answer the question they get most often: “If you had to pick one idea that to make a million dolla...rs this year, what would it be?”  No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:00) Idea 1 - The "Me Also" strategy (12:00) Idea 2 - Niche community that solves for X (16:00) Idea 3 - QSBS advisory firm (24:00) Idea 4 - Pizza robots (44:00) Idea 5 - Buying a university — Links: • Quiet Light - https://quietlight.com/ • Exit Five - https://www.exitfive.com/ • Figure - http://figure.ai/ • Renovate Robotics - https://www.renovaterobotics.com/ • Anduril - https://anduril.com/ • DealStream - https://dealstream.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Free 2024 Goal-Setting Session - https://planfor2024.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, someone asked me an incredible question today. They said, if you had to pick one idea, that could make you a million dollars this year, and it can't be just a newsletter or a blog or an agency, which are usually our go-toes. What would it be? What would you do? One specific idea that you would do. And then he also said, and I want to hear one specific idea that you would do to try to make a billion dollars. That's a good question.
Starting point is 00:00:22 And me and Sam are going to answer that right now on this episode of My Future Bill. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I would do. want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel. Never. All right.
Starting point is 00:00:35 What's up? We're doing our Q&A, and we got one question that we really love. But is the question, Sean, is it a billion dollar in net worth or a company that's worth a billion dollars? I'm going to say it's a company that's worth a billion dollars. And then, you know, you own a big chunk of it. Okay. What's a billion here or there?
Starting point is 00:00:53 Okay. Look, the company is worth one billion. It's all a billion. It changes dramatically. So I know a guy who sold a company. company for $900 million, $990 million. You know how much he made after the sale? $3 million. That's how much he made. He had four co-founders, or maybe five, and he raised a ton of money, and they sold it, and he made $3 million. That's insane, right? And I don't, I think that's
Starting point is 00:01:16 an extreme case, but I think there's many cases where you create a billion dollar business, and you actually walk away with like 8% of the company, which is still a ton of money, but that's a wild experience. It's like a small ton. It's a small ton. It's a small. It's not as big of a ton as people think you get when you're, when you make a company that big. Yeah, it's just the numbers change things a little bit, but let's just get right into it. The million dollar one. What do you have? The million one.
Starting point is 00:01:42 All right. So, you go first for this one. So a million dollars in, is it net worth? Like, and what do we say, three or four years to do it? Yeah, you got a couple years to do it. You're going to make a million dollars in profit. So to make a million, so I think that there, if you want to make a certain amount of money, quickly, you have to ask yourself, is it going to come through annual cash flow or is it going to come
Starting point is 00:02:04 through selling something, like selling a business? So, for example, if you have a business that's earning, let's say, $300,000 a year, in year one, you do $50,000, year two, you do $200,000. Year three, you do $300,000. That's not going to add up to a million dollars. However, you could sell that business for maybe $900,000 and maybe a million dollars. So collectively, you can come up with a million bucks. I think the easiest thing to do would probably, be to sell the business if you want to make that amount of money in a certain amount of time in like three years. What I would do, so first, do you know Quiet Light brokerage? Yes.
Starting point is 00:02:40 So if I want to make a million dollars in, let's say, three years, I'm probably not going to invent anything new. I'm just going to copy what works, and I'm going to try maybe not even do it better. I mean, there's almost 400 million people in America. I can kind of just figure out someone that already is doing something and copy it, but put it, slightly different. Ladies and gentlemen, we're not going to be better, faster or cheaper. We are simply going to be also in the business of doing this. That old old strategy. Yeah. The Me Too strategy. Is that what this is like me also? No, no, that's a different thing. We don't want me to. We don't want me to. We don't want me to.
Starting point is 00:03:17 Sorry, the Me Also strategy. That's what we'll call it. The Me Also strategy. So I would probably go to Quiet Light brokerage. So Quiet Light brokerage, I've had a couple friends sell and buy businesses through this. I've had one friend sell a business via Quietlight Brokridge for $10 million. I had another buddy buy a company for $300,000 that ended up making $18 million a year in revenue. And I know those guys at Quiet Light Brokerage and I've talked to them. And basically, Quiet Light Brokerage is a website where you buy and sell businesses. It's a brokerage, meaning it's not exactly automated. But what you can do is you can see anonymous descriptions of companies that are for sale. You can see what the earnings are. You can see what the
Starting point is 00:03:56 revenue is, you can enter in your email and they'll send you all the financials to the business. All you got to do is say, I'm interested in this business. And then they send you a packet of information about that business, including the name, who the owner is, where it's incorporated, how they got their first customers, where they get their customer mix today, what are the areas for growth? They do this fantastic little interview with the person, which is for buying the business, very useful. But also if you're executing the Me Also strategy, it is brilliant. And in fact, we have a friend who did this. We have a friend who was looking at one of these websites,
Starting point is 00:04:30 saw a business for sale for I think like $120,000 or $150,000, one of the smallest business for sale, maybe on Flipa somewhere or something, something like that. And he was like, well, I don't have $150,000, but I do have a lot of time to pick your brain. And so he picked the brains of a bunch of people.
Starting point is 00:04:47 And then they were like, cool, you want to buy it? He's like, no, but you could, you know, you convince me how easy this is. So see you and went and recreated that and sold her for many millions more. And literally did that. I think once I heard that, I realized, oh, there are easier ways and harder ways to make $10 million. And the easier way is you go look at businesses that are already successful and you're reverse engineer, which one you could create and copy it.
Starting point is 00:05:15 And by the way, I don't think, I think they make you sign an NDA or something like that. So I think you could get sued if you just rip it off entirely. But I think, and that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. suggesting be inspired by and do something exactly like it, but slightly different. Sorry, what, what are they? Well, let's just look at it right now. So, for example, I'm scrolling, you go to Quietlight or whatever. You could use any of these brokerage sites. We both like Quietly because it's a little curated. So it's, it's less filled with junk, even though, honestly, a lot of these businesses on here are absolute junk. So let me show you one of these junk businesses. So you go down to the
Starting point is 00:05:47 kind of like for sale for two million bucks. Two million bucks is a nice number, right? You can be even a little bit worse than this business and still make a million bucks. If you sold it for $2 million after taxes, you have a million dollars. All right. So here it is. It's a FBI business fulfilled by Amazon. It's a money counting machine. Does that mean they're literally selling a money counting machine?
Starting point is 00:06:08 Yeah. Like any business that can be called a money printing machine, a money counting machine. In this case, they literally, so this says launched in 2020, so three years ago, it says this business sells money counting machines and counterfeit bill detectors to local business, government agencies, restaurants, financial services, banks, event manager companies, and nonprofits. Is it one like this, like this money counting machine that I have sitting there on my desk? Why do you have that right now?
Starting point is 00:06:32 So I have for those now, give it a run. Give it a run. I don't have it plugged in. But so I have, I literally have a money counting machine here with counterfeit money on it. When I sold my company, Jack Smith, my best friend, he bought me this as like a congratulations. It's $100. I've never used it. just like keep it there.
Starting point is 00:06:53 And when I have friends that do something interesting, like they sell a company or they close a big deal, I send it to them and I say, this is either going to be a huge paperweight or you're actually going to use it. Good luck. And it's a nice gift. I think this costs $200. That's actually great.
Starting point is 00:07:09 We should do that for any fan. If you're going through the process of you're going to sell your business, just email us and we'll send you the counter as the good luck, as our good luck charm from us to you. Whenever, and when I have like my cleaning lady, here, I'm like, just so you know, this is fake money. Don't even think about it. Watch this. Rip it up. Yeah, I was like, it's fake. It's 100 grand in cash that costs $5.
Starting point is 00:07:34 That's a great trust test. You should just leave it out and see, like, you know what? Not only did you steal fake money, but you're out of a job too. Well, that's actually a test I do. When I have like new vendors at my house is sometimes I'll leave like a few hundred dollars there and I know exactly how much is there. And I'll see like, what's going to happen? And a candy bar and see what happen. So someone's selling literally a money counting machine? Money counting machine, $1.8 million in revenue, $625,000 of net income, net profit. So they're selling it here. And then if you go and you, it's a husband and wife duo, they says they spend, this is a classic on Quiet Light. This is like the,
Starting point is 00:08:10 I don't know what Tinder profiles say nowadays. I don't know what the kids are doing, but I know that every business for sale, the owner spends five to ten hours a week on this. They just don't have enough time and energy to devote to growing the business. that anybody who steps in could do. All right. So anyways, I would look at businesses like this, and it seems like what you're saying is you would probably look at what? Not one, but like maybe 20 to 30 of these just to get a good idea, get enough data points.
Starting point is 00:08:35 And I would find out which fits my interest. So, for example, Sean, click where they have membership. So they have a membership category. They've got media, which I know about media. So I would do that one. But membership is interesting. I think the reason memberships are interesting is I think you could have a really, really, really niche community where you solve a very specific problem. And I'll give you two examples.
Starting point is 00:08:57 So for like one could be, so if you are, if you have a job, you maybe work, you know, you work in whatever industry and you know something, but you have this problem called the knowledge complex where you think, well, everyone knows this, therefore it's not that interesting to teach. And I think that's actually crazy. I think for like two examples are automations for HVAC owners. Another one is outbound sales for like chiropractors or for, for architects. And I think what you can do with things like this is you can charge pretty high amounts. You can charge $500 a month where you get access to content that you update on a regular basis and then you have a community where all the
Starting point is 00:09:34 other participants can share tactics and ideas that they're using to overcome the problem that they've all signed up for. Another example is a community where you have a database with all the right people who you need to contact at a certain within a certain niche in order to get a sale done. So, for example, let's say you're an agency. It could be like, here's all of the buyers of media at these companies that you update regularly. And then you could have a community where people are discussing tactics and strategies in order to accomplish that task. And I think when you look at the problem or you're thinking about what the customer is going through and they're going to buy this, which is, well, if I spend $3,000 a year on this, if I only get one sale, this is worth it for me.
Starting point is 00:10:15 And I get a positive ROI. And I think that sale is significantly easier than selling to consumers where you're having to do a lot of guesswork. With this, if you do $3,000 a year in order to get to a million dollar sale, you'd have to look at what those multiples are. But I think the multiples on the membership sites are like five times profit. So you get to a $250,000 in profit. To get to $250,000 in profit on a $3,000 a year service, it could be just you and a part-time employee or one full-time employee. I don't know what that math is, but you don't need that many customers in order to hit that target. And so I would do that over a consumer product because I can just talk to my customers and they can tell me exactly what they want.
Starting point is 00:10:51 And I'm basically providing a service that they're requesting on a regular basis in order to keep them retain. Here's the specific example of that. Exit 5, I think is the name of it. Exit 5 is like a community of B2B marketers. And I don't know what they pay per year. It's a little bit less than what you just said, but I think they could be charging more like $2,500 or $3,000. But the big idea here is go get 100 people paying you three. grand a year. And you can even make it exclusive. Be like, this is a community for only 150 of the top B2B marketers in the world. We're going to invite you in and then you're going to share
Starting point is 00:11:27 ideas. Plus, we have this database of whatever, whether it's ad creative that works. We have this database of vendors, you know, buyers with their contact info. And we all openly share here. It's a sort of give to get, you know, model. And yeah, the thing is probably worth two, three million bucks right now that this guy's made and, you know, 500 to 1,000 members. And the reason if you're starting from scratch is you don't need that particularly big of an audience. You don't need to, you'd cold email people. You would also build an audience. But in order to get to a, let's say you have an audience of 5,000 people, which is very attainable to get, particularly if you give it a year, you only need about 100 to 200 people to buy what
Starting point is 00:12:04 you're selling in order to hit that target. And so your podcast doesn't need to be huge. Your Twitter handle, your cold email outbound strategy doesn't need to be huge. And so that's probably what I would do to get to a million dollars. What do you think about that? Well, you have, you basically said two ideas, right? That was a two for one special. You had go to Quietlight or a business brokerage and find a business that you can either reverse engineer or legitimate. So, you know, reverse engineer, we kind of say, and that's, I would say a little bit.
Starting point is 00:12:34 Generously, let's call it scrappy, the scrappy way to do things. You don't have any money. You, you know, you need to get, you know, rather than just try to come up with an idea from scratch, when you're kind of a beginner, the better way is to go learn what businesses actually work, how they work, why they work, go look at 30 to 50. That's like a real world NBA that you picked up and then find one of those that you think you could mimic and put your own twist on, right? That's idea one you had.
Starting point is 00:13:00 By the way, with that comes also, you could just buy the business. So for a lot of these, even a $2 million business, you can go get an SBA loan. A lot of these will say that they're SBA loan eligible. So let's say that you're in the United States. you can go get SBA loan, put down 10 to 15%. So if you can go get 200 grand, you could buy a $2 million business that's doing 600K of profit per year. And so you could actually go buy that business and just try to grow it because actually getting a business from $0 in revenue to $2 million in revenue, 1.8 million in revenue is pretty hard
Starting point is 00:13:33 relative to taking a business that's at 1.8 and getting it to $3.1 million, for example. Like, you know, adding an extra million of revenue to a business is already working is actually much easier than going from zero to one. I think you got both options of the table there. It's just more risk. Well, yeah, there's a little bit more risk because you're personally liable for the, for the loan there. So, you know, you have to buy a good business. You have to be able to know what a good business is.
Starting point is 00:13:56 And that's where maybe some mentors could help. The other business, the other idea you said was basically a membership service, a membership community for some niche, right? That's kind of like a separate idea. It has to solve a specific problem. So a lot of these, like, you'll see a lot out there that are memberships for launching a business. That's not nearly specific enough. It's got to be geared towards employees and like there's a clear beginning, middle,
Starting point is 00:14:23 and end, and there's an outcome. Right. And there's a clear ROI as opposed to like accountability or whatever it is. You know what I mean? Right, right. Nothing soft and fluffy. All right. So those are good.
Starting point is 00:14:34 I think those are really good. In fact, I think the first one you said is, I think, the right answer. that's what I would in reality that's what I would go do but to make it fun I'm going to come up with some other ideas so is that what you had that's what I would it's like if it was my cousin and my cousin's like yo how do I do this I'd be like all right look this is what we're doing you need to do this worst case scenario you're going to go learn what a bunch a bunch a bunch of blueprints for successful businesses and maybe you don't pull the trigger on any of them but still was a good use of your time and best case scenario you find one of these that you say I could do that and
Starting point is 00:15:06 either you buy it or you're going to like makes it and create your own version of that. So that is, I think, the right answer. The second right answer would be an e-commerce company because it's not hard to build an e-commerce brand, either on Amazon or on Shopify that can sell for a million dollars, but kind of, again, a boring answer. So I'm going to give you a more fun answer.
Starting point is 00:15:24 So here is, here's one idea. The four most beautiful letters in the English language are QSBS. All right. So what's the QSBS idea? You're going to create a QSBS advisory firm. Well, what is that? That's super niche. Technically, this might be considered an agency, but I think we'll allow it because
Starting point is 00:15:48 it's so specific and niche here and off the beaten path. So here's what you're going to do. Now, when any company starts, a tech company starts, that's going to be QSBS eligible, that QSBS eligibility is worth a lot. You have to say what QSBS is. Oh, sorry. QSBS is a tax treatment for qualified small business stock. What that means is that if you're a business that fits like,
Starting point is 00:16:08 these five criteria, which most tech companies fit, then when you sell, if you've held the stock for five years or even if it's a little bit less than that, you can still kind of roll it over. Your first $10 million of your gain are going to be tax-free. Not only most tech companies, most new C-Corps that hold for five years, well, it would fall under this. There are some exceptions. Like, you can't do it if you're a doctor or lawyer or real estate. Like, there are things that are excluded.
Starting point is 00:16:37 But again, that's kind of the point here is QSPS advisory. We're going to help me figure out, are you eligible or not? And we're going to provide a letter that says, we attest to the belief that this is going to be qualified small business stock. Now, why is this easy to do? Why is my strategy this? Well, if I'm trying to make money, it's kind of like you described with the membership. I need to create 10 times more than I'm taking, right? This is a general rule of life.
Starting point is 00:17:02 That's probably a good rule of life. Create more value than you're trying to take. and that's what I'd be trying to do here. So I was looking for something where with a small amount of work, I could create a lot of value for my customer. Well, all right, that sounds generic, but like in this case, if my stock is going to be QSBS eligible,
Starting point is 00:17:21 that might save me $10 million down the road. And that's a pretty big, huge benefit. So would I pay $5,000 or $10,000 for, you know, in legal fees in order to, to an advisory fees in order to protect my possible $10 million gain, I would. And I think a lot of people do. And so what I would do here is I would build a advisory firm that says, we are QSBS experts. We know the ins and outs of QSBS were respected.
Starting point is 00:17:52 I would hire maybe lawyers or accountants that have done this before. And I would say, hey, on a as needed basis, I'm going to, when I get a customer, I will pay you, whatever, $300 an hour, $500 an hour for your. your time to do an assessment and write a letter that basically assesses the eligibility you think for QSBS. Now, QSBS is not like a black and white thing. It's not like a, QSPS is basically when you get the sale, you declare, you say, this falls under QSBS. But if you ever got audited, you'd have to be able to defend that. Why did you say it was QSBS eligible? And so what companies and individuals do is they will go get a letter that basically
Starting point is 00:18:32 says, we as experts have looked at this business and we believe that this is going to be QSBS. This is qualified for all business stock. You know like the 409, what's it called? The 409. Yeah. 4.09. So when in order to do a bunch of stuff with your business, a lot of times tech companies have to get valued every year. Every year. Every year you should get valued. And then that also is necessary when you want to issue new stock or whatever for employees or for investors. You and there's a set a benchmark for a nine. But there's a lot of companies that do this as a service where you spend five or $10,000 to $10,000, and you don't actually give them that much information. You give them your financials.
Starting point is 00:19:10 And then they ask you to submit like 10 publicly traded competitors. And then they just like say, all right, we think that your valuation is blank. And you spend five to $10,000, I think, for that. You're basically- You want it to be low, usually. So usually what you're trying to do is get a low 4-9 so that everybody's options are priced low. And so it's like, you're not even like you're trying to justify a high valuation. You're actually trying to justify a low valuation in most case. And it's kind of crony capitalism a little bit. Like they'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll make it low. We'll be fair. And then they wink at you. And they like set it really low. But yeah, basically, what you're, what you're suggesting is doing the same thing for QSBS, which is far. Yeah. And 409A is an equally
Starting point is 00:19:51 valid idea. But what I would do is I would, I would create this firm. What I like about the QSBS thing is it's a little bit higher ticket. So typically these people will charge, let's say, $10,000 to $15,000, for the initial attestation letter. I don't know if I'm saying that word, right? But then on top of that, you could even charge kind of like an ongoing fee because there are all these like footfalls. So it's not just like a,
Starting point is 00:20:12 there is some genuine help. So for example, oh, you're going to sell secondary. There's things you might do wrong when you sell secondary that could disqualify you. There's disqualifying events. And so, you know, you can't bill for revenue in specific ways.
Starting point is 00:20:25 If it's categorized as X, it might take you out of QSBS eligibility. And so, it's just an insurance policy. It's a cover your ass. It's a legal thing. It's something people don't want to do themselves. Just too high risk to do yourself. And you literally can't do it yourself because you can't write the letter for yourself. And so you don't have to have it, but it is a nice to have. And what I would do is I would go scare the living shit out of every tech company that I find on CrunchBase. And I would say, don't you want this $10 million exclusion for you? It's per person,
Starting point is 00:20:55 by the way, it's not per company. So it's per tax return. So let's say there's a company that's going to be going to be big, every single one of those executives is going to want their stock to be QSBS eligible. And so I would go to them and I would scare the living shit out of them that they might get this wrong. And I would tell them, don't worry, we can cover this for you. And here's how we'll cover it for you. Pay us, whatever.
Starting point is 00:21:17 Either the lump sum up front or a monthly recurring fee or an annual recurring fee, $1,500 a year, $2,000 a year. And we will kind of make sure we're your advisory on that so that, you know, you're covered at the end of the day. That's a pretty brilliant idea, actually. If you just think about it, right, how do you get to, let's say we talked about to sell a company for over a million dollars, let's just round up and say you've got to have $300,000 of annual net profits. So how do you get to $300,000 of annual net profits if you're charging roughly $10,000 a year? You only need 30 customers a year.
Starting point is 00:21:55 30 customers a year? I've taken shits bigger than that. Come on. If you can't get to a million dollars this way, you can't get to any way, right? I think what holds a lot of people back would be, there's not going to be a bunch of these. This is not like,
Starting point is 00:22:06 you can't spring up 10,000 of these, like, you know, social media marketing agencies. There can be a million of those. You have to have some expertise or partner with people who have expertise. So they send, you know, some of the, some of the mechanics of how to do it. But man, there's niches and riches.
Starting point is 00:22:20 And like, that's not that hard to do to get to a number of that. And there's so many upsells to that, which is like the key to selling a company is they say, all right, well, how does this grow? and you say, well, do these companies also need a 409A? Do they also need these other legal services? Do they, of course they do.
Starting point is 00:22:37 That's how you do it. And you sell the dream a little bit of what the expansion revenue comes from. And the key here is, you don't need to be a law firm. So there's all kinds of rules around who can own a law firm. You don't actually have to be a law firm to do this because it's not legal work. It's advisory. And it's like some blend of like legal accounting and just advisory. And so I think because of that, you don't need to be a law firm if you do this.
Starting point is 00:23:01 And by the way, I've worked for somebody who does this. If everybody actually needs this letter, feel free to email me. I'll route you to the guide. You can actually use this. What are you going to be like the mob and take a cut for making an introduction? You should. I got to get my beque wet too, all right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:17 That's actually better than my idea, by the way, because I actually think this is simpler. Because it's already a service others are providing, and you're just basically connecting. Yeah. Yeah, so I would look for things like, I had like five other ideas that would fit this, but okay, for this exercise, we're doing one. Now, let's move on to the main event, the billion dollar idea. By the way, do I get a thrill of the shill before we get to the billion dollar idea? Oh, hold on. What time is it? It is time for the thrill of the shill.
Starting point is 00:23:43 Sam, you're up. Your first time providing it a thrill of the shill for those who don't know. This is where we shamelessly shill one of our companies. But we have to do it in a thrilling way, meaning we got to provide some value, some entertainment, some insight. we got to provide something, a little something. We've got to have attributes if we're going to do this. Here we go. Thrill of the show.
Starting point is 00:24:01 I'm going to try and keep this one short because this might be a short episode. But basically, I remember in 2017, I went to nerd wallet. NerdWallet.com. I went to their office. Tim Chen was the CEO and founder. He invested in the hustle. And I remember being like, Tim, I'm freaking out, man. My expenses went up because of payroll from $30,000 to $80,000 a month.
Starting point is 00:24:21 And at the time, they had just rented Twitter's old office. And they were, you know, they probably had a payroll of three, million dollars a month or maybe even five million dollars a month. And I remember he looked at me funny. And he was like trying to be empathetic and he was nice. And he kind of like was nice by saying, oh, wow, wow, yeah, I understand. And I was like, Tim, I'm so stressed out about this. And what he said to me was basically, look, you kind of have to detach yourself and your payroll needs to just, it's just a number on an Excel sheet. And you just have to like figure out, do I deploy this much money here and what's my outcome going to be and what's my profit going to be? And
Starting point is 00:24:56 that didn't sit well with me until about 12 months ago. So I launched this company called Hampton.com. It's like a community for founders who are doing at least a million in revenue, but the average member is like 25 million a year. And I remember like that freaking me out forever. We had a team retreat last week and I went out there. And right now we've got 16 full-time employees or 15 including me. And then we've also employed, I think, 50 facilitators now. So in like 18 months, we've created, what's that, 70 or 65 jobs, something like that. And I am so not stressed about it this year. This is the only time I've not been stressed about payroll and providing people because the way that we've looked at it is exactly how Tim has explained, where it's just like,
Starting point is 00:25:41 what's my input, what's my output? And this idea of being like a capital allocator. I've never had that where it's like been as clear cut as, well, I hired this person. I get this much out after three months. It's completely changed how I've run this company. And it's made me so much more relaxed. And I don't know what made that shift other than his conversation. But you know what I'm talking about? Have you ever been through this?
Starting point is 00:26:05 Well, we both used to be kind of like, oh, if you're an entrepreneur, you're a product maker. And like we'd be sitting there right in, you know, you're right into hustle. And I'm sitting there in designing things and working with it. You're trying to make a product. But there is an up level of that, which is once you build the product and the product has part, which Hampton does, has product market. People like it. They use it. They're in it. Now you're a capital allocator.
Starting point is 00:26:28 Basically, you're just deciding where resources go. So I need to be able to like, you can't be tight on money because money is your job. You have to deploy that in a way that's going to get more output than the input. And sometimes you'll miss, you're not going to be 100%. But knowing that that's the job makes it easier. And it sounds like having the right conversation at the right time from somebody who's a peer of yours was the key? Yeah, and that's, by the way,
Starting point is 00:26:55 one of the whole things about Hampton is that you have peers with other entrepreneurs that are of similar-sized company that you have. And anyway, that like learning, I remember having our team offsite at previous companies, and I'm like,
Starting point is 00:27:09 how, like, this person just had a baby. Basically, I just had a baby. How am I going to create enough revenue in order to, like, provide for this kid? Because that's how it feels at first. Or you're like, no, you didn't. I did remember.
Starting point is 00:27:23 Yeah. I'm the one who did that. Hey, Jess, when's our baby shower? Or just, and this year it's been, or you'll be like, this person costs $250,000. There's no way that's a fair salary. Right. And it's like, well, that's not how you. It's a house where I'm from.
Starting point is 00:27:39 Are you a house? Yeah, can I live in you? Do you have three beds in a bath? I'm not paying $250,000. So that's been my biggest takeaway this year with Running Hampton. So anyway, particularly if you're listening to this and you do at least $50 million in revenue, we're building groups for that. Joinhampton.com.
Starting point is 00:27:56 All right. Let's do the billion dollar one. You want me to go first? Can I go first? Okay, go. All right. I'm going to steal one of your lines. So, Sean, what if I told you, I had an idea.
Starting point is 00:28:07 This is your line. I'm leaning at. What if I told you, I had an idea that Elon Musk himself would be bigger than Tesla. Would that interest you? I'd be fairly interesting. Can't keep going. Do you know who, I think his name is Kai Fu Lee? Do you know who that investor is?
Starting point is 00:28:24 He's the, uh, sounds awesome though. He's a famous Chinese investor, basically, one of the early guys at Apple, early at Google. He wrote a great book about why China's amazing in terms of like why they're going to beat America. And he was saying that this thing is going to replace 40% of jobs inside the next 12 years. Would that interest you? I would love to replace 40% of jobs in the next 12 years. I think about that off. Now, if you're thinking I'm talking about AI, you're wrong.
Starting point is 00:28:52 Here's what it is. It's humanoids. Humanoids, that's the technical term. Basically, imagine robocop or imagine machines. And I think that those whole business of humanoids, which is robots to automate a lot of processes, but a lot of people think just blue-collar jobs, but that's not entirely true. It's like every type of job. So Elon Musk said that Tesla is working on humanoid.
Starting point is 00:29:18 I think it's called Optimus is what it's called. And he went on to say that at a recent investor call, he was like, not a lot of you people are talking about optimists are robots, but I think that's crazy because this is actually going to be bigger than our car business, bigger than self-driving, bigger than solar. It's going to be bigger than everything. And I don't think you guys realize how big this is going to be.
Starting point is 00:29:36 I invested in this company in a space called Figure. And I talked to Brett Adcock. We had him on here. And he basically has me convinced that this is going to be like the biggest industry mover in the next like 10 or 15. years. And I think that what I would do... You invested in figure? Yeah. Is that... Did I tell you that for the 30th time?
Starting point is 00:29:57 No, no, no. I've never told you that. That's funny. But what valuation? $300 million, I think. Okay. That's not bad. And I invested... It's not that bad. Well, I invested... And I invested a lot for me, which I think is around $60,000. Well, yeah, he's like your hero. So, you know, you actually just paid for some time with you. Yeah, I paid for access. I paid for him to...
Starting point is 00:30:18 reply to a text. But basically, that was a lot of money for me. I don't normally invest that much. But my reasoning is, I could see it going on a business, which is incredibly likely. I could see it selling for $3 billion, or I could see it becoming like a $50 billion company. But it's like any angel investment. I think the likelihood of it going out of business is incredibly high. But basically, here's my reasoning. If you or reasoning why I think this could be a big company, I think this is going to be one of the biggest things that happens in the next 15 years. I think that the people who are working on this space are typically like hardcore hardware engineering nerds.
Starting point is 00:30:58 And I think that I could spend a year going to every meetup, going to Carnegie Mellon, which I think a lot of these folks come from, and I think I could find a handful of people and do a really good job of organizing these people around a company. I think that I could do a good job of cold emailing the Brett Adcocks of the world and getting in with them as well as some of the older, guys in the space and making them like open up to me and say what are tangentially like the areas that you're not attacking that are interesting. I think I can get them to explain to me
Starting point is 00:31:26 these problems. I think that I think this is so big that there's going to be more of these robots than there are humans. And I also think that when you, in order to create a billion dollar company or a company that can net you a billion dollars, that's just, you have to go huge. And you, I think that the odds are what I'm doing personally in my life, I don't have a goal becoming a billionaire, but I think that could happen is I'm creating companies that sell for a small amount of money and then I'm letting compounding kind of like do the rest. That's going to take me 50 or 80 years. Who knows how long that's going to take me. But if you want to make it in a short amount of time, you pretty much have to raise VC and you have to do it in an industry that's like a tidal wave
Starting point is 00:32:06 where you're just trying to catch that wave. If you want to do it in like 10 years, rather. And so I think I would go into the humanoid space. What do you think about that? well as you know I love that idea because I was going to say that idea and you said no can I say that idea today and I said that's not what I said I said I've literally written that down already can I have that will you send me that and I'll say it with my lips and I was like I fine bro well let me tell you something interesting let me add to it so obviously 100% agree I think I actually was specifically thinking like warehouse robots like I would even just kind of narrow it down and be like all right if I was really going to do this I would try to figure out what job in a warehouse I can eliminate by using a robot. Which is what? Like packing boxes? Basically, I would look at the minimum wage labor class and I would say, nobody wants minimum wage essentially. The workers don't want to be minimum wage.
Starting point is 00:33:00 The employers don't want to pay minimum wage and get like kind of a flaky output. And so I had a friend once that was telling me, he's like, I invest in companies with no product market fit risk. My friend, Vishal, and I said, what do you mean? I've never, I just thought. Every startup has product market risk. That's the whole point. You're trying to get to product market fit. He goes, no, I invest with no product market fit risk.
Starting point is 00:33:20 I never heard that before. And he goes, I'm just looking for technical risk. Meaning, if you could build it, the job is done. And he's like, of course you'll still go sell it. But like, it will be so easy at that point. The market will obviously absorb this if it can actually do it. There are many things like this. So like self-driving.
Starting point is 00:33:38 If you can actually make safe self-driving cars, cars that do not crash that are, you know, self-driving. And obviously there's always the edge cases, but there's infinite market demand for people not to want to be driving and sitting in traffic and having their car parked instead of having it go run around and earn the money by dropping people off.
Starting point is 00:33:56 And so his idea, you know, he invested in this pizza robot company. So it was like basically... Which was awesome. Zoom. Yeah, well, there was like a few of them at the time. I don't think any of them worked out. There's always like these waves and it's like, it was too early the tech wasn't there and all the companies crash and burn, but like the next wave
Starting point is 00:34:11 should start right now. And actually that's maybe where I would go with this. So he's like, you know, if you're dominoes, do you want to pay, you know, whatever, I don't know what they pay, $15 an hour for somebody who's going to call in sick. They're going to be checking their phone. They're going to be goofing off. They're going to be eating pepperonies off the pizzas. They're going to, you know, they're going to get in fights with the other people there. And, you know, then they leave and then you have to replace them and then you have to train that new person. Or would you rather buy one machine that prints a perfect pizza every single time, 24-7, never calls in sick, never complains, never asks you for more money, never ask for a
Starting point is 00:34:43 raise never spits in the food, never does it. Would you rather have that? It's like, oh, of course. You would always have the robot that makes the perfect pizza. And he's like making a pizza is incredibly like it's a, it's a sandboxed thing. It's like not like a robot that can do anything. It's a specific robot that can make a pizza. It can flatten the dough into a perfect circle, apply the cheese, apply the sauce,
Starting point is 00:35:06 whatever, bake it for a certain time and then put it in the box and cut it. And like, that's what that needs to do. And I'm going to, you know, so what I would do is. I would go and do exactly what you said, like, go to MIT, go to Carnegie Mellon, and be like, hey, guys, we're building a pizza robot. And what we do, there's whatever. How many pizza chains?
Starting point is 00:35:23 How many pizza restaurant location? How many pizza chains in the U.S.? And by the way, there was a company called Zoom. Zoom, I forget, that went out of business, and people made fun of them. They're like, in the headlines, they got totally mocked. They raised $500 million. That was cool, and that definitely could have worked.
Starting point is 00:35:41 I think they screwed it up. They, like, went, they, like, made restaurants that you could go to. That was not right. There's 80,000 pizza restaurants in the country. 80,000. And you would start with the chains because the chains actually have the most to gain by doing this, right? And they would help you. They'll have budgets.
Starting point is 00:35:56 They'll sign letters of intent. Like, I remember when Boom Supersonic, the airplane company came out at YC and they were like, yeah, we have a hundred million dollar purchase order from like Richard Branson. If we could build this plane, they're going to buy it. So now the question is, do you think me and this pack of nerds behind me can build this plane? that's the bet.
Starting point is 00:36:14 And like, whether you do or don't believe it, that was the bet. And I like that idea. I'll tell you another thing about the robotics thing. I like tech risk a little bit more than, like, demand risk for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
Starting point is 00:36:28 Me too. Even though that's not at all how I've, you know, thought about it before. But if I was going to go try to build a billion dollar company, I would go try to build one with only tech risk and not demand risk. So there's, here, I'm going to tell you a little, story here. So shout out to this guy Abe. You probably don't know Abe,
Starting point is 00:36:47 but his boss, Kevin Ryan came on the pod. So Kevin Ryan comes on the pod. He's fascinating. But like he had this aura of I'm a badass who does badass things, but I'm kind of busy. And so, uh,
Starting point is 00:37:01 of course, Ben applied Ben's law. So the, the Ben's law for those who don't know is you don't try to contact Sean. You contact Ben. Ben. Ben is the faster, more approachable, smarter, better human being to approach and get the inside
Starting point is 00:37:15 on and get in touch with me than trying to go to me directly. And so, Ben applied Ben's law. Ben goes and he finds Kevin Ryan's Ben. And so he finds the number two that's like there. And so he finds this guy, Abe, Abe Murray. And I'm subscribed to Abe's newsletter and he just had a good one, which he goes,
Starting point is 00:37:32 he goes, why the consensus view of robotics is wrong. And he goes, I think that most people think, you know, the future of robots is this humanoid. And maybe a humanoid that walks and has arms and legs is the eventual solution. But that might be too far out right now. And actually, we should look at the most successful robot in the world today. What is it?
Starting point is 00:37:56 The dishwasher. It's installed in everybody's home already. It's a robot dishwasher. It replaced that job of having to wash dishes for the majority of homes. And he goes, it doesn't have arms and legs. It doesn't look like a human. It is a purpose-built robot that solves one specific need. and they have some company called Renovate Robotics.
Starting point is 00:38:14 And the picture is basically, it's a robot that sits on a roof that does roofing jobs. So it'll go and it'll replace a roof, basically. It just goes up and down your roof, you know, or like, not replace, but like, you know, lay down the roof or whatever, like, you know, install a roof on a home. And he's like, if this works, it's going to be,
Starting point is 00:38:34 he's like, we just did the first robotically installed roof. If this works, again, you have lower costs, higher quality, more like consistent. and see more availability for roofing companies. And so I like this idea of these purpose-built specific robots, the equivalent of dishwashers
Starting point is 00:38:51 and pizza-making robots. If I was going to do the billion-dollar idea, that's what I would do. Listen to their homepage. The homepage is, Labor is the biggest challenge for roofers. Our robots make roofers twice as productive and improve safety by reducing work at height.
Starting point is 00:39:07 Easy. That's an easy sale. And I'll wrap us up. Another reason why robots are interesting is you are only working within the laws of physics. And the laws of physics, I find those to be a bit easier to work in compared to say creating the next Louis Vuitton. Like to creating a brand or consumer product, I actually think it's more complicated than just saying, well, I, like, because that's an infinite number of options. Within hardware, it's just like, it's just like so much simpler and straightforward versus just just, generating demand or creating a brand that people love or creating a social product that people love, which is so much more rare and more challenging.
Starting point is 00:39:47 Have you heard that Elon Musk quote, the only real laws are physics, everything else is a recommendation? No, but that's brilliant. All right. So that's a great idea. I think these purpose of robots. That's a great idea I came up with, says you. Well, I'm saying this robot idea, I think, is the right idea.
Starting point is 00:40:09 by the way, here's a way to create more luck like this. Our buddy Furcon has this space in San Francisco called a Founders Inc, F.D. Inc. And what he did, I was like, so what's the plan? He's like, I'm just going to recruit like the smartest hackers I can find and just be like, hey, here's a free office.
Starting point is 00:40:27 I'm going to help you out and I'm going to invest in you before you even know what the hell you're doing. And I'm going to help you get these off the ground. I was like, well, that's great. But how are you going to get the best hackers? He goes, I'm going to give them toys. So what do you mean toys? He goes, I took the first,
Starting point is 00:40:39 floor of the entire office, there's no desks. It's just a hardware robotics lab. So I'm buying like 3D printers, drones, laser cutting equipment, robotic arms, stuff that the average hacker can't buy, you know, the average, you know, 22 year old engineer can't go buy this, you know, $15,000 thing or $30,000 thing. But Furcon can buy it. And he's like, I'm just going to make it available for free and come in here and work on it. And so now he's got in that lab, there's a guy who's got a brain device.
Starting point is 00:41:09 that you put on your head and it like makes you more focused. There's a guy who's a company called Orangewood Labs that basically they have this robotic arm that can do whatever you program it to do. So when I went in there, they were like, watch, we're going to make it, you know, make a margarita. Watch this. We can make this. And the application they're doing is painting or like, I don't know, powder coating or something like that.
Starting point is 00:41:30 Yeah, powder coating. You ever done powder coating? And I was like, no. That's really dangerous too. I was like, no, stop asking me questions. And they're like, well, I think everything is powder coder. Yeah, it's basically like how you, you know, all you do it on floors, or any metals or whatever, like for a car or something like that.
Starting point is 00:41:44 So they're like, yeah, this thing can powder coat basically better and faster, like automatically. And so we could do jobs at like, you know, one fifth of the price of a human being. Because we just give them the robot, the robot just goes and does it, and then it comes home. And that's it. And so I was like, oh, interesting. But there's a lot of people building stuff like this. And one way to increase serendipity is to like go to these kind of hardware labs or go
Starting point is 00:42:06 find out where they hang out. Just go talk to people. See what they're building. And a lot of these people who do this, they're not, they're not, a lot of them don't care about business. A lot of them are unorganized.
Starting point is 00:42:17 It's like the typical like scientists who wears like, who forgets to put one sock on and only wears like one sock or like, their shoes on, on the wrong foot. It's like they're just like these brilliant people who don't necessarily care about stuff. And I think if you can be the organizer, you can win.
Starting point is 00:42:30 What do you have? All right. So my path to a billion. Do you want the dark ID? or you want the light idea. Do you want the good idea or the evil idea? Which one do you want? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:42:44 I want to go dark, I think. Is that realistic? I can give you both, but I'll do the dark one fast. So here's the big pitch for the dark idea. Anderil for some other country. You can figure the rest out from there. What Paul Murlucky has done with Anderil for the U.S. Defense Department, do it for Israel.
Starting point is 00:43:06 Do it for another country. Go find a country that wants, you know, advance weapons technology and be like, cool, I'm going to recruit the brightest minds. And we're going to give us like, you know, a $50 million to $150 million contract and we'll get started here. Dude, Palmer's on a tear lately. And I would literally go look at the roadmap for Andrew.
Starting point is 00:43:23 I'd be like, oh, they built this like missile that can fly itself, you know, and lives in this like vending machine. I don't know if you saw that video of like, yes, it's amazing, man. He's on a tear. I'd be like, cool. pick from the Andrew Rule menu. We're going to figure out how to build those and you guys will own the IP.
Starting point is 00:43:40 That's what I would do if I really had to, you know, if I wanted to go into more of the gray or dark areas where it's, you know, there's a bit of war and destruction involved. But here's the light idea. Here's another idea. We're buying a university. Okay. So what are we doing? There are a lot of colleges for sale more than you would think. Are they on quiet light?
Starting point is 00:44:03 They're on deal stream. So go to a website called deal stream. Come on, that was kind of funny. Well, they could be. Deal stream is literally like Quietlight. It's just different name. It's the same idea. It's a business brokerage.
Starting point is 00:44:15 But if you look colleges for sale, they're there. And they're not that expensive. You could buy colleges for like $5 million, $10 million. So to do this, you're going to need a lot of money. But the good news is that universities are worth a lot of money. Like, what would you peg the value at? Let's start at the top end. Like, what do you think Stanford or Harvard is worth?
Starting point is 00:44:32 If somebody really, if mega billionaire genius wanted to buy, Stanford or Harvard, what would it even cost? Could it, I don't even know. Would it be like a Harvard, a hundred plus billion dollars? I mean, the endowment alone, I think is like, what, the endowment alone is almost $100 billion, right? Yeah, it's hard to even. It's the whole entire. It's got to be 500 billion. It might like, these are companies that are worth there. The universities are essentially properties that are worth, you know, a Facebook. They're crazy. They're crazy. Harvard endowments is is 53 billion. So, yeah, I don't know. 100 to 200 billion, 300 billion, something like that.
Starting point is 00:45:11 Yeah, like so big that it's hard to understand. Hard to even fathom, right? Not for sale. Can't be bought, essentially. Same thing with Stanford. Now, let's even go to like a Belmont, right? So like, let's just do some quick math here. Where I went, Belmont University. You went to Belmont. What's the tuition at Belmont? Back then, it was 30,000. Let's see what it is now. Belmont University tuition, $38,000. All right, so $38,000. And how many students go to Belmont? Let's say 5,000. 5,000 per year, per year or the whole university.
Starting point is 00:45:40 You could say, let's say, 1,800 per year. All right, so let's go. Let's round up to 2000. So even a small, small private school, where is, Belmont? I don't even know where it is. National Tennessee. It looks like they have 7,300 students, so 2,000 per class, let's say. Cool.
Starting point is 00:45:54 So $76 million top line. That's not counting endowments. It's not counting grants and research. It's not counting the facts that it's tax-free, that it has like all. all these other benefits. So you can actually see the numbers, by the way. Belmont's annual revenue is $464 million. Their expenses are $350 million. So they make $100 million a year in profit. They only have $200 million in liabilities and they have $1.5 billion in asset. And that's for a Belmont nowhere. So that's the game plan. We're building one of those.
Starting point is 00:46:30 Now, what are we going to do? So we're going to go buy one. What are we buying? We're essentially buying two things. I want the campus and I want the liquor license. And by liquor license, I mean the accreditation. As long as it's already accredited, I don't want to go through that process. Now, why do I want a campus? Because I want the land. I want the buildings. I want the depreciation. I want a physical place because I think it adds to the prestige. We will have a large online component, but whatever. Now, the main goal here is we got to brand this school. And so what are we going to do. We're going to make it a bit of a luxury product, meaning it's going to be only for the elite of the elite. So, yeah, we have to have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. We have to be
Starting point is 00:47:13 known for, we're going to sponsor competitions for like a math elite type of competitions, hardcore science competitions. We are going to go around the country to high schools and basically be like, we're going after gamers, programmers, and hardcore math kids. And we're going to sponsor a ton of competitions. Guess what those sponsors cost? pizza. The currency is essentially where you provide free pizza. There is no competition. When I was doing our esports company that we sold the Twitch, I was like,
Starting point is 00:47:40 all right, we want to create the world's biggest high school East Sports League. And we did in like less than a year. Guess what it cost? Like 450 pizzas is what it cost me to like sponsor these programs. It costs nothing. And so we're going to go and we're going to first, we're going to get in front of them. Now, when I, why did I go to Duke
Starting point is 00:47:56 University? I went because like in fifth grade, Duke did something called the nationwide talent identifications. program. And I'll be damned if my mom didn't want to find out if her kid was talented. And so we take this test. And we take this test. Is that like the Indian version of like a like one of those model competitions they have at the mall when you're 12? Yeah, it's a beauty. It's like, it's like sports, but for brown people. So my mom puts me in this. I really actually, I think every kid in my school took it. They just went to the school and they were like, hey, we're trying to identify the most talented, gifted and talented kids. Also parents, can you put your income on the statement as well? Exactly. Is that impact your IQ a little bit? And, you know, we got to get paid. So I got a scoreback and a goodie bag.
Starting point is 00:48:42 And literally the goodie bag was a Rubik's Cube. And I don't know what the hell was going on. But whatever that is, I'm going to go find the marketing coordinator that did this Duke Talented Advocation program. We're stealing that. We're going to go get them while they're young. Fifth, sixth grades. We're going to be identifying these special, you know, special gift and talented kids. So we're making it super prestigious.
Starting point is 00:49:00 You already know the name is going to have some old. money shit, right? You know, you know, we're going, I've already done this before with the private school names. Yeah, it's going to be like Bridgetmont, Oakland or something. Waldorf. Kennedy Excelsior. Yeah, exactly. So we're definitely going that way. We're going to have our own entrance exam. So we don't take the SATs because we're not peasants. And so you're going to, we're going to go from city to city and we're going to have our own entrance exam. It's going to be a six-point exam. I don't know what that means, but let's just say that's what it is. Now, what else are we going do? You know these speaker bureaus where you can go pay like $50,000 for Obama to speak?
Starting point is 00:49:41 Yeah. We're doing that. More like $2 million for Obama, but yeah. Okay. Well, we're, we got a budget. All right. And the budget's going to be like, we have like a $6 million speaker budget. So when I'm raising this money for this, I'm going to basically raise $50 to $75 million, maybe $100 million for this. And a lot of that is front loaded in brand building. And one of the things we're going to do is about $5 to $6 million a year in speaker fees. And so I'm basically going to pull the San Bankman-Fried without the fraud. So you know, San Biggraf took the money and basically was like, how do I just brainwash everybody that FTX is like a thing and it's legitimate?
Starting point is 00:50:12 He's like Tom Brady, Larry David, Steph Curry, this arena. This guy is like a super connector in Hollywood. I'm going to put $100 million into his fund. And now he's going to make, he's going to give me dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton. And that's what he literally did. And although he did a bunch of screwed up things, honestly, it's kind of inspiring the way he just threw his weight around using money to, like, build a brand.
Starting point is 00:50:38 If he had not literally stolen money from customer deposits to do so, that would have just been an incredible approach by an entrepreneur. Like, it actually would have been very lauded of how he did it, the same way that, like, you know, Uber is sort of praised for the way it just like brute forced its way into different cities and actually like built a huge global brand. So that's what I would do. So speaker fees, those are going on the website. Those are going viral to get those people to do like kind of speeches to our kids.
Starting point is 00:51:07 And we're going to also spend a ton of money on direct marketing. So no university really goes D to C except for the low end University of Phoenix type of shit. That's crazy. And by the way, they are amazing at it. They are really good at it. They're like $5 billion in your business doing it. In the world of like direct response, there's like financial newsletters. Then there's like Omaha.
Starting point is 00:51:27 Stakes who like crushes it and the stamps dot com of the world and erectile dysfunction and then like
Starting point is 00:51:33 video game people and then universities University of Phoenix crushes it I think I think them
Starting point is 00:51:40 and like full sale are in the top like 20 of spenders on Google yeah yeah exactly and you know
Starting point is 00:51:47 ITT technical institute running TV ads and stuff that that's what I would do so I'd basically go through
Starting point is 00:51:51 podcasts I'm going to blanket them every every intellectual podcast that parents listen to
Starting point is 00:51:56 I'm going to blanket it with ads for this. And the ads aren't apply, apply now, come here. The ads are going to be about how hard it is to get in. It's going to be more native stuff about controversy. Is it right or wrong
Starting point is 00:52:11 that the school is so hard to get into that it's only for the gift and talented that they're discriminating and only allowing the smart kids in. And I would actually drum up controversy around that in order to build the brand. Because there's no better brand than a brand of something you can't get into. So there's just something,
Starting point is 00:52:27 amazing article that says lessons you can learn from for-profit universities on cost per click advertising. The University of Phoenix in the last five years has spent $3 billion in marketing. On Google alone, it's estimated that they're spending roughly $5 million a month, and they receive roughly 70,000 to 80,000 clicks per month off of Google app. That's insane. That is insane. That's wild. What else would I do? Okay, so I'm spending a ton of money on ads. I hired the best branding agency in the world. I'm spending money on the speaker's fees. Again, I'm spending, spending, spending. Now, how do I make money? Okay, well, obviously you have things like your tuition. But I actually think there's
Starting point is 00:53:06 another way you could do this. It involves my good old friend NFTs. Okay, so hear me out. Hear me out. You're going to respect this idea when you're here. Have you ever seen when a stadium launches that they sell something called PSLs? Do you know what those are? Is that like season ticket holders for a certain period of time? Or like founding club members? You would think you're paying 25, 50,000, dollars, oh, you must be getting tickets. No, no, no. You got a personal seat license.
Starting point is 00:53:33 And the license just allows you to buy the ticket. You can't even buy the ticket without the license. So literally imagine every chair in the stadium and they basically have their own license. Each one has its own license. You have to buy the license. Once you buy the tickets, now you can sell it. Now you can sell the license. You can sell whatever, right?
Starting point is 00:53:49 They use this to fundraise. So I kind of had this idea about universities, which was if I wanted to start a university, Let's say it was going to have, you know, 5,000 or 10,000 students a year. Well, why wouldn't I sell 10,000? Why wouldn't I mint a 10,000 NFT package around this? And again, I built the brand up. I have a real story here, unlike most NFTs. I have a real story.
Starting point is 00:54:10 And the story is this, what would it be worth to buy a seat at Harvard? To own one seat in every admissions class in Harvard. You could use it for your own kid. You could gift it out as a scholarship. Or you could sell it to somebody who wants to go to a university. Well, yeah, because the value of a good diploma, it should go up every decade. So like a Belmont University, they don't have any street cred. So like my value isn't going up.
Starting point is 00:54:37 A Harvard, a Stanford goes up. But then if they have a controversy like Penn State did, it goes down. Correct. And so I want to have 10,000 admissions, licenses essentially. So this is a ticket you buy. There's one of one. You own it. You can decide if you use it, if you gift it, or if you rent it out to a student that
Starting point is 00:54:55 year and it's going to pay your rental income. You're going to get a piece of the revenue, or a piece of the profits from the, from the, from the, from the, from the tuition. Now, I think that you could sell these for probably at least 25,000, if not 50,000 each, right? So like, I think that's a low end for what you can do if you again, tell the story properly. And your boy's a good storyteller. So let's say we get, we end up getting to $50,000 a piece. We sell 10,000 of these. I just raised $500 million. Okay. So yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a pretty big initial set of funding. But I think you could do that to get this off the ground without having to go get rich VCs or billionaires to fund this thing. And so I think what you could do is do
Starting point is 00:55:35 maybe $10,000 or $20,000 per seat here, sell 10,000 of these. And, you know, we're going to price these all in ETH. That's just five ETH. Five ETH that you own, you know, a seat at this prestigious university. And so I don't know if I would do it year one, but maybe year two, I would move to that once I've built a little bit of the brand momentum. And I would say, you're going to own something that's going to pay you back every single year. So you might have spent 10 grand on it, but you're going to get back, you know, $2,000 a year a $1,000 a year in an income
Starting point is 00:56:03 plus you own this prestigious asset that's going to appreciate over time. And you can sell your whole seat later. I think you answered the shit out of this question. I think that's a very compelling argument. I would probably do normal tuition, but I understand that you do normal tuition in addition.
Starting point is 00:56:21 That's the beauty of these PSLs. You do normal tuition on top of sales. You do normal tuition on top of selling this initial seat. It's just that person gets a rev share of the tuition. The biggest thing that's wild here is that you can go on to deal stream, which I am, and I'm looking at universities that you can buy. Here's a university for $8.5 million that you can purchase, fully accredited, which I don't know what the value of that is. And you get a campus. This particular university had peak enrollment in 2017 with $2 million in
Starting point is 00:56:50 revenue. This is wild. This is wild. There's one right here. Fully accredited university, Southern California. A fully accredited university in SoCal, all right? 25 million. It's accredited. Its degree is recognized all around the world. The school can offer F1 visas so you know we're getting that international student money. Because you know who likes being accepted into a hard to get into program in the United States more than a U.S. citizen, somebody in China.
Starting point is 00:57:14 And so we are going to go ham on international students. We're going to, you know, that's going to be a big part of the marketing. So this says the school has about 900 students enrolled in undergrad, MBA, and, DBA programs. There's one physical campus and one branch campus. So I think this particular one has, it says Title IX is possible. And I think with Title IX, I think that means you get government funding for sports. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:57:40 You're eligible for getting funding from it. And this is crazy, right? So I would, you know, I would just keep my eyes peeled for about a year. I would go around and, you know, one thing that every rich person likes is the idea of, like, fixing education. And I would just go tell them, this is a school. that you would have wanted to go to, right? It's a school that is based around people
Starting point is 00:58:01 who actually build things and make things. It's going to be a school that prioritizes projects. So for lectures, it's a school that is, you know, it's competitive. And it's not online. It's not online. And we're trying to build the next brand, these old brands, like, you know,
Starting point is 00:58:18 even the best, you know, the Harvard's, the Stanford's, whatever. There hasn't, you know, where is the new one? These are like hundreds of years old. There's an opportunity to build something fresh and we want you to be a part of it. I think that that pitch would get a lot of people excited to cut, you know, $1,000 checks. I think that was a 9.5 out of 10 pitch. I think you did pretty good.
Starting point is 00:58:37 You did a great job by starting it off of, what do you think Harvard's worth? And I'm like, I don't even know. Unlimited money. It's not even sellable probably. It's not even buyable, rather. What's Stanford worth? What's University of Penn? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:58:50 It's invaluable almost. that's a very good pitch. Bravo. All right. That's the episode. That is the How to Make a Million bucks and How to Make a Million dollars from your boys at My First Million. A Million and a Billion.
Starting point is 00:59:04 That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.

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