The Money Mondays - "This $500,000 MBA Degree is WORTHLESS" - David Guttman 💰 EP140

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

In this episode of Money Mondays, we dive into real-world entrepreneurship, investing, and what college doesn’t teach you. David Guttman, serial entrepreneur with both eight- and nine-figure exits, shares how mindset, strategy, and timing shaped his career. Alongside him is Anna Prudchenko, an 18-year-old who skipped the traditional path to build her first company with David’s mentorship.---Who is David Guttman?David Guttman is an entrepreneur, investor, and now helping entrepreneurs scale to 7, 8 and even 9 figures and exit their businesses. His journey started humbly, managing a help desk at 24 before discovering the power of equity during his first IPO. That lesson fueled a career that led him to eight- and nine-figure exits and recognition as a three-time Inc. 500 entrepreneur. A graduate of Brown and Wharton, David’s perspective was further shaped by surviving a terminal cancer diagnosis in 1990, an experience that redefined how he approaches both business and life. Today, he channels his experience into mentoring and teaching through The Anti-MBA: What Business School Never Taught Me.---Learn More: https://bit.ly/46vct60---Who is Anna Prudchenko?Anna Prudchenko is an 18-year-old entrepreneur and majority owner of a new venture she launched under David’s mentorship. Instead of following the traditional college route, she jumped directly into business, learning the ropes of building and scaling a company from the ground up. With a focus on taking bold action over waiting for credentials, Anna is part of a new generation proving that entrepreneurship has no age limit.---Click here to order your personalized poster: https://bit.ly/46J08MS---Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇Shark Tank’s Daymond John: Life, Best Sales and Business Strategies 🦈 : https://youtu.be/RkHBezJ3n8sCodie Sanchez & Pace Morby on Making Money Fast 💸 : https://youtu.be/4YaaiEQTCcwHow Jesse Itzler Started and Sold 6 Companies for Millions 💰 : https://youtu.be/L0eJWPAMnRMDave Meltzer & Ryan Pineda Share Investing Strategies You Need 📈 : https://youtu.be/Sq__cgCkLAc---Watch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money.---If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! ---Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1---Dan Fleyshman,The Money Mondays---Learn more here: https://themoneymondays.com---Watch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---Let’s Connect...Website: https://themoneymondays.comPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondaysLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondaysFB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/

Talk us through about investing, literally, it must be a quarter million dollars into this program. Here's what I think about my Wharton MBA. Wow. This is your actual degree. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast, where we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to invest money, how to to give away to charity. And today, our guest has done all of those things, and he's brought a special guest with him, which I rarely ever do. So I'm very excited about this one for today and for very, very, very, very important. This podcast is not just about you. It's people from

your past, present and future. There might be people that listen to this episode when you hear about the things that he's worked on, things that he's built and created, it might be impactful not just for yourself, but someone in your social circle, your friends, family followers. So don't just listen for yourself. Think about who else this might have. applied to over the years. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's ridiculous. We have to have these important discussion about money with your friends, family, and followers, because how do I get a loan? What are taxes? What's a FICO score? Should I rent? Should I buy? Should I lease? We have to have discussion because it's part of your daily life.

Money is not the root of all evil. There's a lot of very important tools that money can do for your people in your world. From your mom and grandma to your kids, to your friends and everyone in between, it's a very useful tactic. Okay. All that being said, as you guys know, this podcast will be under 40 minutes because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 33 and 38 minutes for your listening pleasure. Without further ado, David, if you can give a quick two-minute bio, swing it straight to the money. Sure.

David Gutman, been a serial entrepreneur for the last 35 plus years. Undergraduate computer science from Brown, MBA from Wharton. But then, honestly, I've been an entrepreneur since then, had an eight-figure. exit, a nine-figure exit. I've been a three-time ink 500 entrepreneur. And watching my first course on basically how to be an entrepreneur. I love it. What's the name of the course? Actually, Anna came up with the name. It's called the anti-MBA what the Wharton Business School never taught me. Oh, interesting. I might have to talk about later. I see the degree over here. So who's Anna? So Anna is the daughter of a very close friend of mine. I'm an advisor

in his company, dear friend of mine. And so his daughter was looking for a summer internship. I originally brought her on just as a summer intern to do some social media grunt work. And I was so impressed with her after a couple of weeks. I was just putting the finishing touches on my course. And I was like, you know it would really be compelling. I thought to myself, well, if I could take an 18-year-old that just finished high school, no business background whatsoever, and have her successfully launch and get the profitability, a brand new company, taking my course and my mentorship, that would be pretty persuasive.

Sure. So I went to Anna and I think she was three weeks into her internship and I said, first I asked her dad to make sure he wasn't going to unfriend me. But once he was fine with it, I said, Anna, you're going to think I'm crazy, but hear me out. So I basically said, I want to give you 51% of the company. I'm going to pay you a salary, a full-time salary between now and when the company can afford to pay you until the company's profitable. And you're going to have 51% and you will make 100% of the business decisions. I want you to actually take the course and we'll talk once or twice a week. you feel you need to help guide you along the journey. And she said, you are crazy. She thought about it. And, well, I'll let her answer what she decided. But yeah, so that's that's who Anna is. And she came up with the name, the Antian. So it sounds like a real life

university is what you're putting her through. I am. That's right. It's what I wish I had. So Anna, why did you decide to go this path? You're 18 years old. You could obviously go on to normal college path and chosen USC or NYU or go abroad. Why decide to dive in here? I think it was just a lot of life circumstances coming together at the very right time. I was planning to go to college. I was planning to go to one of the UCs or something like that. It just so happened that I couldn't afford it because of the current state of my family. And I had to go to community college.

And this is where I met David, who showed me that, wow, so my lifelong dream, since I was seven years old, of becoming an entrepreneur, starting something of my own, can actually come true. much earlier than I thought it would. So that's why I took the opportunity. And I was like, okay, I'm going to community college for the next two years. It's not the hardest thing you've ever done, community college.

So I was like, okay, this is the time for me to focus on something that could potentially be life-changing for me. So from 15 years old to 17 years old, I was working three jobs at Qualcomm Stadium, peanuts and crackerjacks here, Ruby's dine over the sailor's cap on, and for a stockbroker under the table

would give me cash. And I saved up $43,000. during this three years, so let's call it 12 to 15 grand a year I was making many, many years ago. So I have this 4,000 to $3,000 saved up because I can't afford to go to college, and I wanted to go to San Diego State University. But at 17 and a half, I started my clothing company. At 18, we did a million dollars in sales. At 19, we did $9.5 million in sales.

And the money that I saved to go to SDSU in San Diego State, I used to fund the company and to get the whole thing going. And my mom put on her credit card, like our first convention booths. $3,200 to her was a very, very big deal. that $3,200 led to a company way end up taking public on the stock market. And so I love this story. I'm excited for your journey. And the fact that you're starting off so young, being around mentors is the most important

thing. So someone like this that's already had an eight-figure, nine-figure exit, it's unfathomable how much that helps. All right. So as you guys know, we covered these three core topics, how to make money, invest money, give away to charity. On the make-money side, what do you think holds people back from making money? I think that a huge percentage of the money,

the population, something like 80% have a scarcity mindset. It's the, say, if you've watched college basketball as an example and you watch a team like Duke play, they can be down 12 points with three minutes left and you just know they're going to win the game. They have that scarcity mindset. I know you're a professional poker player. It's the person who's, you know, they're on the bubble and, you know, they don't want to lose the chips they have.

And that's when they're really good players get aggressive. For sure. And they, you know, amass their chicks. chip stack because they know that they're afraid of losing versus being optimistic about winning. And I think that's the biggest thing that holds most people back is mindset. What do you think holds your friends back? Why do you think your friends take the easy path? They just go to school for the next four to six years.

They go to college and they just kind of skip four to six years of their life not knowing what they could be doing. Why do you think people go the easy path? I don't know if it's the easy path. It's just the path that everybody takes. I think that I was about to go on that path myself. and that's because I've never seen anyone else do something different. I was just extremely lucky to have the dad that I have

and the family that I have who allowed me to go the path less traveled. So I think that my friends, if they knew that, oh, yeah, I could go this path. Maybe they would have. But here it also comes in play, like, what is your risk tolerance like? Because this is not the most safe route I could take, for sure. The safest route would be for me to go to college, finish, as per usual. And I would have all of the things, I have all of the things to finish college very successfully. But I think that no risk, no reward.

That is my mentality. And that's why I want to spend my life building something great rather than working the 9 to 5. There are different goals for everybody. And I think that's what's kind of holding some people back. Yep. But what it would say, though, is I think it's an illusion that the path you're on is a less risky path. I think it's the safer path. Because what you're building is you're building up your talent stack.

You're building up your skills, as opposed to sitting in a room listening to some professor pontificate about something he or she's never done. To me, having a real world experience, you could always go back to school if you wanted to. The reality is that taking action is the thing that holds people back. So I always tell people to taste it. Taste it is go try it. If you want to be in clothing, go work as an intern for Damon John and his $4 billion clothing brand. You want to be in music? go intern for Universal Records or maybe you're getting a little bit of money or zero, but tasting it is the concept of like, you might go to clothing and realize you don't like it. You might go to music. You're like, oh my God, I love music. I want to be this in my whole career. But tasting it is trying to figure out what do you like? What is it that excites you? Because so often people think that they want to be, you know, this major in college and they get two to four years into it and they switch majors. That's a big decision. They just lost two to four years of their life, their good years too, like 19 to 21 that they could be doing something.

else. And so oftentimes if you want to be in real estate or you want to be in fashion or you want to be in some other industry, you can go out there and taste it by going out and actually becoming an intern or employee for these companies you look up to. Now also on the make money side, you've watched. There's a ton of companies that go out there and they go build $1 million, $5 million, $10 million, $20 million revenue, but they never exit. You've exited multiple times. What do you think the difference is between a company that doesn't have exit or maybe never will exit versus the companies that you have exited? So I think that a lot of it comes down to understanding from the starting point what your end goal is and working backwards.

There, you know, look, there's lots of companies that maybe they don't consider exiting, and, you know, someone comes along and gives them an offer they can't, you know, can't refuse kind of thing. But I think that if you go into it with an understanding, again, sometimes it's driven by capital. So if you're bringing in venture capital money, you have to be planning for an exit. To be fair, most of the businesses that I've run are consulted to, I've either Angel, some combination of Angel and VC, investors so they're thinking to exit. But the other thing I would say, though, about that is if it also can be a double-edged sword because what you really need to do is run a really good business. If you run your business well, you will maximize your exit opportunities. And you can

always decide, because if you're running a business that's really profitable, now of a sudden you can exit on your terms when it makes sense. When you have a business that is a scarcity of capital, now sometimes you're taking in capital or maybe exiting or merging when it's not when it's less optimal for you. So I would say the main rule of thumb for me, whenever I'm advising people, is run a really good business. Have an eye to the exit, but don't be married to it, and I think you get the best outcomes that way. So there's a big decision to make when you're exiting the company. You can sell 51%, 80%, you know, have another bite at the apple, or a whole 100%. Sometimes they're called in cold in handcuffs where someone keeps you on because they need you

for three years or more to help run the business. That's a lot of different decisions. And a lot of people don't know even if they go to fancy school like wharton school sometimes they don't know the golden handcuffs or the 51 80% 100% options they don't know if they could take stock or cash there's so many options like when did you know this is the time I'm going to sell this company for 20 million or 80 million or 20 million whatever the number is like when did you know this is the time to take the exit and what type of deal to take yeah so to be transparent about it in both cases you know the the CEO I was president and COO for the two companies that exited that the board and the CEO made the final decision. With that being said, you know, we exited the first company

right towards during the 2008 financial crisis. We actually exited in December. Like, I mean, it was the worst possible timing. Wow, like 11 seconds later, yeah. Yeah. And, but, but again, but because we had planned for it really well, we had our three best money. I mean, they wanted to reduce the, you understand, due diligence is often about how can I reduce the purchase price. Right. Right. And so they wanted to reduce the purchase price in the worst possible way. But we, we had set it up in such a way that we knew that the last few months before we closed on the deal, we're going to be our three best months in the history of the company. So they couldn't reduce the purchase price. So, you know, thinking about the right timing, like what's the right timing

and trying to optimize that to the best of your ability is super important. And I think that you've got to be selling under the, for the right reasons to the right person. And the second exit, the nine figure exit, that one was we sold 60% to private equity. And actually the second, the 40%. The nice thing about that one is the 40% will end up being worth two to three times how much the 60% was. So in that one, we probably would have sold sooner but for something I can't say. But so because the world had changed and we weren't able to exit during the pandemic, we were able to, we had the private equity sale right after. And that ended up being a better outcome overall. So it's always based on circumstances. You always,

want to try to create a competitive environment when you can that's always going to maximize value too so there's a lot of different variables play into it so on the make money side for you you're fresh out of high school 18 years old a lot of your friends are either again going to get a job or going to work you know going to college etc we're taking a year off and figure out their lives how do you know what you want to make some people want to they see on instagram or ticot like oh i want to become a bazillion or millionaire in my first year other people want to go make 40 grand 50 grand 60 grand like how do you know what you want to make when you're fresh out of school I don't have a figure that I want to make.

It's not a thing. It's not about the money. You know, I'm doing this. I don't really care how much I earn from this business specifically that I'm starting right now. I'm doing this for experience. I'm doing this for knowledge. I'm doing this for the people. And it's always like the same goes.

It's not what you know. It's who you know, right? So that's what I'm doing this for. It's where the real wealth lies. And so I don't have a figure in mind of what I want to earn. Money will come. It's, I think there's a much better way to be. successful than just to chase money. So on the investing side, you have the exit,

get a bunch of extra capital, and now you're like, man, I got millions of dollars or maybe tens of millions of dollars. There's a lot of options. Real estate, stock market, Bitcoin, Ethereum, I could angel invest, S&P 500, I could invest in my friend's restaurant, bar, nightclub, clothing line. There's so many options. How do you decide when there's all these different options what you invest your money into? So I got into Bitcoin in 2015, through a close friend of mine who had sent me the Stoji Nakamoto white paper and I was immediately like,

this will change everything as soon as I saw it. The thing is interesting is you don't need to be that technical. It's a relatively straight, you know, straightforward thing to read. And it was just so obvious to me. So I have what my wealth manager would say is an insane percentage of my liquid net worth

in crypto. So I basically have had it in Bitcoin and then I've made investments in private companies, you know, basically startups for the most part where I'm mentoring the teams that are running those companies. That's what I like, to do is I want to put my time and money in people that I enjoy doing things I find interesting.

So is there something you want to invest into? Have you saw something or got excited about you? Like one day I want to own storage units or one day I want to own commercial buildings or I want to own a podcast studio. Are there things that you've ever thought about one day once I have the money I'm going to invest into this category? I think in my, the people that surround me don't really invest in some such concrete things. I haven't really thought about investing in real estate or anything like that. I see my mentor investing in people and investing in businesses. And that's kind of where I'm going with right now because I really like his retirement plan

of investing in a few businesses that he really likes with the people that leading them who he really appreciates and respects. And that seems like the most fun for me. I don't really think about investing in real estate right now. So investing in yourself is what a lot of people talk about. A lot of people invest into themselves for school and college. Obviously, I've been staring at this thing over here. We got the Wharton School.

What year is this? 1994 you graduated. Masters and Business Administration. So a lot of people invest into themselves, which is either through masterminds, courses, books, online schools that you guys are creating, or they go to college and spend 60 grand, 40 grand, a year for four years.

It could be a quarter of a million dollars. I don't know, I'll pick this thing up. I'm just been staring at this whole time. talk us through about investing literally it must be a quarter million dollars into this program it cost you your math is very good this cost all me cost me almost a quarter of a million actually a little bit over a quarter of million dollars in lost income and uh and the opportunity cost and just what everything caught you know the tuition and room and board and all of that nowadays when i did the back of the envelope math it's more like half a million dollars and the reality is um i remember

when I was deciding what I was going to major in in college, I'm walking across campus to meet with my academic advisor, and I don't know what I want to do. I'm 18 years old. I don't know anything. No offense. And I'm like, well, my dad did computer stuff. My brother did computer stuff. Maybe it's genetic. That's as much thought as I gave to being a computer science major. The reality is youth is wasted on the young in some cases. And so here's what I think about my Wharton MBA. this is your actual degree when i when i said i was going to do this people ask me if i was going to do this people asked me if i was going to do this to a copy this is not a copy that's your actual degree

this is my actual degree that i spent a quarter of a million dollars on oh my god wow no like literally this is real glass this is a real degree so that's what i think they say you got to put your money where your mouth is well there's a half a million dollars on the floor yeah what makes you so passionate what what does this come from so so continue discussion after this you're going to take a break um because here's the thing that all the people that went to ivy league schools like that i did they're keeping the dirty little secret. The secret is because they got in. They're benefiting from the illusion that it actually matters. The reason people that went to Harvard were successful was because they got into

Harvard, not because Harvard taught them useful things. In fact, some of the most successful people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, these are people that dropped out of schools like that. They were able to get in because they were talented, right? It's the selection criteria. And because the people that are benefiting from the illusion, they don't share it. And I'm like, I'm just not going to do that. You know, it's like, I want people to understand the reason why I genuinely tried to talk Anna out of going to school is because I care deeply about her and her future. And so, therefore, people I care about, I want to try to guide them to do the thing that's in their best interest. It's just like I said before, it's an illusion. In the same way that getting a corporate job in

corporate America, it's an illusion of security. The best security is investing in yourself. and your capabilities. All right, so millions of parents are going to see. This is very real, by the way. Millions of parents are going to see this, right? I assume this is going to go pretty viral because this is what people, we've heard people talk about it, right? They talk about college or they say you don't need a degree,

but you literally just lit half a million on fire. Like, walk us through, what would you say to a parent that's having that discussion with their 17 or 18 year old about the options of going the work path rather than the college path? Look, I tried to talk my daughter, desperately tried to talk my daughter. She's 25 now into not going to college. I said, let me put the money I was going to spend in Bitcoin. She'd be sitting on $8 million right now.

And, you know, she didn't listen. She got a degree. She got a good job, having nothing to do with her degree. And actually, she worked for a company that I peoed, and she even made like 60 grand. Not bad for a 23-year-old, right? But the reality is I was just at a mastermind with, I think I was 30 years older than the next oldest person. there's a 17-year-old running a seven-figure business, right? When I was growing up, it made a little bit of sense to go to schools like this

because the ability to accumulate knowledge and skills was so much more difficult. You had to go to a library and check out a book that there were no even book reviews for. Nowadays, you have a problem, you have a curation problem. There's too much information. And so how do you figure out what information is useful? That's really the harder problem. And so nowadays, you know, instead of being 18 and deciding, here's what I want to do for the rest of my life, which is crazy when you think about it.

And by the way, spend a quarter of a million dollars doing so, as opposed to, in fact, the tasted comment that you made, I did the exact same thing. I gave the exact same advice to my daughter. She had just had the company IPO. She left that company because she didn't want to work 80 hours a week. And she was thinking, well, I think maybe I want to go back and get my master's and become a, you know, a dietitian or something like that. I said, do not go back to school again. I said, here's what I want you to do. Spend a month, contact people on LinkedIn that are 3, 5, 8, 10 years out that have the degree that you're getting, and ask them to buy them lunch, take them to coffee, ask to shadow them at work. After a month of doing that,

she's like, dad, I definitely don't want to do that. That's the smart thing to do. Spend time figuring out, taste it. Spend time figure out what you do want to do, what you can get passionate about, what you're excited about, and what you have some ability in, and then really give it everything you have. What would your friends think about him smashing this half a million dollars on the floor? My friends would think he's crazy. I have friends going to Stanford. I have friends going to Harvard.

I have friends going to all of these ivies. And I have even more friends going to UCs and more meatier schools, right? I think they would be like, Anna, what are you doing on this podcast? So I don't know. What's your answer? What are you doing here? Yeah, what are we doing here? But I think that it makes sense.

It just makes so much sense if you really think about the data and the logic of it all, and you don't just go with the flow and go with what everybody else is doing. But, yeah, they want it to prove. They wouldn't approve. So when it's time to invest in yourself, knowledge is still powerful. And you guys have been working on creating a course and education program. Can you talk us through what that is? Sure.

So, you know, and I'll be fully transparent about why I even did it. I started at the end point, and this is actually the advice I always give people when they're starting a business. Start at the end goal and work your way backwards. So what I wanted was I wanted to make 8, 10, 12 investments in businesses that were I would have board seats and have equity in the business and really like the people running it and really like what their business is doing. And so I worked backwards in that. So what's the best way to do that?

And I thought about things like Shark Tank or Y Combinator and things like that. The problem with that approach is you don't really getting time to evaluate the, you know, the leader. And to me, that's the most important thing in any business is who's calling the, who's making the decisions, the CEO. And so I was like, well, what, what way could I basically have a period of time to evaluate them? I said, well, what if I had a mastermind? I said, well, okay, but I don't want to just have a whole bunch of people in a mastermind. How could I filter people into that? And that's what I decided I'm going to use the course as a way to filter. So it's four and a half hours long, roughly. And when people

finish, I'll do a 30 to 60 minute coaching call, but what I'm really doing is I'm evaluating them and their business idea. And so what I'm going to do is it'll be invitation only. So if I go through that process and I really like them and their idea, then I'm going to invite them to an invitation only mastermind where they have to commit to six months. At the end of that six months, I'm going to have a group of five people that we're going to evaluate all 10 of those ideas and invest in no less than one and no more than three of the 10 ideas between 250 and 500,000. Wow. I love this plan for so many reasons. All right. Let's talk about the charity side of things. Why do you think it's important for business owners for their employees, their clients, their vendors, and people around them?

Why do you think it's important to have some type of philanthropy in their business? I don't think there's anything that feels better, especially, you know, it always amazes me when you have, I mean, you see leaders like in Elon Musk or Steve Jobs where I think they're actually successful in spite of their leadership style. Servant leaders, and I think that's the best style of leadership, they understand that the happen. path through life is being useful. Nothing feels better than being useful to people. And, you know, when you see people that are less fortunate than you, and again, there's lots of forms of philanthropy. For me, I mentor a lot of people. I spend a lot of time. In fact, my wife used to give me a hard time about it because I would, you know, spend so much of my time helping

other people with no expectation of anything. And I'm like, I'm not doing it for them. I do it for me. That's how I want to travel through life. And I think that if people understand that in order for your life to have any meaning whatsoever, you have to focus on something that's bigger than yourself. So also on the charity side, there's so many options. People have millions of different charities that are out there. There's different organizations, small, medium, and large. I throw what's called the world's largest toy drive.

The gentleman you met is who we created with. It was named after his mom. And it's been 12 years now. We broke the Guinness Booker Records multiple times For the most toys, this morning we're at the BMO Stadium, because we're hosting it again this year, and Miami Heat Arena, et cetera. That charity we first started, there was eight of us wrapping toys on the floor, and now we're filling at BMO Stadium in Miami Heat Arena.

It's not just money when it comes to charities. It's time and energy. And a lot of times people think of charity, like they have to donate a check or they have to put in $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000, whatever the numbers. But the time and energy part is actually much more important. Talk us through in your own world. How do you get the kids or the employees or the people in your world to all should be passionate about a charity?

You have to lead by example, right? It ultimately comes down to that. And people, you know, you see this when you're raising children, that you could say whatever you want. Kids pay attention to what you do, and I don't think that leadership in an organization is any different than that. How do you spend your time, energy, and resources? and I think that if you can demonstrate that to other people,

people that are not sociopaths will follow along generally. So there's only one question that I ask on every single episode and I've never gotten the same answer out of 200 plus episodes. So you had an eight-figure exit, a nine-figure exit, God willing, you're going to have a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar exit in the future. At the end of the day, what percentage of your net worth do you leap to your children? I don't think of it as a percentage. I think of it more like how much, one, my daughter's not a very, much of one child.

You know, she's not a very materialistic person. Even if she had unlimited funds, I don't know that it would necessarily change how she lives her life. I'll simply make sure that she has enough money that she'll be able to live, you know, a comfortable life. And I don't mean comfortable like mansions and private jets and yachts. but, you know, just never having to worry about money. At the end of the day, I think if I had a son, I would think about it differently, if I'm being honest. I worked for my dad who started a software company, and I hated working for my dad because I felt like, you know, nothing, it wasn't mine.

But with a daughter, I just want to make sure that she's protected and taken care of and that she doesn't have to need a man or need anything, even that she's even going to have to do it on her own. I want her to be able to be comfortable. So I think about it more like, you know, that's probably something like $5 to $8 million, you know, invested properly in a trust fund that, you know, is structured in the right way that, you know, she'll always have funds. So I'm going to ask you a question.

You mentioned Ivy Leagues and all these different schools. Are there any friends in your world that grew up with a trust fund or grew up with a lot of money? And how are they different in your friends that don't? It's a really good question. I think there are two types of people who grew up with money. The first is that differentiate, are those who differentiate their parents' money and their own money.

those are the ones who want to supersede their parents they want to make more than their parents they want to succeed on their own and those are the friends that I have the other type of people who grew up rich are the ones who believe that their parents' money is their money and that leads to a lot of lot of

spoiled behavior and I don't have those friends so I can't speak to that but the ones that I do have they're the most amazing people they're one of the most driven people too they know what it takes to get there because they saw their parents get there and they are willing to put in the work. Very cool.

Any final thoughts? How can people find you on social? How can they find education programs you guys are creating? How can they get into your world? So if they go onto YouTube and the David Gutman podcast, my link tree is there with all of my links. And look, at the end of the day, I'm really looking for three groups of people. I'm looking for people that are first-time entrepreneurs that want to try to get it right the first time, entrepreneurs that maybe want to get it right the second, the third of the fourth time.

I'm a failed entrepreneur myself, so I have all the battle scars too. And those people maybe that have more of a corporate job and they see what's coming with AI and they realize, hey, I have domain expertise, but I've never start scaled and sold a business. Maybe having a little bit of guidance there might make some sense. So, yeah, those are

the people that I'm looking for. All right, guys, you're listening to this very special edition of the Money Monday Monday's podcast. It's moments like this that are truly important because, again, you're going to remember this. You're going to have a situation where you're at lunch or dinner with your friends talking about college, and this is going to pop into your mind of half a million dollar degree being smashed on the floor. These are the things that you could be sharing with people,

whether you're swaying them to go to college, stay away from college, at least understand the option that careers are out there, there are the past, and you should do your research about what is right for you. But look at some of the people that David mentioned. Look at some of the characters that have become some of the biggest in the world and what their paths were, and find out what's right for you. Tasting it is free out your career, figuring out of college is right for you, figuring out what types of things do you want in your world and always understand this. If you're 18 years old, when you're 23 and 25, you're not the same person. When you're 32 years old, you wouldn't even hang out with a 25 and 18 year old. When you're 39, you definitely don't hang out with the 18

year old because that could be your child. And so every five to seven years on average, we change as humans. So just make sure that as you're going through life and freeing things out for yourself, it's okay to pivot. It's okay to change. Whether it's your career, your profession your school or anything between it's okay just got to understand do as much research you can we'll see you guys next monday here at the money mondays dot com