The Startup Ideas Podcast - $30M by Age 19 — And Where You Should Build Today

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Are you a founder at heart but afraid to act? Today we explore how to build a scalable venture, the best way to create arbitrage in the market, and why the time is now to start your start-up. Hosts Sahil Bloom and Greg Isenberg are joined by Val Kateyev, an immigrant turned serial entrepreneur who built his first company to $30M, all before his 20th birthday and from his parent's basement. Val offers his personal insight into how technology has expedited the timeline of creating a company, the industries that are ripe for innovation, and how leveraging debt could be the future of start-up funding.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► Riverside (https://riverside.fm/?via=wih) is our go-to platform to record studio-quality podcasts or videos. We use it for all of our episodes of Where It Happens. Their secret sauce is the ability to record locally, which means you get uncompressed audio and video that works even if your WiFi isn’t cooperating.Once you’re done recording, it’s so easy to edit and download all of your files. To get 15% off your plan, use code HAPPENS at https://riverside.fm/?via=wih►► This episode is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise is on a mission to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual. With over $2.4B AUM and 250k active investors, it’s the largest direct-to-investor real estate investor platform in America.Their platform is so easy to use and they make it so easy to diversify your portfolio. For a limited time if you sign-up, you can get $10 bonus. Just go to www.fundrise.com/roomTHIS EPISODEVal Katayev: https://twitter.com/ValKatayevSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985

The government has pulled away the ability for the average people to make a lot of different kinds of investments. The SEC basically blocks all kinds of different opportunities because they scrutinize everything, right? So that's why we have the world we live in where institutional money, like VC money, has access to all these tech companies, grows them to tens of billions of dollars of value, only then put them out on the IPO. because it's just not worth for these companies to go public anymore. What's up? How you doing? Well, you know, it took me 20 minutes to log into this because technology decided that it just didn't want to work. So I'm good.

Coming in hot. Got my summer shirt on here, the tie-dye. So I'm ready to roll for some warm weather. What's on your mind today? What do you want to talk about? Oh, man. I had a bunch of stuff on my list, and we've got a really cool guest coming into jam on some stuff. So I would suggest we just dive right into it. There was a bunch of interesting stuff that happened recently, much of which I think is sort of evergreen. I'd love to love to jam on some of it. Did you, first thing on my list, did you see this whole thing that happened with Ross Albrecht, the Silk Road guy and this like Bitcoin finding?

I did. So for people that don't know who this is, Ross Albricked, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, Albrichd, he was the founder of Silk Road, which was, for lack of a better way to put it, like Amazon for illegal stuff. You know, it was founded in, what, 2011, it was like you would use the Tor, like anonymous browser, so you could use it anonymously. And it was founded with like, really kind of libertarian ideals. And it was basically the first use case of Bitcoin, like in the very early days. And it's part of the reason why like Bitcoin got a reputation as being a currency for like scammers and fraudsters and, you know, illegal kind of grifters because it was basically being used on Silk Road to purchase all variety of things. The vast majority I think of Silk Road, maybe you saw it way back in the day, was like kind of harmless drugs. Like I think a lot of people were buying weed that I knew like on Silk Road and other like party drugs. But then, you know, there was, it's the internet. So there was like dark parts of Silk Road that were people buying,

you know, all sorts of things, guns, you know, more harmful drugs, etc. But, you know, Ross Albrecht was the founder of it. He was like the Jeff Bezos of this Silk Road thing. There was a huge bust in 2013 when they found it. And he basically got charged with all variety of crimes, despite the fact that it was a platform that he was running, right? Like, it kind of, the whole case basically said that he was selling these things rather than like operating the platform. And he got sentenced to life without parole. And it's like this very, very controversial case. Yeah. So I remember going on the Silk Road and just testing it out, you know, as a good product person. I got to test everything out. One of the things, I mean, there was a bunch of harmless stuff,

but there was also some crazy things on the Silk Road. So there was like, I remember like a whole guide around how to break into an ATM machine. So. That you could buy, like you could buy the guide. It was basically like this guy. He was like, I've broken into many ATM machines. And I'm like the guy, you know. And if you want to be like me, all you have to do for the, you know, low price of one Bitcoin,

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building a better portfolio with private real estate. Signing up is easy. Just head over to fundrise.com slash room. Again, that's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash room to get started today. Today, I am so excited to talk about Riverside. Riverside is the leading platform for studio quality, remote podcasts, and video recordings from anywhere. We absolutely love it at where it happens, and you're going to love it too. Greg, what have you enjoyed most about Riverside?

What's amazing about Riverside is that when you're recording a remote video podcast or a remote interview, the recording quality is independent of Wi-Fi stability. It basically records locally, which is a huge advantage in order to ensure a remote video. a reliable and uncompressed content outcome. The way I think about it, it's basically like a studio inside your browser. And it's not just us who uses it. It's 70,000 plus people ranging from Guy Raz, Gary Vee, and the New York Times. It's an amazing experience, super easy and intuitive to use.

You don't need a whole team on the back end to manage it to get it up onto all of the podcasting platforms. It is just a great overall experience, truly a podcast studio. in your pocket that you can use from anywhere. We absolutely love it, and you're going to as well. So to check out Riverside, go to riverside. com and use code happens for 15% off a membership plan. Again, that's riverside.com and use code happens for 15% off at checkout. Yeah, it's like, it's, I mean, it's funny because like, it's like the illegal alternative

to like Gum Road, like that same guy sells that book on Gumroad. as like an e-book. It had a break into ATM machines, but, you know, was doing it there. The crazy thing about the case, and there's an amazing book on it,

if anyone hasn't read it, called American Kingpin, which I don't know if they've done it yet, but it would be an incredible movie because the story of the rise of the Silk Road and what he was like going through the lengths to try to not get caught, because basically,

like, the acceleration of it was like any insane tech company story, but it was not venture-backed. It was just like pure product. market fit insanity and the growth and the amount of Bitcoin that was flowing through the ecosystem and the amount of money he was making. He was operating under the pseudonymous named Dread Pirate Roberts, which was the fictional character from the Princess Bride. And it was just like, I think it astounded him and he probably got completely off guard by it. But it was like insane

product market fit and product led growth story. And then basically, you know, he gets taken down in this bust. And it becomes, you know, as part of the market fit and it. You know, as part of the of it, right, they like kind of indicted him on a bunch of different things. One of the things he got indicted for was like six or seven murders that he allegedly ordered and paid for, none of which were actually carried out, but that it was alleged that he had kind of solicited murder for hire. And he didn't get charged with it ultimately, and he didn't get tried for it. Like, they didn't convict him of those things. And so his sentencing has been a massive dispute, especially for libertarians who argue that like he was running a platform if people were doing illegal things on it not

really his fault he should be kind of absolved of that and for people who are like look you can you know say that he did those things but if you didn't get convicted of those things or charged with those things the murders how is he sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for what amounts to like a bunch of um you know kind of like drug trafficking charges effectively so there's this massive crusade that has continued and that a lot of like big tech Illuminati type figures are behind to try to free Ross, basically. The reason it's back in the news, which is what I was referencing before, is because part of his whole deal was that he had to pay like $193 million of restitution to the U.S. government for like, basically they were charging him like a fine for every single transaction

that went through the Silk Road over the years that he operated it. And so he owed $193 million. So even if he gets released and somehow like the Crusade Works, and he gets out, he was going to be $193 million in debt to the U.S. government, basically never a free man. All of his wages would be garnished, et cetera. Now that has changed because the U.S. government has like basically secretly signed a deal with him that this $1 billion bounty that they have found from a hack of the Silk Road, they are crediting towards his debts to the U.S. government. And so he has now effectively paid back the debts to the U.S. government of $193 million.

It's unbelievable. Like, I remember reading that and I was like, this guy, man, this guy. I mean, it's like a completely insane story. The fact that it's not a movie yet, actually, like, it's going to be an incredible, whoever makes it, it's going to be an incredible movie. And I think part of it is like people have wanted the story to finish because there's some, I think there's like a broad case to be made that he will get out at some point. maybe then they will try to charge him with, you know, the alleged murders and bring him up on that,

which is a totally separate thing. But the whole story is like completely remarkable. And the book, if no one has read it, the book is incredible. American Kingpin is what it's called. We'll throw it in the show notes. So anyway, I wanted to start off with that because I think it's a fascinating story. It's also ties to like crypto, Bitcoin and in the early days of actual use cases of all of this. Let me, let me shift gears a little bit with something that's on my mind. Hit me. So last week was Miami Tech Week. I live in Miami.

So basically it's this new, for those you don't know, it's like this new holiday, tech holiday that Delian from Founders Fund, who's a VC, basically a year and a half ago, I think he created this. And it was like a small event last year. This year, like it was huge. like every major fund was throwing events. It felt very much like a mini South by Southwest. And what I wanted to talk about and what's been on my mind is a tweet that I saw from a buddy

of mine, Furcon, who said, your product doesn't get built at conferences and growth doesn't happen at networking events. If you're a founder, I highly suggest skipping these events, the real work happens at a keyboard. And I was reflecting on that a bit because I spent so much like energy, just like personal energy talking to people like Ubering here, Ubering there, going to this dinner, doing this, doing that. And I definitely agree with him that like I think that for if you're a founder. Now I'm not saying like, you know, if you're a VP sales, if you're a director of biz dev, if you're like, you know, chief marketing officer like, yes. like maybe go to those events but if you're a founder the most i think the most efficient way to

spend your time is behind the keyboard what do you think um i go both ways on this right i think it's tough because my general perspective is like i one side of me says that these are the type of things where you end up getting lucky like you go to something like this there's 10,000 people in Miami, you know, half of whom are like very smart, interested, might be interested in similar things to you. You go to these events. You mingle new ideas strike, insight strikes, you meet someone that you wouldn't have otherwise met. Good things happen. And if it's like two, three days, you cannot build for a couple days. Like what did you do last weekend? You took a day off, maybe, whatever. So that's like one side of me. The other side of me says, yeah, like, you know,

in the early days of something, you have to put your damn head down because otherwise, you know, you're just not going to make that early traction in order to get something done. I guess my general take, kind of putting it all into a blender, is like, what type of founder are you? Because I think there are founders who they're not the builder, right? Like, they're the salesman. And to use the Naval thing, which is one of my favorite general frameworks around this, you either need to learn how to build or you need to learn how to sell. And someone that can do both is completely unstoppable. And there's like probably a handful of people who can do both at an elite level, like a Elon Musk or like a Steve Jobs or whatever. Those are like insanely elite individuals that can build and sell. But for the most part,

people can either do one or the other. And so if you're like in the build camp, if you're an engineer and you're a builder, yeah, I agree. Like you probably should put your head down and be behind the keyboard. But if you're a sell type and what you're really exceptional at is selling, going to one of these events and like selling the dream of your idea, that can be the difference between like having Keith Rabeboy, you know, founders fund, meet you, see you, you know, the new investor comes on, on like a new employee that could be your 10x engineer that you happen to meet there. Like if you're out there selling in that environment, maybe that's what's actually the best use of your time,

not sitting behind a keyboard. Yeah, my take on it and you'll get this because, I mean, we'll both get this. We both spend a lot of time on Twitter and blogging and stuff like that. My thinking is if I could spend 72 hours behind a keyboard typing an amazing blog post or email newsletter or an epic Twitter thread, the, like, if that goes viral and millions of people see that, the, it's just way more efficient use of time.

Now, I still love going to these events and I love hanging out with like, I got to, like, I treated it as like a vacation, you know what I mean? Like, I got to, I ran into so many amazing friends and it was really fun. And I did hit, you know, play the slot machine a little bit. And I did meet some really cool people. which could be like lifelong friendships, which is awesome and good for my business. But I still think if I'm looking at it just from an efficiency standpoint, heads down for me is the way to go. I think you're probably right.

I mean, I think, and it depends what stage you're at, right? Like you and I aren't in the trenches building something like a product today. And so a big part of your job, like what you're doing and what I'm doing too is being out. And so it is like that's probably the most efficient use of our time relative to a business. builder who's kind of like in the trenches today and they probably should spend that time doing um you know doing building or creative work or something that's going to reach you know have like a much more scalable reach overall so i don't know i can go both ways on it but i do think it's a really interesting discussion point i loved i saw the like back and forth on twitter of different

people arguing over whether founders should go to these type of events um and i thought it was interesting but like just to say it the web three space in general i think has skewed too far to the sell and not enough to the build. So I think it's like a good call to arms in general to like throw a shot across the bow to the general industry of like, you know, there's so many of these companies that are raising at absurd prices off of no product. And it's because they're incredible salesmen and there's like this unbelievable heat around the market.

And I think it needs to come back into some level of balance. We got Val in the waiting room. All right. What is up? What's going on, guys? Hey, what's going on, man? all good good to have you yeah man we got the two legends over here three legends man i appreciate you joining you're uh you're crushing it we're excited to have you and uh excited to hear more about your

story and um and dive into some hopefully cool ideas yeah absolutely man can you just give us the like one minute version of your background and it doesn't actually have to be one minute but just so Like, all of our listeners understand why you are so legit. Don't give us the humble version either. Like, I want the real version of some of the shit that you've done. So we're live. We're live, man. All right, man, you're going straight to the point here.

Well, we film, we've already been on for like 20 minutes before you. So we're all, like, warmed up and ready to roll. All right, man. Well, I don't even get to see you ahead today. That's not right. You're here for the hair and you don't even get to see it. I was just here for the hair. I'm rocking the same wood's hat today.

Yeah, it looks good. But Greg got like starting to get that going on. So I don't know, man. You guys got a nice competition on that front going. Yeah, man, listen, I built, I'm an immigrant. Came to this country when I was like 11. And I got my computer only like at 16 years old. By that point, I already knew everything about computers.

And I was just so hungry. launched a company. I just started like doing some stuff and it just kind of took off. Came across. I mean, there was like a bunch of steps, but I built a at like 19. I started a company that built did Google advertising and like I essentially crushed it like just huge arbitrage did all by myself out of my parents' basement. And then like I lived in a suburbia just to like for tax purposes and people thought I was a drug dealer in the neighborhood. This is one of my favorite stories about you, by the way, is just like Val basically became a whale of like Google Advertising business. Like you were like the second biggest buyer of AdWords or something from your parents' basement. Yeah, basically. It was like you and like eBay.

Like what were you doing like affiliate? Like what were you doing? Yeah, I was doing a lot of affiliate stuff. I had like 800 different advertisers that I was marketing. You know, I was an affiliate marketer, but I had a lot of like, like very premium deals, a lot of like nice brands. So I was definitely like on the premium side of affiliate marketing. If you could, you know, so like my clients were like New York Times and Rhapsody and eBay themselves. And so it was like I did all the good stuff. You know, I didn't really do colon cleansers and asideberry stuff, you know, and all those interesting things that were out.

What year was this in? So I started around right after like the dot-com bubble collapse. Okay. So it wasn't actually Google I started with it. I started back in the days when we used to be overtured, which became go-to.com and then was acquired by Yahoo, which became Yahoo search. This was. So I was big on Yahoo first.

This was an epic. So no one talks about this, but from 2000 to 2006 was the heyday of affiliate marketing. Yeah. And for those of you don't know what affiliate marketing is, It's basically when a brand, instead of going out and doing their own advertising, they say, hey, Sahel, we'll give you $5 for every install or lead or sale that you generate. And they give you a special Sahel code. When people think of affiliate marketing today, they actually think of it as like influencer marketing.

What was happening from 2000 to 2006 is there were people like Yuval. and I actually was also involved in some of this, where we would do arbitrage. So we would actually, you would go, let's just say, and do a deal with eharmoni.com. Eharmoni.com would pay you $5 for every lead. And you would go, and because at the time, these big brands were terrible at user acquisition.

It was completely brand new. These people, and they call them super affiliates, these super affiliates were better at marketing than some of these big brands. I mean, it's completely. So you were basically, but you didn't know how to do this. It's not like you went to school for this or something. You were basically just kind of like hustling in the early days. You were like, oh, yeah, I can do it for this price.

And you'd go, you know, learn how to do it, scale it up. And then once you had done it well, you were like, oh, I can scale this up, do it with more money, do it with more money, bigger brands, whatever. Yeah, I mean, listen, I had a. bullshit like little PlayStation website and and uh it started making like 5,000 bucks a month. I was in high school, which is a lot of money in the 90s. And, uh, right away. Dotcom bubble burst.

And like I went from making $5,000 a month to like 500 a month. If that, actually that was revenue. So I was probably losing it after all the web hosting costs and all that. So I started like scrambling to figure out how to sell, uh, advertising. So I started selling advertising on my own. Then I realized that like, wow, I'm actually pretty good. Like I need more inventory. So I started selling advertising on other people's websites.

And then I start looking for more ways to like scale that up. So that's kind of how I came across affiliate marketing because I just grabbed a few like deals from half.com at the time because they would have video games. The video games was a big category there. So I was like, wow, this is actually kind of converting. And that led to me testing it on search. And I'll and just actually I lost money. Like I lost $5,000, $6,000, I think actually. night. I turn it on on go to dot com. There were no budget caps at the time. I go to sleep. I wake up

on negative $6,000 and I only had $1,000 in leads. So I lost like 5Gs that that one night, right? I was like, holy cow. I think most people will actually just like, oh my God, I'm never doing this again, like the stupidest thing ever. And I just something just like on the inside. I just had that gut feeling. Wait, I made a thousand. I got that I brought in a thousand dollars, right? Like I'm too, Sometimes it's like I'm an optimist. Right. So I look at it as like, wow, I've earned a thousand dollars. I didn't think of it like, hey, I lost six, like I lost five thousand.

Right. So like I was able to take that thousand bucks. And then see like we just dive into that thousand dollars that, that we were able to, like I was able to generate. And turn that into a gold line. I mean that that that that just. What did you end up making over those few years like before, you know, the market now, it's funny. Right. Like this market has become hyper.

efficient now, or at least much more efficient because of how much, I mean, you were, you were sort of like a pioneer, right? Like, you were early days. So there was massive spreads. Like you could, you know, you could make a ton of money off of doing this. Now there's like so much money across all of this stuff that has flown in. And so it's made the market more efficient. But like, just to give people a sense of the scope, you were 19 years old when you started this and built this out of the basement. Like, what did you end up making off this from a profit standpoint. Over 30 million?

Out of your, out of your parents' basement. Yeah. That's so absurd. I remember reading your, you wrote a piece about it, which I remember reading, I don't know, six months ago or something

like that, that just said that like, at your, at your largest, you were Google's second largest advertiser as well, like operating out of your parents' basement, which is just like, that's one of my favorite things ever. Yeah, and the, The funny thing is I only found out because somebody told me from the inside.

And then when Google had like all these class action lawsuits, and you realized how big of a percentage I was of that class action. They didn't file it. It's like somebody obviously else did all the work. And my numbers were pretty big on that. So I was like, wow. I didn't realize how big of a chunk of the revenue I was at one point. And this is like probably right around right before their IPO.

So they were like already big but not that big yet. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. Listen, man, the markets are becoming way more efficient. The way I look at it is the windows of opportunities are starting to get shorter and shorter. So like you're talking about 2000, 2006, whether it's affiliate market or really search. Like I look at it more on the search side, right?

That's the way that has like a nice six year window. But after that, you know, like display advertising also had a decent window. But everything after that, like Facebook, I mean, it probably got closed in two years, right? Instagram, one year. Like TikTok has probably got burned out within a year, right? And if you could catch that lightning bolt, right, in that short opportunity window, window opportunity, you know, and you could build up on that. That's the magic because, you know, there are plenty of successful people still on TikTok, right? But a lot of them kind of caught that wave early on when it was an open opportunity.

Yeah, that's really profound because I think what you're saying is the half-life of marketing channels are getting shorter and shorter, especially with all these tools. Like now, like when you create a Facebook ad, it's out in the open. Your competitors can go and check your Facebook ad. And vice versa, you can go and check their Facebook ad. So I think I remember, well, I sound like an old person, but I remember when you can buy a Facebook ad for a nickel. Back in my day. You literally, when the Facebook ad platform came out, it was a nickel for a click. Yeah, especially for content.

Yes, they were charging five cents. Like, for con- Like going to the movies for our parents. Like, I don't know the average right now, but it's, you know, 50 cents to a dollar 50. So the Facebook ad platform comes out with all this inventory. It's five cents. And we, you know, we looked at it and I was also young at the time. This is like, what year was that about? Like 2006, maybe, 2007 when they did their ad platform?

Something like that. Facebook? Yeah. No, they were later than that. It hadn't been later than that because it would have been, I was like out of high school. Yeah. It must have been like 2011 or something. I don't know.

Let's see. I don't, I don't. And does it work as an option? Like, is the way it works? They just put it out and then people bid on it? Yeah. So there was, they put it out, people bid on it. It's 2007.

I'm, how old am I at this time? I'm 18 years old, 17 or 18 years old. And what we did was did deals with the Zingas of the world who were building Facebook games, who needed installs. So they would pay us $3.50 for all these social game companies for every installs. And we were buying, we were buying clicks for $5. So what we needed is like. So you were doing, you were an install super affiliate.

Yeah. So we like our niche, like we understood community and social. So when all these social networks started implementing ad platforms, we were really good. at creating content around it. So then we're just like, oh, hey, let's just go do a deal with. And I don't speak about this publicly very much, by the way, Sahel. I see your face. You're like, what?

I don't even know you. But like the beauty about affiliate marketing is that if you build, if you get this to work and it costs you $0.50 and you get $1.50 out, you want to, you know, instead of putting $1,000 a day, you want to put $10,000 a day or $100,000 a day or a million dollars a day. and it becomes the world's greatest money vending machine. Yeah. It's so easy to scale once you got that formula going. Yeah.

I just remember seeing, I think it was Toby recently that at Shopify said, like, you know, it's so interesting to your point on like the half-life of these opportunities shrinking over time. It's sort of broadly, by the way, like the half-life of these marketing channel opportunities has definitely shrunk. The half-life of like every opportunity, I feel like has shrunk with the rise of technology. Like if you're not, if you have an idea and it looks like an interesting opportunity, you have to go get it fast. Because if you don't, there's someone else that's going to go capitalize on it. It's going to get squeezed out. But like, totally more people now, right?

Like, they have interest in these, in these spaces. Yeah, there's more people with the internet. Right? Just there's more people with the internet. Like, it's just, it's really hard, right? You're competing not just against like the nerds, you know, with computers. Like it might have been 20, 30 years ago. Now it's like everyone has a computer with their phone.

phone, not to mention that like the entire subcontinent of India has come online and is all technology focused. So there's just like there's massive, massive opportunities still, but they go away fast. And so you have to like be a type of person like you guys both are clearly to go and capitalize on these things. Yeah. You know, that's said, there's still a lot of fragmentation out there that if you have that skill to do arbitrage or you actually like doing it or you have a skill at any particular topic or category, he could still do plenty of arbitrage. You just have to get a little more fragmented and figure out how to scale that fragmentation, which is like one, like the company that I'm building now is a lot to do with that. It's a lot more involved, but, you know, but the second

business that I scaled up right after that was also just just a different set of, just different set of arbitrage, which is I got into the whole music category. And that was, that was actually a bigger business than Then the first one, I was like, the first year, I generated over 10 million net profit. Jeez. And, and, and, it was always, it started out with just me, but ended up being like seven people. And we had like a monopoly on distribution of premium content, specifically started it with like ringtones. So if you ever seen like a music site and said, like, send this ringtone to your, to your cell, like, back in the years, that was me. we had like a half a billion people we were in front of every month and so it was pretty

you know so there's a once you get like a feeling for for those inefficiencies you could take advantage of them across many categories like Greg like I never got involved on the on the installs game I know it was huge I knew it was huge I never got it on it but I never got it on it but yeah there's like so many different ways you could to make that work well there's two ways there's two ways of like if you're listening to this and you're like okay how can i get involved in something like this well one way is you find a new platform shift so like search gets really big and ads come out or TikTok gets really big and their ads come out you find a new platform and you create a product or partner with someone with a product on that new platform and the second way is you create a new

you're just really good at content so you create a new format on that platform so as an example and some might and I'm not I don't know about you but I'm not creative like Sahel is obviously creative like he has somehow you're like you're like a weird creature where it sounds like you're I feel like you're creative yet yet you're good with numbers right I'm not creative

I've never been called a weird creature before but I will take that hey man that's what makes it makes you tick like I said I can't I can't I'm not creative at all so I cannot put out content on TikTok like that

So, yeah, but people figured out different concepts that work on Instagram, stories, or TikTok. What do you see today when you look at the landscape as some of the interesting opportunities? In any category? Yeah, broadly. Like you're saying, you know, you need to be able to kind of identify whatever some of those opportunities that might exist. Like, if you were looking out and you were, I know you're building something else right now, if you were looking out, like, what do you think are some of the spaces that our listeners should be looking at and thinking about building in? I still think that a lot of the mom and pops,

and mom and pops could be different sizes, right? Like, you could have mom and pops toward 300,000 revenue. You could have stores that do $2,000, $5 million. You have car dealerships that do $5, $10 million. Right. So all kinds of ranges of mom and pops. But I think they're still very much behind in many categories. And if you could bring him value, right, connect them and make them relevant on whatever

platform, whether it's TikTok. or Facebook or Instagram, whatever it is, make them relevant on those category and those platforms, there's absolutely an arbitrage there because they're willing to spend money to catch up because they haven't caught up. So I do that for the jewelry industry.

I mean, what I've done is way more advanced because I'm also like vertically integrated the jewelry manufacturing process and doing all the data and marketing for them. So it's a way more like advanced. But if I was, you know, if I had smaller investment,

if I could make a smaller investment and even if it's a side hustle, I mean, that's what I would do. I would just go out there and start helping small fragmented mom and pops. And you know what? I always like historically, I've always started with arbitrage first. Because once you figure out that there's an arbitrage in something, you could build and scale around that.

right so so i think it's very important and you could once you do that once you figure out that magic formula that works you then it's up to you whether you want to take bc money or if like not everybody's good at raising money right nobody not everybody has those connections as well yeah there's like a massive opportunity broadly you know if you think of it as like an agency business model um you know not raising money like if you're an individual and you're kind of a hustler and you have a builder mentality around these things um i mean you could probably go like in your town and go to the like small, you know, restaurants, shops, et cetera, in the center of your town or, you know, in the local area, I bet if you went and talk to them, you know, about what they're doing around,

you know, online advertising or online reviews or, you know, whatever it might be, I bet you could go and, like, secure a few, you know, monthly retainer type contracts to go and deliver them value. And you could basically say, hey, it's free the first month. I'll prove, you know, the value of doing this. And then we, you know, agree to some sort of contract going to forward and I bet you could spin up like if it's just you too and you're just like paying your living wage I mean you could probably spin up like a 50,000 a month business pretty quickly doing that for like a bunch of local mom and pops on like a few thousand dollar a month type retainer deal for all of them. Today I am so excited to talk about Riverside. Riverside is the leading platform for studio quality remote podcasts and video recordings from anywhere. We absolutely love it at where it happens, and you're going to love it too.

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slash room. Again, that's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash room to get started today. Yeah, absolutely. But you know what I would do is I wouldn't go local, like your own local backyard. I would pick an industry, like one category, and then try to start getting them, you know, like locally, regionally, even nationally, like go after that one because then you're going to be very good at one. So when I was thinking about launching my last, my last company, So I actually retired for like three years, right? And I was too bored. I got to like build something myself. And I was like, no, I'm going to go after something that's not corporate America because that's what I've done my whole life, right? I want to do something that that helps the main street. And so the things I was looking at is like something very huge, like huge, but fragmented. So pizza shops, right? And this is before like slice came out. I don't know, like later on slice. I was kind of thinking in that. realm right i was thinking about all the um bars like all the pubs they have they all had these they have these like beer dispensing mechanisms right like why can i take over that distribution of that

right and then i own that distribution point like that that's the stuff i was thinking about um just going very after like one category um but that's very fragmented so i love it as a as a as like a general framework or idea for starting and building something. You guys want to do some business ideas? Yeah, sure. Let's hit it. Let's do it. All right. Well, first off, I want to do one that's sparked by a thread that you did, Val. So I was recently on Twitter, and Greg obviously knows this, but Val, I'm expecting my first child soon. And, yeah, little boy, super excited. But you wrote a thread. about basically rather than paying your kids allowance, you pay them interest. And it sparked for me a business idea that I think is kind of interesting.

But will you just kind of give the general concept of what you wrote about and then I'll lay out the idea? Yeah, absolutely. So it all started with my view, again, immigrant mentality and how do I instill my kids to, look, they're going to grow up in a different environment that I grew up. I wasn't ever like super poor or anything like that, but I lived in the Soviet Union. And like I said, I couldn't get a computer for the next first six years in this country. So, I mean, we had food on our table, but I was never like wealthy or well-off or anything like that. So how do I instill that into my kids?

And, you know, I realize that resourcefulness is very important. Right. So I actually don't give, I purposely limit the resources. I throttle the resources they get. I want them to figure it out how to do a lot with very little. Essentially, that's what made me successful, I think. At least that's what I think. So the idea was, okay, I'm not going to give you an allowance.

You're not going to get free money, right? You're going to have to figure out how the world works. And, you know, they start getting, I know, I know they start getting like little birthday gifts and little holiday gifts. And I told them like, hey, and they start putting it into piggy bank, right? They were like little kids like two, three years old, right? They start putting in a little piggy bank, right? That's the thing because somebody gave them a piggy bank.

That's fine. I told them like, hey, you know, that's money sitting there in piggy bank. It's doing nothing, right? You know, and I was like, what if you put it, what if you give it to somebody? They're going to give you back more money, you know? And it has to be like super basic conversation. like you kind of get a little more and more detail as they get older, but it has to be super basic, right?

That somebody else needs money and could use the money to do something with that, right? Rather than sitting in your piggy bank. And it made sense. So what I've done is I created this like Google Sheet and every time they have money, they want to put it instead of putting your piggy bank, they put it in our kid's loan account. And it collects interest.

So essentially instead of giving them allowances, they get interest on their money. I picked an arbitrary number just because it's easy 1% a month, which is 12% a year. They're staking their allowance. They're staking their allowance, exactly. To use Greg's Web 3 analogy. I mean, the thing that I thought was so interesting about it was it's a topic

that I often think about of like we have this complete inability to educate children and young adults on investing money, you know, like modern principles of all of this. The things that, by the way, like our parents learned about that stuff are not really applicable today. The entire landscape has changed. There's so many different opportunities. There's all this different stuff. So I thought this was really interesting the way you laid it out. It also just made me, made my eyes light up a little bit around business opportunities around it.

Because as you said in the thread, you're like managing it with kind of a janky spreadsheet that you pulled together and like, you know, kind of like working with them through that. And it maybe isn't super intuitive to them as they have like tons of technology at the, their fingertips. And so, you know, I've seen a bunch of like general apps that are doing like kids related investing or different things. But I wonder whether there's an opportunity to kind of create like a very simple set of tools for parents to, um, sort of like engage and have this general, um, discourse and dialogue with their kids around like the range of opportunities. The thing I thought, you know, like you have investing. That's one. Like you can put money into the stock market and have discussions around the different companies and the stocks and what it looks like and how it tracks

over time. You have like a bank, like this interest idea, which is like you put, you know, you put money in and it's being loaned out to other people here with other people that got it. Here's what it looks like. You might have, you know, the different areas of it, right, like bonds, whatever it might be. But kind of create a set of like very simple, intuitive technology tools that allow you to have those discussions. Recently saw a company called Greg, you and I talked about this. early bird, early bird that I think our friend Alexis backed that has like the investing side of it where you can kind of like set up an account for your kid and have, you know, people contribute dollars so that you can have investments and talk to your kid about those over

time. I think the combination of like the actual functionality plus the education and like discussion aspect of it is where it becomes really interesting. Like what you're doing where you're actually able to have the discussions with your kids explained to. them how it works, what the tradeoffs are of each decision, etc. That's where I think something really interesting comes together. So I'm curious for your guys' thoughts. I love it. I'm actually just checking it out.

I haven't heard of an early bird. I know there are some other, what's the one with something with green. I know one of my kids were asking for like a credit card from that company. It was specifically for children and to help them manage finances, right? So anything around educating about finances for kids, I think it's a great thing. It makes it more comfortable with money. Some of the comments I was seeing in the threads, and it was like, it wasn't largely people loved it. It kind of went bit viral, relatively speaking for me.

Not Sahil viral, but it went viral enough for me. And, you know, there was some comments about, you know, some parents are like, oh, let the kids be kids and don't talk to them about money. I don't, you know, I feel like they should be more comfortable about money and not be all weird about it when they grow up. And if you kind of, you know, it's not like I sit there with them like to just talk about money all the time. But that's, I think that's part of the education. Yeah. And it's not like you're forcing. I mean, you're giving them the sense of the tradeoffs, right?

Like they can either sit and let their money grow or they can spend it, in which case it's not growing and they're using it on something. And so like my general take on it is like this is stuff that you're going to have to decide the rest of your life. Like you all three of us, every time you have to decide whether to go buy some nice thing or spend it on something else, you're deciding between like investing it in something cool, putting it into the market, staking it and cryptic, like doing all of these different things. You're having to make those tradeoffs and those decisions. And so why not educate kids on those tradeoffs over time from an early age? The challenge with most of these businesses historically, by the way, has been the customer acquisition. cost is insanely high because kids are like Gen Z, all of these like teen investing apps and teen banking apps notoriously very difficult businesses that you have to raise a shitload of money

for because the churn is crazy high because the kid just like, you know, they get on it and they're all into it and then they go on to the next thing. Like whatever the next hot thing is that comes really high churn. And it's really hard to market to them. Like you're marketing to our point earlier through TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, super expensive to buy the ads and to get the customers. So I think they're like going early is really interesting because then you're actually selling to a parent like with early bird. It's kind of cool because they're like selling to me or they're selling to you, Val, and they're saying like, oh, you're interested in talking to your kid about this over time. Come join us. You're going to be able to track and watch this throughout your life. And so now

it's like a sticky customer that is sitting there. I think there's something actually really interesting with it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the distributions that I remember when I was researching one of the categories we were looking into potentially start a business around. And it was actually kind of related to families and children. What I realized how huge of a distribution channel the schools themselves are. And you could get in them through PTAs. Oh, B to B to C sale. I like that. Yeah. The parent teacher associations are like everywhere. Like, and they have so many parents involved and, you know, and teachers like, so there are many ways. Yeah. And you into some of these categories. Here's the tech light version of it, by the way, which I'll leave you,

and we can jump to the next idea. The tech light, so the tech heavy version is something like early bird, you know, build a whole platform. They raise money. They're like, you know, now a high-flying tech company. The tech light version is literally go create like a newsletter or a blog that is, kind of offers free information plus like paid premium tools that take parents, new parents on this money and educational journey with their kids. I think that in and of itself would be really interesting and valuable, where you're literally just like, hey, we're going to give you free information about how to talk about interesting new money things and teach them to your kids. And by the way, if you want to do more, here's like the free or no, here's like the premium paid

set of tools for like showing in a spreadsheet how to track the different things. And it's just like a preset spreadsheet where you can track their investments or track the interest stuff. I think that would be really cool. You could probably go set that up and like build an audience around something like that. And I bet you could generate a seven figure business just off of doing something like that. Well, it was a market watch. I know when we can move on, but like market watch is like the, right, I think it's market

watch that has the stock market game. Yeah. Right. And if you have kids like all the schools use that one platform. to do a stock market game. Like they compete in the schools and they all use that MarketWatch stock market game. So somebody's already giving, it's just like one tool. Yeah.

And it's been used for who else how many years have been around. I think it's been around. I think it's been around, you know. I mean, I went to school. They didn't have Market Watch back then. So they used to do it some other like little paper. Like I would fill out like my stock buys, I remember, on a piece of paper. But yeah, like those tools.

and I bet MarketWatch has so much traffic just coming from that particular category. If I was doing this idea, I would do it as a free-to-play game. So a video game. I'm reading this book right now called Reality is Broken,

why games make us better and how they could change the world by Jane McDonnell. And it's fascinating. And I think it's actually a must read for any, I think it's a must read for any person interested in product. But I also think it's a must read for any parent. Because there's definitely that, you know, a lot of parents think, oh, my God, you know, my kids are playing video games. It's a waste of time, that sort of thing.

But it's just about how you can use game dynamics to get people to learn how to do things. And if it's a free game, you can go to the PTA and be like, hey, like, it's a free game. go check it out, go to XYZ.com. That's what Robin Hood is. Yeah, it's a game. It's a game. It's what Robin Hood. They gameify the stock market.

Listen, so somebody like probably my age and you guys, right, the reality is the government has pulled away the ability for the average people to make a lot of different kinds of investments. The SEC basically blocks all kinds of different opportunities because, you know, they scrutinize everything, right? So that's why we have the world we live in where institutional money, like VC money, has access to all these tech companies, grows them to tens of billions of dollars of value, only then put them out on the IPO because it's just not worth for these companies to go public anymore, right? Same thing happens with all the alternative investments. And we're starting to see all this cracking all over the place.

Robin Hood gamified it. I mean, they got into trouble with the CC a bit here and there, right? you got like all these other platforms that are just made it more available like angel list right or other places like so you got more public involved in just all these investments now because it's finally getting like reopened up and there's just so much pent up demand for that and so i think we're seeing seeing that right now and like you're to your point right like rob robin hood is that's what exactly they did uh is they gamified um the dynamics of the stock market this is like a fascinating space I'm actually about Greg, I haven't talked to you about this. I'm about to invest in a big player in this space in India that's doing like, I don't know what it, I don't know what it's called like play to game. I don't know. It's like real money finance type games where like you you put money into it.

That gets you like literal tokens, not like crypto tokens. It's like a crypto. It's like being in an arcade. So like you put money, you put, you know, 10 rupees in. You get 10 rupees worth of tokens. you can use them to play the like games that are in the app. And you can earn rewards from the app. And that's kind of like their marketing costs.

But the 10 rupees you put in is actually like into a savings account. Like it's invested for you. And so then you can like, it's sort of a way of onboarding this whole new generation of people into saving and investing via games. And so like exactly to your point, Greg, it's this amazing way of like onboarding an entirely new generation of people into saving, investing, etc. through a gamified experience that people kind of intuitively know and understand.

Yeah. Super interesting space. Play to earn. I think that's the terminology for all those games. Yeah, this isn't quite play to earn. With savings component. Yeah. I don't know what the what the like effective term is of this.

It's not played earn because you're not like it's not quite the same mechanics of it. It's not like a crypto, you know, etc. It's really like, you know, real money game. is kind of like the general space that it exists in, but super interesting space nonetheless. Anyway, let's jump. Who else has one? Business idea.

You want to, who did the first, last one? I think that one was me. Oh, yeah, you did the last one. Okay. Listen, man, I think that, I mean, I could give it a shot. Go for it. I think that, and I'm learning this myself now, to be frank, I think that is underrated, right?

I've never used that in my life, whether aggressively or even moderately. I'm starting to use it moderately. The reason I'm saying that is the abundance of availability of like SBA loans now. The government is like looking for ways to give out money. People should be taking advantage of that, right? Because and if you could use that, and I'm not saying like just do stupid shit and the ways, you know, and, you know, take on debt. I think it's very serious, but in right moderation, you could acquire a little, you know, or maybe not so little to most people, you know, a business, right, that maybe it's a franchise

business or it's a, or it's a, you know, a local, you know, two doors, you know, local two doors doing whatever, selling whatever or doing whatever, right? So if you could take an SBA loan, a lot of times the mechanics are, you could pay that loan off if so quickly, And then you have this high ROI business that will pump out cash flow for you, even after you pay that, as you're paying that loan even. So there are so many opportunities around that, especially the interest rates are being super low. I think that everything becomes an opportunity. Yeah. I think, you know, the combination, so SBA loans, small business administration, like they give out loans.

Basically, they have partner banks all around the country. you can go, you can look up on the website, what partner banks exist near you, develop a relationship with like a local branch that issues these loans. They come with really friendly terms, you know, like long, long terms, low rates. Obviously, rates are rising some now, but still quite low. I think the combination of SBA loans, so the downside of SBA loans is they are, they are personal, like personal guarantees and recourse to you. So if you default on one of these, you're going to be on the hook with like garnishing wages in the future to pay them off. But an SBA loan in combination with doing some form of seller financing when you go buy a

small business is like a hugely, hugely powerful thing. And it's what some of if you're on Twitter and you follow like Cody Sanchez, who we've had on this show or Nick Huber or some of these other folks, they're writing about this where it's like this huge opportunity that exists where you can go buy these small businesses with extraordinarily little down. Chris Munn is another one that I've seen right about this, where basically you can put 50K down, get like 750K of seller financing,

which is basically that you're buying the business from them, but what are they going to do with that money? They're going to have to pay a bunch of taxes on the business. And so they're loaning you the money to buy their own business, and you're going to pay them a rate on that. So for them, they're happy because, A, they don't have to pay taxes because it's not like a gain yet. it's a loan that they're making.

And they're getting a rate of return on it, which is probably above what the market is giving them in this environment. And the combination of the seller financing plus an SBA loan, you can go buy a business that maybe is making like several hundred thousand dollars in cash a year for much less than that and be making it a massive effective rate of return on the equity that you're putting into it. So, I mean, I agree with you. I think it's really interesting.

The flip side of it is I do think there's like massive headaches that operating one of those businesses can have that, you know, small business Twitter maybe like glazes over when they when they write about these things. Oh, absolutely. It's a anything like that is a hustle, right? And but if you are making whatever, if you're making $60,000 salary or $80,000 salary, right, and you have the opportunity to buy something that's generating $200,000. I mean, that's a game changer.

And you'll like, if I wasn't those shoes, I probably hustle to make that $200,000. and then eventually at 200,000, you know, you buy a few more or you build a few more and you have to half a million, a million dollars a year in profits. And like I didn't, I don't really follow much of those on Twitter, but like I've, and I've never taken SBA myself, but some people asked me for advice. And like, I'll give you one example. This guy, he has a family and he was looking at buying a business for $2 million that was generating like 700,000 in profit.

I think it was EB-Dam or net. I remember. And then, you know, and he could take a, he was already approved for SBA to give him a loan. All he had to do is put $100,000 or $130,000, something along those lines. There you go.

Like you put on $120,000 and you could buy a business that's generating $500,000, right? And there's so much cushion. Like, even if something goes wrong and you don't make that $600,000, and now you made $400,000 or $300,000, there's just still so much. cushion in between for these small businesses because they're typically sold at like three times, you know, three to five times income. So there's a big cushion. If you mess something up,

there is like room to make mistakes. Yeah. It's kind of like, it's interesting too because it's a way for people to like opt out of the, um, the standard path, right? Like maybe you're not, you know, a tech, you know, builder where you're not going to go raise a bunch of money for some VC back thing. That's totally fine, but you also don't want to go, you know, have to work for someone the rest of your life. This is like a pretty cool way if you're, you know, entrepreneurial to go buy a local business and build, you know, really meaningful income and wealth, you know, without having to do either of those paths. Like, you can kind of opt out of the, of the standardized life and system of, like, working for someone and climbing up the corporate ladder and buy, like, a local landscaping business. And, you know, operate and running.

It doesn't have to be so scary. Like, buying a local landscape business is scary. Like, there's so many things that you probably, most people don't know about, right? But you could also buy a franchise, right? And a lot of the stuff is already figured out for you by those friends. And it doesn't have to be like a major, major franchise. It could be like a franchise with 300 locations. I wanted to do kids swim schools.

That was the one that I was like really high on recently. Because parents pay. Everyone puts their kids into these swim schools now. I was looking it up the other day. The unit economics on the boxes, like, they make a couple million dollars per box with like really high margins because it's literally just a pool. Like it's not a fancy place.

And so if you can just like finance the build out of one of these, very low overhead from a labor perspective because it's literally just like a few classes a day and you just need like one or two teachers to do them. But there are these kids swim schools that you can go get. There's not like crazy net worth requirements to getting the, to getting the franchise licenses or whatever it's called for a given territory. I think I know exactly which one you're talking about because my kids for many years used to go to one of those and there's also a franchise.

Yeah, and literally everyone puts their kids into these things. Goldfish was the one that I was looking at, I think. I'm not sure if it's a franchise and I think it is a franchise called Safety Squam. Yeah, yeah. The other one that would be amazing would be building these like kids like birthday party places. These things have like risen, especially in higher income areas. Like, you're like, you basically put up like a turf field and like a bunch of like games and people can like bring their own food.

You rent out the place. They're rented out for like years. The one in my friend's neighborhood where he was having his kid's birthday party is literally rented out every weekend for the next year. Like he had to do the kid's third birthday at the same time as doing his second birthday because it's rented out for every weekend. And I was just like this is in the middle of nowhere. It's in an industrial area. It's literally just like turf. There's nothing super nice about it.

Don't think they're on machine too. Like they have everybody on a conveyor belt to go from room to room. Yeah. And you can do like during the week, you can do like corporate events or you could do like soccer games, like do like a league or something like that. I think you could make a killing off that business. I'm listening to you guys speak and I couldn't be less interested in like owning a landscape business or owning this like turf where I'm inviting kids to it and for high income earners.

I think what happened was on Twitter, there was everyone just talking about internet products all the time. And then there became this wave of like, you know, sort of physical sweaty businesses. And it's been like really, you know, in vogue, on vogue to like go and buy a laundromat. And my take is it's a really personal decision. Like I know as an internet person, like owning. a laundromat owning a landscaping business. Like, you know, my hair looks good or, you know, I've got

a lot of hair, but my hair is about to be gone, like fully taken out of my hair. Like, if I go and, you know, run a business like that. I think that it's a very personal decision. For me, no bueno, but for, I think there's going to be a lot, here's my

prediction. I think there's going to be a lot of internet people who are going to end up buying laundromats and stuff like that and it's going to go really wrong. And I have one more, I want to end with one thing, Val, if you were building your affiliate business and all of a sudden you're like, you know what, I need to go, I see, there's this like loan I can get and I can go like buy a landscaping business. Isn't that like, you know, right before you came on, we were talking about focusing and how being heads down is really important. Isn't that like the opposite of that, like splitting your attention? Like, don't you think like if you're really good at something,

Don't you think you should like double down on it? Oh yeah, absolutely. That's what I was saying. Like figure out what you're good at, try to do some arbitrage around that and then double down into that category. I would absolutely not be buying landscaping businesses. You know, like I said, I don't, I don't know anything about a lot of things out there. But what?

So my pushback to this, Greg, by the way, first off, I completely agree with you. Not for everyone. It sounds like a complete headache. the way I would do it, because I don't want to go run a landscaping business either. I don't want to run like this place was called chatter splatter, like the kids turf thing or like a goldfish swim school. Like I don't want to go run that shit either. And I don't think I'd be good at it. I don't think I'd be good at it.

But could I like go pay some young person like 200 grand a year and it would be a great salary for them to run it and like deal with all of the headaches? Give them like some upside plus a salary. And now I own something that happens to be netting me like 40% cash on. on cash returns annually and now it's just like a great investment and it's throwing off a bunch of cash flow. I don't hate that idea. Yeah, until that idea works extremely well until something happens and the manager quits or leaves and all of a sudden you're like on the on the front lines in the trenches and like you're sacrificing your main business to go like go for a swim. And that's that's the risk. And yeah, like is that, you know, I,

small risk, absolutely. But like, I want to, yeah. The way I think about it is like, I want to take risks in my world and my business, like, around like agency and studio and stuff like that. Like, in internet stuff and community and web three, I don't want to take risks in like, and stuff like that. I think what you're getting, you're getting at like a very profound and important point to reiterate, which is like know your, know your game and focus on your game. And I do I think it's a great point to make because I've been saying this recently. Like, if you want to excel in anything, write down the 10 most important things in your life and then cross seven of them off the list and focus on those three because you can't have

10 things that you care about and that you're focusing on, you can really only have a couple. And so you need to just be ruthless about prioritizing them. I completely agree with you, Greg, actually, in hearing you say it and thinking about it because I've often thought about this in the case of real estate where I've had friends who are like make some decent money and then they're like, oh, I'm going to go buy rental properties. And personally, I think that most people that buy rental properties, maybe this is a hot take, it's like a vanity thing where they want to be able to flex and say that they own rental properties because the vast majority of my friends that have done that, it is the combination of a

headache and it doesn't drive better returns than just investing in a publicly traded reed that would get you the same exposure to real estate in general without having to actually manage any properties or do it. So I agree with you, Greg. I think there is probably, for the vast majority of situations, a much lower headache and lower intensity version of driving the exact same financial returns. Listen, you got to be able to, if you can't scale something, it's not going to be, to Greg's point it's not going to be manageable because like that manager quits everything goes to you know

hits the fan right um like so i actually have a portfolio of multiple companies right that either co-founders um of mine or managers who are CEOs of these businesses so like i'm talking about serious companies like i have a mobile advertising business my co-founder is a CEO he runs it you know they're a hundred we have 100 employees It's like it's going to do it's on the track to do like 100 million revenue very profitable, right? He got it like I don't get involved like real estate. I partnered up with a guy who I've known many, many years. He's like super smart.

We got I started his business five years ago, real estate development around, you know, like around New York City area is where our focus is. Which by the way, everybody wrote off all over the country like every headline. Like everybody's writing off New York City. But it's it's doing so well. It's unbelievable. Like we got over 100. million worth of properties that we're either already finished developing or sold or,

you know, kind of starting to break ground on now. So I think it's very doable as long as you have the right managers in place, but you have to scale up the team first because if that manager can't, you know, can't continue for whatever reason, right, if they get hit by a bus or something, you got to have ability to be, you know, if you have scale, there are always people that could step into those shoes or you could hire into that position because, you know, you have a big business that could afford a, you know, a solid manager. So luckily I've never had that situation, but, you know, but I think it's very, very doable. Again, on the, on the bigger side, like, you shouldn't be doing, you shouldn't be doing landscaping business on the side, like,

and hoping that somebody's going to run that business for you. It's just not going to happen. Yeah, normally if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And I think with most of these things, you need to go in eyes wide open about that. Like you're not getting those kind of returns for free. It comes with additional risk in the form of headaches or financial risk. You're buying a job too. At that scale, you're buying a job. Yeah, which like if you're a hustler and a grinder and you want to get out of your sales role

that you were doing and trying to climb the corporate ladder, maybe that's what you want. and maybe it's like a great way to kind of own your own career and own your life and you can go build around that. But to Greg's point, not for everybody. This was awesome and really enjoyed getting to get into Jam with you, man. I mean, $30 million from a, from a parent's basement, I think has to go down in the record books as one of the more legendary stories of hustling that we've had on the show. So, dude, truly appreciate you joining a bunch of interesting stuff. I mean, the huge opportunity around finance for kids. Check out Early Bird if you haven't checked it out, Val.

I think it's pretty interesting. I just set one up for my kid, actually. Super smart moved by the founders, by the way. Like, I had tweeted about something with it. And they sent me $50 for my kids account and it like got it started. Now I'm like, oh, I'm using this. You know, it's a great customer acquisition tactic. No, you're talking about it.

To do that really smart. Now I'm talking about it. And they did it. So very, very smart. But between that, the business idea around, you know, or lack thereof of some of these sweaty businesses, as Greg points out, the downsides of them, a lot of interesting stuff to chew on here. So really appreciate you joining. Any final takeaways from either, you guys? Go read.

No, man, I appreciate you having me. This is awesome. I mean, listen, I don't know what you guys are doing, but you got some magic sauce. You know, both of you on kind of the content side and some of the, some of the stuff I read, some of the threads I've seen, it's like, wow. So, I mean, it's interesting reading those because I'm not a good communicator. Some people are and some people aren't. That's just not my strength.

And some of the tweets like I see coming out of you guys. I think you're doing pretty well, man. Yeah, like I've been doing that and I don't even realize I've been doing that my whole life. You know what I mean? You're doing pretty well for yourself, man. I don't know. I mean, you're sharing real earned insights because of stuff that you've done and built along the way, which I find really cool and super value add to the community because a lot

of people can learn from it, both the positives and the negatives along the way. So truly appreciate all that you're doing and excited to get to continue to follow along on your journey. Nice meeting you, Val. And go read Reality is Broken, Val, that book around game design. Oh yeah, that sounds cool. Yeah, we're going to check that out. Yeah, absolutely.

And I already got the kids thing here, so I'm probably be signing up to that too. Yeah, check it out. Awesome. Awesome. Great seeing you, man. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at

hi at t-R-W-I-H.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon. Predicate the misery level company think on it pray on it Sip a cup of tea never let the world we broke it in the borders and I'm a