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

All right. Someone asked me an incredible question today. They said, if you had to pick one idea that could make you $1 million this year, and it can't be just a newsletter or a blog or an agency, which are usually our go-tos, what would it be? What would you do? One specific idea that you would do. And then he also said, and I want to hear one specific idea that you would do to try to make $1 billion. That's a good question. And me and Sam are going to answer that right now on this episode of My Future Millionaire. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my All right, what's up? We're doing our Q&A and we got one question that we really love.

But is the question, Sean, is it a billion dollar in net worth or a company that's worth a billion dollars?

I'm gonna say it's a company that's worth a billion dollars. So you, and then, you know, you own a big chunk of it. Okay. What's a bill? What's a billion here or there? Okay, look, the company's worth 1 billion. You're worth 1 billion. It's all a billion.

It's like a small ton.

It's a small ton.

Not as big of a ton as people think you get when you're, when you make a company that big.

Yeah, it's just the, the, the numbers change things a little bit, but let's just get right into it. The million dollar one. What do you got?

Million dollar one. All right, so, uh, you go first for this one.

So a million dollars in, is it net worth? Like, and what do we say, 3 or 4 years to do it?

Yeah, you got a couple years to do it. You're gonna make a million dollars.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're not going to be better, faster, or cheaper. We are simply going to be also in the business of doing this.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's our strategy. Yeah.

The me too strategy. Is that what this is like?

Me also.

No, no, no.

That's a different thing. We don't want me too. We don't want me too.

We don't want me too.

Sorry.

The me also strategy. That's what we'll call it. The me also strategy. So I would probably go to Quiet Light Brokerage. So Quiet Light Brokerage, I've had a couple friends sell and buy businesses through this. I've had one friend sell a business via Quiet Light Brokerage for $10 million. I had another buddy buy a company for $300,000 that ended up making $18 million a year in revenue. And I know those guys at Quiet Light Brokerage and I've talked to them. And basically Quiet Light Brokerage is a website where you buy and sell businesses. It's a brokerage, meaning it's not exactly automated, but what you can do is you can see anonymous descriptions of companies that are for sale. You can see what the earnings are, you can see what the revenue is. You can enter in your email and they'll send you all the financials to the business.

And by the way, I don't think, I think they make you sign an NDA or something like that. So I think you could get sued if you just rip it off entirely. But I think, but, and that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting be inspired by and do something exactly like it, but slightly different. Sorry. What, what, what are they?

Well, let's just look at it right now. So for example, I'm scrolling, uh, you go to Quiet Light or whatever. You could use any of these brokerage sites. We, we both like Quiet Light because it's a little curated, so it's, it's less filled with junk, even though honestly a lot of these businesses on here are absolute junk. So let me show you one of these junk businesses. So you go down to the kind of like for sale for $2 million. $2 million is a nice number, right? You could be even a little bit worse in this business and still make a million bucks. You could, if you've sold it for $2 million after taxes, you have a million dollars. All right. So here it is. It's an FBA business, fulfilled by Amazon. It's a money counting machine.

Does that mean that they're literally selling a money counting machine?

Yeah, like, I like any business that can be called a money printing machine, a money counting machine. In this case, they literally— so this says launched in 2020, so 3 years ago. It says this business sells money counting machines and counterfeit bill detectors to local businesses, government agencies, restaurants, financial services, banks, event management companies, and nonprofits.

Is it one like this? Like this money counting machine that I have sitting right here on my desk?

I have that right now.

So I have, for those not—

give it a run. Give it a run.

I don't have it. I don't have it plugged in, but I have, I literally have a money counting machine here with counterfeit money on it. When I sold my company, Jack Smith, my best friend, he bought me this as like a congratulations. It's $100. I've never used it, but I just like keep it there. And when I have friends that do something interesting, like they sell a company, they close a big deal, I send it to them and I say, uh, This is either gonna be a huge, like, uh, paperweight or you're actually gonna use it. Good luck. And it's a nice gift. I, I think this costs $200.

That's actually great. We should do that for the, for any fan. If you're going through the process of you're gonna sell your business, uh, just email us and we'll send you the counter as the good luck, as our good luck charm from us to you. Uh, that's great.

Whenever, when I have like my cleaning lady here, I'm like, just so you know, this is fake money. Don't even think about it.

Watch this. Rip it up.

Yeah, I was like, it's fake. All this, it's $100 grand in cash that cost $5.

That's a great trust test. You should, uh, just leave it out and see, be like, you know what, not only did you steal fake money, but you're out of a job too.

Well, that's actually a test I do when I have like new like vendors at my house, is sometimes I'll leave like a few hundred dollars there and I know exactly how much is there and I'll see like what's going to happen.

A candy bar. And see what happens.

So someone's selling literally a money counting machine.

Money counting machine, $1.8 million in revenue, $625,000 of net income, net profit. So they're selling it here. And then if you go and you, it's a husband and wife duo. They says they spent, this is a classic on Quiet Light. This is like the, I don't know what Tinder profiles say nowadays. I don't know what the kids are doing, but I know that every business for sale, the owner spends 5 to 10 hours a week on this. They just don't have enough time and energy to devote to growing the business that anybody who steps in could do. All right, so anyways, I would look at businesses like this and seems like what you're saying is you would probably look at what, like not one, but like maybe 20 to 30 of these just to get a good idea, get enough data points.

So here's a specific example of that. Uh, Exit5, I think is the name of it. Exit5 is like a community of B2B marketers. And I don't know what they pay per year. It's a little bit less than what you just said, but I think they could be charging, you know, more like $2,500 or $3,000. But the big idea here is go get 100 people paying you $3,000 a year. And you can even make it exclusive. Be like, this is a community for only 150 of the top B2B marketers in the world. We're going to, we're going to invite you in. And then you're going to share ideas. Plus we have this database of whatever, whether it's ad creative that works. We have this database of vendors that are, you know, buyers with their contact info. And we all openly share here. It's a, it's a sort of give to get, uh, you know, model. And, um, yeah, the thing is probably worth 2, 3 million bucks right now that this guy's made and, and, you know, 500 to 1,000 members.

And the reason if you're starting from scratch is you don't need that particularly big of an audience. You don't need to, you'd cold email people. You would also build an audience. But in order to get to a, let's say you have an audience of 5,000 people, which is very attainable to get, particularly if you give it a year, you only need about 100 to 200 people to buy what you're selling in order to hit that target. And you can, so your podcast doesn't need to be huge. Your Twitter handle, your cold email outbound strategy doesn't need to be huge. And so that's probably what I would do to get to $1 million. What do you think about that?

It's just more risk.

Well, yeah, there's, there's a little bit more risk 'cause you're personally liable for the, for the, for the loan there. So, you know, you have to buy a good business. You have to, you have to be able to know what a good business is. And that's where maybe some mentors could help. The other business, the other idea you said was basically a membership service, a membership site, a membership community for some niche, right? That's kind of like a similar idea.

It has to solve a specific problem. So a lot of these, Like you'll see a lot out there that are memberships for launching a business. That's not specific. That's not nearly specific enough. It's got to be geared towards employees and, and like there's a clear beginning, middle, and end, and there's an outcome. Uh, and there's a clear ROI as opposed to like accountability or whatever it is.

You know what I mean? Right, right, right. Nothing soft and fluffy. Um, all right, so those are good. I think those are really good. In fact, I think the first one you said is, I think, the right answer. Um, that's what I would, in reality, that's what I would go do. But to make it fun, I'm going to come up with some other ideas.

So is that what you had?

That's what I would, it's like if it was my cousin and my cousin's like, yo, how do I do this? I'd be like, all right, look, this is what we're doing. You need to do this. Worst case scenario, you're going to go learn what a bunch of blueprints for successful businesses and maybe you don't pull the trigger on any of them, but still was a good use of your time. And best case scenario, you find one of these that you say, I could do that. And And either you buy it or you're gonna like remix it and create your own version of that. So that is, I think, the right answer. The second right answer would be an e-commerce company, 'cause it's not hard to build an e-commerce brand either on Amazon or on Shopify that can sell for $1 million. But kind of, again, boring answer. So I'm going to give you a more fun answer. So here is, here's one idea, the 4 most beautiful letters in the English language are QSBS.

All right.

So what's the QSBS idea? You're going to create a QSBS advisory firm. Well, what is that? That's super niche. And technically this might be considered an agency, but, but I think we'll allow it because it's so specific and niche here and off the beaten path. So here's what you're going to do. Now, when any company starts, a tech company starts, that's going to be QSBS eligible. That QSBS eligibility is worth a lot.

You have to say what QSBS is.

Not only most tech companies, most new C-corps that hold for 5 years, well, it would would fall under this.

You know, like the 409, what's it called? The 409.

Yeah.

For one, so when, in order to do a bunch of stuff with your business, you, a lot of times tech companies have to get valued every year for different purposes.

Every year, every year you should get valued. And then that also is necessary when you want to issue new stock or whatever, uh, for employees or for investors. You typically set a benchmark for an 8A.

But there's a lot of companies that do this as a service where you spend, you spend $5,000 or $10,000, $5,000 to $10,000, and you don't actually give them that much information. You give them your financials. And then they ask you to submit like 10 publicly traded competitors and then they just like say, all right, we think that your valuation is blank and you spend $5,000 to $10,000, I think for that, you're basically—

you want it to be low usually. So usually what you're trying to do is get a low 409A so that everybody's options are priced low. Um, and so it's like, you're not, not even like you're trying to justify a high valuation. You're actually trying to justify a low valuation in most cases.

And it's kind of crony capitalism a little bit. Like they'll be like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll make it low and they, or we'll be fair and then they wink at you, uh, and they like set it really low. But, uh, yeah, basically you're, you're, what you're suggesting is doing the same thing for QSBS, which is equally valid idea.

But what I would do is I would, I would create this firm. What I like about the QSBS thing is it's a little bit higher ticket. So typically these people will charge, let's say, $10,000 to $15,000 for the initial attestation letter. I don't know if I'm I understand that word, right? But then on top of that, you could even charge kind of like an ongoing fee because there are all these like foot faults. So it's not just like a, there is some genuine help. So for example, oh, you're going to sell secondary. There's things you might do wrong when you sell secondary that could disqualify you. There's disqualifying events. And so, you know, you can't bill for revenue in specific ways. If it's categorized as X, it might take you out of QSBS eligibility. And so it's just an insurance policy to cover your ass. It's a legal thing. It's something people don't want to do themselves. It's too high risk to do yourself. And you literally can't do it yourself because you can't write the letter for yourself. And so you don't have to have it, but it is a nice to have. And what I would do is I would go scare the living shit out of every tech company that I find on Crunchbase. And I would say, don't you want this $10 million exclusion for you? It's per person, by the way. It's not per company. So it's per tax return. So let's say there's a company with, uh, that's going to be, going to be big. Every single one of those executives is going to want their stock to be QSBS eligible. And so I would go to them and I would scare the living shit out of them that they might get this wrong. And I would tell them, don't worry, we can cover this for you. And here's how we'll cover it for you. Pay us whatever, either the lump sum upfront or a monthly recurring fee or an annual recurring fee, $1,500 a year, $2,000 a year. And we will, uh, kind of make sure we're your advisory on that so that, you know, you're covered at the end of the day.

That's a pretty brilliant idea, actually.

Come on.

If you can't get to $1 million this way, you can't get to it anyway. Right? I think what holds a lot of people back would be there's not going to be a bunch of these. So this is not like you can't spring up 10,000 of these, like, you know, social media marketing agencies. There can be a million of those. You have to have some expertise or partner with people who have expertise. So they said, you know, some of the, some of the the mechanics of how to do it. But man, there's niches and riches and like, that's not that hard to do to get to.

And there's so many upsells to that, which is like the key to selling a company is they say, all right, well, how does this grow? And you say, well, do these companies also need a 409A? Do they also need these other legal services?

Do they?

Of course they do. That's how you do it. And you, and you sell the dream a little bit of what the expansion revenue comes from.

And the key here is you don't need to be a law firm. So there's all kinds of rules around who can own a law firm. You don't actually have to be a law firm to do this because it's not legal work. It's advisory. And it's like some blend of like legal accounting and just advisory. And so I think because of that, you don't need to be a law firm if you do this. And by the way, I've worked with somebody who does this. If anybody actually needs this letter, feel free to email me. I'll route you to the guy and you can actually use this because—

What are you going to be like the mob and take a cut for making the introduction? You should.

I gotta get my beak wet too.

All right.

Yeah.

Uh, that's actually better than my idea, by the way, because I actually think this is simpler because it's already a service others are providing and you're just basically connecting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, uh, I would look for things like that. I had like 5 other ideas that would fit this, but okay. For this exercise, we're doing one. Now let's move on to the main event, the billion dollar idea.

By the way, do I get a Thrill of the Shill before we get to the billion-dollar idea?

Oh, hold on. What time is it? It is time for the Thrill of the Shill. Sam, you are up. Your first time providing the Thrill of the Shill. For those who don't know, this is where we shamelessly shill one of our companies, but we have to do it in a thrilling way, meaning we gotta provide some value, some entertainment, some insight. We gotta provide something, a little something. We gotta have attributes if we're gonna do this. Here we go. Thrill of the Shill.

Well, we both used to be kind of like, oh, if you're an entrepreneur, you're a product maker. And like, we'd be sitting there writing, you know, you're writing the hustle and, you know, I'm sitting there in designing things and working with the engineers trying to make a product. But there is an up level of that, which is. Once you build the product and the product has product, which Hampton does, has product market fit, people like it, they use it, they're in it. Now you're a capital allocator. Basically, you're taking, you're just deciding where resources go. So I need to be able to, like, you can't be tight on money because money is your job. You have to deploy that in a way that's going to get more output than the input. And sometimes you'll miss, you're not going to be 100%, but knowing that that's the job makes it easier. And it sounds like having the right conversation at the right time from somebody who's a peer of yours was the key.

Yeah. And that's, by the way, one of the whole things about Hampton is that you have peers with other entrepreneurs that are of similar size company that you have. And anyway, that like learning, I remember having our team offsite at previous companies and I'm like, huh, like this person just had a baby. Basically, I just had a baby. How am I going to create enough revenue in order to like provide for this kid, because that's how it feels at first.

Or you're like, no, you didn't.

I did, remember? Yeah, like, I am the one who did that. Hey Jess, when's our baby shower? Uh, this year it's been— or you'll be like, this person costs $250,000, there's no way that's a fair salary, right?

It's like, well, that's not a house where I'm from.

Are you a house? Yeah, can I live in you?

You have 3 beds and a bath? I'm not paying you $250,000.

So that's been my biggest takeaway this year with running Hampton. So anyway, if you're particularly, if you're listening to this and you do at least $50 million in revenue, we're building groups for that. Joinhampton.com. All right, let's do, uh, the billion dollar one. You want me to go first? Can I go first?

Okay, go.

All right. I'm going to steal one of your lines. So Sean, what if I told you I had an idea?

This is your line.

I'm leaning in. What if I told you I had an idea? That Elon Musk himself would be bigger than Tesla. Would that interest you?

I'd be fairly interested.

Do you know who, uh, I think his name is Kai-Fu Lee. Do you know who that investor is?

He's the, uh, sounds awesome though.

He's a famous Chinese investor, basically one of the early guys at Apple, early at Google. He wrote a great book about why China is amazing, uh, in terms of like why they're going to beat America. And he was saying that this thing is going to replace 40% of jobs inside the next 12 years. Would that interest you?

I would love to replace 40% of jobs in the next 12 years. I think about that often.

Now, if you're thinking I'm talking about AI, you're wrong. Here's what it is. It's humanoids. Humanoids. That's what, that's the technical term. Basically imagine RoboCop or imagine machines. And I think that those whole, uh, business of humanoids, which is robots to automate a lot of processes. But a lot of people think like just blue-collar jobs, but that's not entirely true. It's like every type of job. So Elon Musk said that, um, the Tesla has— is working on humanoids. I think it's called Optimus is what it's called. And he went on to say that, uh, like at a recent investor call, he was like, not a lot of you people are talking about Optimus, our robots, but I think that's crazy because this is actually going to be bigger than our car business, bigger than self-driving, bigger than solar. It's going to be bigger than everything. And I don't think you guys realize how big this is going to be. I invested in this company, uh, in a space called Figure, and I talked to Brett Adcock. We had him on here, and he basically has me convinced that this is going to be like the biggest industry mover in the next like 10 or 15 years. And I think that what I would do—

You invested in Figure?

Yeah. Is that— is that— did I tell you that for the 30th time?

No, no, no, no. I've never told you that. That's funny. But, uh, what valuation?

$300 million, I think.

Okay. That's not bad.

And I invested—

I mean, it's bad, but it's not that bad.

Well, I invest and I invested a lot for me, which I think is around $60,000.

Well, yeah, he's like your hero. So, you know, you actually just paid for some time with him. Yeah.

I paid for access. I paid for him to reply to a text. Uh, but basically that, that was a lot of money for me. I don't normally invest that much, but my reasoning is, is like this could, I could see it going out of business., which is incredibly likely, I could see it selling for $3 billion, or I could see it becoming like a $50 billion company. But it's like any angel investment. I think the likelihood of it going out of business is incredibly high. But basically, here's my reasoning. If you— or why— reasoning why I think this could be a big company. I think this is going to be like one of the biggest things that happens in the next 15 years. I think that the people who are working on this space are typically like hardcore, uh, hardware engineering nerds. And I think that I could spend a year going to every meetup, going to Carnegie Mellon, which I think a lot of these folks come from. And I think I could find a handful of people and do a really good job of organizing these people around a company. I think that I could do a good job of cold emailing the Brett Adcocks of the world and getting in with them, as well as some of the older guys in the space and making them like open up to me and say, what are tangentially like the areas that you're not attacking that are interesting? I think I can get them to explain to me, uh, these problems. I think that, um, I think this is so big that there's going to be more of these robots than there are humans. And I also think that when you, in order to create a billion dollar company or a company that can net you a billion dollars, that's just, you have to go huge. And you, I think that the odds are what I'm doing personally in my life, I don't have a goal becoming a billionaire, but I think that could happen is I'm creating companies that sell for a small amount of money and then I'm letting compounding kind of like do the rest. That's going to take me 50 or 80 years. Who knows how long that's going to take me. But if you want to make it in a short amount of time, you pretty much have to raise VC and you have to do it in an industry that's like a tidal wave where you're just trying to catch that wave. If you want to do it in like 10 years rather. Um, and so I think I would go into the humanoid space. What do you think about that?

Well, as you know, I love that idea because I was going to say that idea and you said, no, can I say that idea today?

And I said, that's not what I said. I said, I said, I've literally written that down already.

Can I have that? Will you send me that? And I'll say it with my lips. And I was like, all right, fine, bro. Um, well, let me tell you something interesting. All right. Let me add to it. So obviously 100% agree. I think I actually was specifically thinking like, um, warehouse robots. Like I would even just kind of narrow it down and be like, all right. Uh, if I was really going to do this, I would try to figure out what job in a warehouse I can. Eliminate by using a robot.

Which is what, like packing boxes?

Zoom. Yeah.

Well, there was, there was like a few of them at the time. I don't think any of them worked out. There's always like these waves and it's like, It was too early. The tech wasn't there and all the companies crash and burn, but like the next wave should start right now. And actually that's maybe where I would go with this. So he's like, you know, if you're Domino's, do you want to pay, you know, whatever, I don't know what they pay, $15 an hour for somebody who's going to call in sick. They're going to be checking their phone. They're going to be goofing off. They're going to be eating pepperonis off the pizzas. They're going to, you know, they're going to get in fights with the other people there. And, you know, then they leave and then you have to replace them and then you have to train that new person. Or would you rather buy one machine that prints a perfect pizza every single time, 24/7, never calls in sick, never complains, never asks you for more money, never asks for a raise, never spits in the food, never does anything? Would you rather have that? It's like, oh, of course you would always have the robot that makes the perfect pizza. And he's like, making a pizza is incredibly like, it's a sandboxed thing. It's like, not like a robot that can do anything. It's a specific robot. That can make a pizza. It can flatten the dough into a perfect circle, apply the cheese, apply the sauce, whatever, bake it for a certain time, and then put it in the box and cut it. And like, that's what that needs to do. And I'm going to, you know, so, so what I would do is I would go and do exactly what you said, like go to MIT, go to Carnegie Mellon and be like, hey guys, we're building a pizza robot. And when we do, there's whatever, how many pizza chains, you know, how many pizza restaurant locations, how many pizza chains in the US?

And by the way, there was a company called Zoom, Zoon, Zoom, I forget, that went out of business and people made fun of them. They're like, in the headlines, they got totally mocked. They raised $500 million. That was cool. And that definitely could have worked. I think they screwed it up. They like went, they like made restaurants that you could go to that, that was not right.

There's 80,000 pizza chain pizza restaurants in the country, 80,000. And you would start with the chains because the chains actually have the most to gain by doing this, right?

And they would help you.

They'll have budgets, they'll sign letters of intent. Like I remember when Boom Supersonic, the airplane company came out at YC and they were like, yeah, we have a $100 million purchase order from like Richard Branson. If we could build this plane, they're going to buy it. So now the question is, do you think me and this pack of nerds behind me can build this plane? That's the bet. And like, whether you do or don't believe it, that was the bet. And I like that idea. I'll tell you another thing about the robotics thing before I like test.

I like Techris. A little bit more than like demand risks for sure.

But I'll listen to their homepage. Their homepage is labor is the biggest challenge for roofers. Our robots make roofers twice as productive and improve safety by reducing work at height. Easy. That's an easy sale. Another, and I'll wrap this up, another reason why robots are interesting is you are only working within the laws of physics. And the laws of physics, I find, I find those to be a bit easier to work in compared to say creating the next Louis Vuitton, like to creating a brand or consumer product. I actually think it's more complicated than just saying, well, I like, because that's an infinite number of options. Within hardware, it's just like, it's just like so much simpler and straightforward versus generating demand or creating a brand that people love or creating a social product that people love, which is so much more rare and more challenging.

Have you heard the Elon Musk quote, uh, the, the only real laws are physics, everything else is a recommendation?

No, but that's brilliant.

Uh, all right, so that's a great idea. I think these, purposeful robots.

Uh, that's a great idea I came up with, says you.

Well, I was saying that's these, these, these, this robot idea I think is, is the right idea. Um, and by the way, here's a way to like create more luck like this. Our buddy Furkan, uh, has this space in San Francisco called Founders Inc., F. Inc. And what he did, I was like, so what's the plan? He's like, oh, I'm just going to recruit like the smartest hackers I can find and just be like, hey, here's a free office here. I'm going to help you out and I'm going to invest in you before you even know what the hell you're doing. And I'm going to help you get these off the ground. I was like, well, that's great, but how are you going to get the best hackers? Because I'm gonna give them toys. So what do you mean toys? He goes, I took the first floor of the entire office, there's no desks, it's just a hardware robotics lab. He's like, so I'm buying like 3D printers, drones, laser cutting equipment, robotic arms, stuff that the average hacker can't buy. You know, the average, you know, 22-year-old engineer can't go buy this, you know, $15,000 thing or $30,000 thing, but Furkan could buy it. And he's like, I'm just going to make it available for free and come in here and work on it. And so now he's got in that lab, there's a guy who's got a brain device that you put on your head and it like makes you more focused. There's a guy who's, there's a company called Orangewood Labs that basically they have this robotic arm that can, um, do whatever you program it to do. So when I went in there, they were like, watch, we're going to make it, you know, make a margarita. Watch this. Uh, we can make this on the, the application they're doing is painting or like, I don't know, powder coating or something like that. Yeah. Powder coating. They were like, have you ever done powder coating? And I was like, no.

Like, you know what you're doing? It's really dangerous too.

I was like, no, stop asking me questions.

And they're like, well, I think everything is powder coated.

Yeah. It's basically like how you, you know, all you do it on floors, you do it on any metals or whatever, like for a car or something like that. So they were like, yeah, this thing can powder coat basically better and faster, like automatically., and so we could do jobs at like, you know, one-fifth of the price of a human being because we just give them the robot. The robot just goes and does it and then it comes home and that's it. And so I was like, oh, interesting. Uh, but there's a lot of people building stuff like this. And one way to increase serendipity is to like go to these kinds of hardware labs or go find out where they hang out and just go talk to people, see what they're, what they're building.

And then a lot of these people who do this commercializing, they're not, they're not, a lot of them don't care about business. A lot of them are unorganized. It's like the typical like scientist who wears like, who forgets to put one sock on and only wears like one sock or like their shoes on the wrong foot. It's like, they're just like these brilliant people who don't necessarily care about stuff. And I think if you can be the organizer, you can win. What do you have?

All right. So my path to a billion, uh, do you want the dark idea or you want the light idea? Do you want the good idea or the evil idea? Which one do you want?

I don't know. Uh, that's, I want to go dark, I think, but okay. Is that realistic?

I'll give you both, but I'll do the dark one fast. So here's the, here's the big pitch for the dark idea. Anduril for some other country. You could figure the rest out from there. Uh, what Palmer Luckey has done with Anduril for the US Defense Department, do it for Israel, do it for, do it for another country, go find a country that wants advanced weapons technology and be like, cool, I'm going to recruit the brightest minds and we're going to give us like, you know, a $50 million to $150 million contract and we'll get started here.

Dude, Palmer's on a tear lately.

And I would literally go look at the roadmap for Anduril. I'd be like, oh, they built this like, uh, missile that can fly itself, you know, and lives in this like vending machine. I don't know if you saw that video of like, yes, it's amazing, man. He's on a tear inside. I'd be like, cool. Do you pick from the Anduril menu? We're going to figure out how to build those and you guys will own the IP. That's what I would do if I really had to, you know, if I was, if I wanted to go into more of the, the gray or dark areas where it's, you know, there's a bit of war and destruction involved. But here's the light idea. Here's another idea. We're buying a university. Okay, so what are we doing? There are a lot of colleges for sale, more than you would think.

Are they on Craigslist?

They're on Dealstream. So go to a website called Dealstream.

Come on, that was kind of funny.

Well, they could be. DealStream is literally like Quiet Light. It's just different name. It's the same idea. It's a business brokerage. But if you look colleges for sale, they're there and they're not that expensive. You could buy colleges for like $5 million, $10 million. So to do this, you're going to need a lot of money. But the good news is that universities are worth a lot of money. Like what would you peg the value at? Let's start at the top end. Like what do you think Stanford or Harvard is worth? Somebody really, if If mega billionaire genius wanted to buy Stanford or Harvard, what would it even cost?

Could it even— no, would it be like Harvard, $100+ billion?

I mean, the endowment alone, I think is like, what, the endowment alone is almost $100 billion, right?

So yeah, it's hard to even—

it's the whole enchilada has got to be $500 billion. It might like, these are companies that are worth— sorry, universities are essentially properties that are worth, you know, a Facebook. They're crazy. They're crazy.

Harvard endowments is $53 billion. So yeah, I don't know, $100 to $200 billion, $300 billion, something like that. Yeah. Like so big that it's hard to understand.

Hard to even fathom, right? Not for sale. Can't be bought essentially. Same thing with Stanford. Now let's even go to like a Belmont, right? So like, let's just do some quick math here.

Where I went, Belmont University.

You went to Belmont. What's the tuition at Belmont?

Back then it was $30,000. Let's see what it is now. Belmont University tuition, $38,000.

All right. So $38,000. And how many students go to Belmont?

Let's say 5,000.

5,000, uh, per year, per year, per co— or the whole, whole university?

You could say, um, let's say 1,800 per year.

All right. So let's go, let's round up to 2,000. So even a small, small private school, where, where is Belmont? I don't even know where it is.

Nashville, Tennessee. It looks like they have 7,300 students. So 2,000 per class, let's say.

Cool. So $76 million top line. That's not counting endowments. That's not counting grants and research. It's not counting the fact that it's tax-free, that it has like all these other benefits.

And that's for a middle of nowhere university. So that's the game plan. We're building one of those. Now, what are we going to do? So we're going to go buy one. What are we buying? We're essentially buying two things. I want the campus and I want the liquor license. And by liquor license, I mean the accreditation. As long as it's already accredited, I don't want to have to go through that process. Now, why do I want a campus? Because I want the land. I want the buildings. I want the depreciation. I want physical place because I think it adds to the prestige. We will have a large online component, but whatever. Now the main goal here is we got to brand this school. And so what are we going to do? We're going to make it a bit of a luxury product, meaning it's going to be only for the elite of the elite. So, you know, we have to have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. We have to be known for, we're going to sponsor competitions for like, you know, Mathlete type of competitions. Hardcore science competitions. We are going to go around the country to high schools and basically be like, we're going after gamers, programmers, and hardcore math kids. And we're going to sponsor a ton of competitions. Guess what those sponsorships cost? Pizza. The currency is essentially you provide free pizza. There is no competition. When I was doing our esports company that we sold to Twitch, I was like, all right, we want to create the world's biggest high school esports league. And we did in like Less than a year. Guess what it costs? Like 450 pizzas is what it costs me to like sponsor these programs. It costs nothing. And so we're going to go and we're going to first, we're going to get in front of them. Now, when I, why did I go to Duke University? I went because like in 5th grade, Duke did something called the Nationwide Talent Identification Program. And I'll be damned if my mom didn't want to find out if her kid was talented.

And so we take this test and we take this test and it's like the Indian version of like a, like one of those model competitions they have at the mall when you're 12. Yeah.

It's a beauty pageant. It's like sports, but for brown people. So, um, so my mom puts me in this. I really, actually, I think every kid in my school took it. They just went to the school and they were like, hey, we're trying to identify the most talented, gifted and talented kids.

Also, parents, can you put your, uh, income on the statement as well?

So exactly.

Because that impacts your IQ a little bit. And, uh, you know, we got to get paid.

So I got a score back and a goodie bag. And literally the goodie bag was a Rubik's Cube. And I don't know what the hell was going on, but whatever that is, I'm going to go find the marketing coordinator that did this Duke Talent Identification Program. We're stealing that. We're going to go get them while they're young, 5th, 6th grades. We're going to be identifying these special, you know, special gifted talented kids. Uh, so we're making it super prestigious. You already know the name is going to have some old money shit, right? You know, you know, um, you know, we're going, I've already done this before with the private school names.

Yeah. It's going to be like Bridgemont, Oakland, Waldorf, uh, you know, Kennedy Excelsior.

Yeah, exactly. So we're, we're definitely going that way. Um, we're gonna have our own entrance exam, so we don't take the SATs cuz we're not peasants. And so you're gonna, uh, we're gonna go from city to city and we're gonna have our own entrance exam. It's gonna be a 6-point exam. Uh, I don't know what that means, but I, let's just say that's what it is. Um, now what else are we gonna do? You know these speaker bureaus where you can go pay like $50,000 for Obama to speak? Yeah. We're doing that.

More like $2 million for Obama, but yeah.

Okay, well, we're, we got a budget. All right. And the budget's going to be like, we have like a $6 million speaker budget. So when I'm raising this money for this, I'm going to basically raise $50 to $75 million, maybe $100 million for this. And a lot of that is front loaded in brand building. And one of the things we're going to do is about $5 to $6 million a year in speaker fees. And so I'm basically going to pull the Sam Bankman-Fried without the fraud. So, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried took the money and basically was like, how do I brainwash everybody that FTX is like a thing and it's legitimate? He's like, Tom Brady, Larry David, Steph Curry, this arena, this guy is like a super connector in Hollywood. I'm going to put $100 million into his fund and now he's going to make, he's going to get me dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton. And like, that's what he literally did. And although he did a bunch of screwed up things, honestly, it's kind of inspiring the way he just threw his weight around using money to like build a brand. If he had not literally stolen money from customer deposits to do so, that would've just been an incredible approach by an entrepreneur. Like it actually would've been very like lauded of how he did it in the same way that like, you know, Uber is sort of praised for the way it just like brute forced its way into different cities and actually like built a huge global brand. So that's what I would do. So speaker fees, those are going on the website. Those are going viral to get those people to do like kind of speeches to our kids. And we're going to also spend a ton of money on direct marketing. So no university really goes D2C except for the low-end University of Phoenix type of shit. That's crazy.

And by the way, they are amazing at it. They are really good at it. They built up, they're like $5 billion business doing it in the world of like Direct response. There's like financial newsletters. Then there's like Omaha Steaks, who like crushes it and the stamps.com of the world and erectile dysfunction and then like video game people and then universities, University of Phoenix crushes it. I think, I think them and like Full Sail are in the top like 20 of spenders on Google.

What else would I do? Okay, so I'm spending a ton of money on ads. Um, I hired the best branding agency in the world. I'm spending money on the speakers fees. Again, I'm spending, spending, spending. Now, how do I make money? Okay, well, obviously you have things like your tuition, but I actually think there's another, another way you could do this. It involves my good old friend NFTs. Okay, so, uh, hear me out, hear me out. You're going to respect this idea when you hear it. Have you ever seen when a stadium launches that they sell something called PSLs? Do you know what those are?

Is that like season ticket holders for a certain period of time? Or like founding club members?

Well, yeah, because the, the, the value, the value of a good diploma it should go up every decade. So like a Belmont University, they don't have any street cred. So like my value isn't going up. A Harvard, a Stanford goes up, but then if they have a controversy like Penn State did, it goes down.

Correct. And so I want to have 10,000 admissions licenses essentially. So this is a ticket you buy. There's one of one, you own it. You could decide if you use it, if you gift it, or if you rent it out to a student that year and it's going to pay you rental income. You're going to get a piece of the revenue or a piece of the profits from the, from the from the tuition. Now, I think that you could sell these for probably at least $25,000, if not $50,000 each, right? So like, I think that's a low end for what you can do if you, again, tell the story properly. And your boy's a good storyteller. So let's say we get, we end up getting to $50,000 a piece. We sell 10,000 of these. I just raised $500 million. Okay. So yeah, that's a, that's a pretty big initial set of funding, but I think you could do that. To get this off the ground without having to go get rich VCs or billionaires to fund this thing. And so I think what you could do is do maybe $10,000 or $20,000 per seat here, sell 10,000 of these. And, you know, we're going to price these all in ETH. That's just 5 ETH. 5 ETH that you own, you know, a seat at this prestigious university. And so I don't know if I would do it year 1, but maybe year 2, I would move to that once I've built a little bit of the brand momentum. And I would say, you're going to own something that's going to pay you back every single year. So you might have spent, 10 grand on it, but you're going to get back, you know, 2 grand a year or $1,000 a year in income. Plus you own this prestigious asset that's going to appreciate over time and you can sell your whole seat later.

I think you answered the shit out of this question. I think that's a very compelling argument.

I would probably do normal tuition, but I understand that you do normal tuition in addition. That's the beauty of these PSLs. You do normal tuition on top of selling this initial seat. It's just that person gets a rev share of the tuition.

The biggest thing that's wild here is that you can go onto Dealstream, which I am, and I'm looking at universities that you can buy. Here's a university for $8.5 million that you can purchase, fully accredited, which I don't know what the value of that is. Uh, and you get a campus. Uh, this particular university had peak enrollment in 2017 with $2 million in revenue. This is wild.

Like, there's one right here. Fully accredited university, Southern California. A fully accredited university in SoCal. All right. $25 million. It's accredited. Its degree is recognized all around the world. They get, the school can offer F-1 visas. So, you know, we're getting that international student money because you know who likes being accepted into a hard to get into program in the United States more than a US citizen? Somebody in China. And so we're going to go ham on international students. We're going to that's going to be a big part of the marketing. So this says the school has about 900 students enrolled in undergrad, MBA, and DBA programs. There's one physical campus and one branch campus.

So they, I think this particular one has, it says Title IX is possible. And I think with Title IX, I think that means you get government funding for sports.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're eligible for getting funding from it. And this is crazy, right? So I would, you know, I would just keep my eyes peeled for about a year. I would go around and, you know, one thing that every rich person likes is the idea of like fixing education. And I would just go tell them, this is a school that you would have wanted to go to, right? It's a school that is based around people who actually build things and make things. It's going to be a school that prioritizes projects over lectures. It's a school that is, you know, it's competitive.

And it's not online.

It's not online. And we're trying to build the next brand. These old brands, like, you know, even the best, you know, the Harvards, the Stanfords, whatever. There hasn't, you know, what, where is the new one? These are like hundreds of years old. There's an opportunity to build something fresh and we want you to be a part of it. You know, I think that that pitch would get a lot of people excited to cut, you know, I think, I think that was a 9.5 out of 10 pitch.

I think you did pretty good. You did a great job by starting it off of what do you think Harvard's worth? And I'm like, I don't even know. Unlimited money. Not, it's, it's, it's not even sellable probably. It's not even buyable rather. What's Stanford worth? What's University of Penn? I like, it's, I don't know. It's, they're, they're, it's invaluable almost. That's a, that's a very good pitch.

Bravo. All right. Well, that's, that's the episode. That is the how to make a million bucks and how to make a million dollars from, from your boys at My First Million.

A million and a billion. That's the pod.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

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