How I Made My First $1M - The Andrew Wilkinson Story

i was making a small amount of money for something i hated and then i started making a large amount of money for something i would have done anyway free you like it was fun alright what's up we got our friend of the house andrew wilkinson here andrew famously is the cofounder of tiny he started off as a barista ended up creating a design agency that was super super successful design slack and a bunch of other popular silicon valley products that you may have may have used started buying businesses right about warren buffett red about charlie longer start buying businesses now owns like an out of portfolio thirty plus companies i think and recently took the company public and then step down to ceo and andrew is here on his of i know vacation tour after stepping down to ceo andrew good to see you man your skin looks great the glow looks good you seem happy you got that non operator glow enough about talking how much of a baby you are alright so andrew i sent you a voice note you start off as a barista at a coffee shop and you've done very well in business and i said i wanna know what were the different jumps like income jumps that actually made a difference and you said there was four levels yeah totally well i think the best money that i ever made was jumping from being a barista to making like sixty bucks an hour well so you go from barista start designing website so you go from six fifteen hour to sixty dollars an hour and it sounds like that might have been somewhat happens stance did you was that intentional to make that shift or just kind of you got an opportunity a lucky bounce came your way what what made that shift happen so i was working making coffees every day for all the people to come in and there's these two guys that would come in every single day they'd roll in looking like they just got out of bed a ten in the morning they're probably like five years older than me so like twenty four twenty five and they would just come in and they would sit on their laptops all day just drinking espresso after espresso and one day i asked them what do you guys do like don't you have jobs and they go oh we're web designers we just walk into random businesses we asked them if they have a website and then we say we'll make one for five hundred bucks and so that day i was like we'll forget this like i don't wanna make the espresso i wanna be drinking the espresso i wanna be these guys and so i went and i bought a book on design and a couple days later i walked into a place and sold the guy website and within a couple weeks i'd quit my job wait did you know anything about design yeah i did actually because when i was a teenager i had a tech news website and i knew how to use like dream weaver like really basic web design and stuff so it it like wasn't rocket science to me like i knew these guys were smart but they weren't you know they didn't have any crazy qualifications it was nothing i couldn't learn and so i just kind of dove in and got lucky do you remember who you approached that first one yeah it was a pulled pork barbecue joint and there is was this place called pig here locally and and mean yeah i was like i think i got like five hundred bucks and some free pulled pork sandwiches you know i basically got unlimited sandwiches for a while that's pretty awesome i was making a small amount of money for something i hated and then i started making a large amount of money for something i would have done anyway free like it was fun it was fun designing websites and coding websites the first money i really ever made outside of like a college job what i was in school was i actually won a business plan pitch competition and we won twenty five thousand dollars of cash and they made some nba a business school student work for us for five k it's so won thirty thousand dollars of total comp and me and my two c founders lived for one year together on twenty five thousand dollars but it was awesome like we we didn't really know how much money a business takes we didn't know we didn't even know how much money many he takes to live because we just been college the whole time so to us that was like oh that last us a long time and we lived off of it for one year but it was the best money at that time it was it was a big jump because we didn't have to get a job so it was freedom it's like oh we don't even have to think about money or a job because we got the lump sum cash up upfront and and we got to go do the go go try the thing we wanted to try you know together as friends so that that was probably the that was the first level and like andrew saying the early dollars create a lot more freedom than the later dollars i think is the way that that you're explaining it those early early dollars in early freedom matter a lot more than the later dollars because you only get so much incremental freedom in fact you might actually get less freedom if you start buying a bunch of shit that now you are a slave to my first level was almost the same as yours sean it was twenty four thousand dollars i think i was twenty three or maybe twenty four i had a small website that i sold but i saw had to work there was basically an aqua hire but after taxes and everything was said and done i think i had twenty four thousand dollars at the time i was spending two thousand dollars a month and living expenses and i said i have a year i have a year of expenses saved up and i felt like i was like let's go to australia i was like let's live like let's go and take a trip let's go to thailand that like have a twenty four dollars i felt incredibly wealthy by the way that's a powerful thing to do is change the denomination into time instead of money so you know if you have twenty four thousand dollars thirty six thousand dollars or ninety thousand dollars it's kind of like chuck your cheese money it's tokens that you don't really understand what this does for you and what most people do is they they just sort of keep working blindly to put in the bank and then they don't really know how to use it what to do with it a more important question is how do i get myself a year of freedom or eighteen months of freedom where i could either just go enjoy myself purely or go take a shot at creating a new life for myself a new chapter a new a new path for myself and early on it doesn't take much to get a year like both of us basically did it on twenty five thousand dollars which i think is it's surprising even for me to hear it right now because my current life burn rates a lot higher right but you know we slept on air mattresses just like well what why do we need you and then we got to got to mattress and head money eventually but for at first it doesn't really matter but a year of freedom or eighteen months of freedom twenty four months of freedom is a good way to dominate things when you don't have a huge sum of money i used this app i didn't use mint i used this one app where every time i spent anything i typed it in how much money i'd spent for that so if i went got coffee two fifty i wrote two fifty in there and then i had this spreadsheet where i took the average of the trailing six months and i said that is my monthly burn and then here's how much money i've saved get to twelve months and so i used an app alright guys really quick so back when i was running the hustle we had this premium newsletter called trends the way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses well hubspot did something kinda cool so they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analyst and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download and it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends for spotting different companies that are gonna explode and grow really quickly so if you wanna stay ahead of the game and you wanna find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist this is the ultimate guide so if you wanna check it out you can see the link down below in the description now back to the show alright so you've you made it to level two you now the next level you said i went from self employed to boss so what does that mean what i over overtime discovered was that there is all these online job boards and there was companies in san francisco posting looking for freelance designers and developers and stuff so i doing these like little five hundred dollar local websites and i found these silicon valley startups posting and this was like what like what you would call today like product designer or interface design and so i got this project designing an interface for an ad manager for some startup and i did a really good job the guy i really liked it and it was like two thousand dollars for basically no work this is the project i mentioned before so it it's like maybe five days of work for two grand which ended up being twenty six hundred bucks canadian so it's very sweet and the guy goes hey this is pretty good can you do coding like can you do some javascript work and i just say yes and i don't know anything about javascript i'm like whatever i can figure it out so i frantically try and learn javascript and i can't and so i go to my friend who's literally just my girlfriend's best friend's boyfriend who's in computer science and i say hey how much would you charge me to do this javascript work and he goes i'll do it for five hundred bucks and so i think i'm gonna get negotiated down by this client and so i go to the client and they say it'll be a thousand bucks and they say okay sounds good and so in that moment i was like oh my god i just made five hundred dollars and i did absolutely no work so that's such crazy transition of going from being a self employed person selling your time to being someone who can sell other people's time which to me is like the big leverage point that's great yeah you so you have that realization did you start devour any books or how did you learn how to do that better than you know than than bang our absolute rookie at it it was mostly trial and error in the beginning and it was really it was really stressful honestly because i think when you start del to other people they always do a worse job than you do and so you are kind of panicking and you there's no there's no like process system or anything and around that time i read this book called the em myth it's kinda cheesy it's by michael gerber but i recommend it to everyone and he really talks about this idea of trying to think of your business as a machine right and i think for me that was the that was a big breakthrough that mental model of my business as a machine and i'm the engineer and all the different people are widgets within the machine and if one doesn't work or something is squeaky you can swap out the people but at the end of the day you have a process you have a strategy and you have people on the bus and if you have the right people on the right bus the right strategy and the right vision things will go well and that was when things really took off that was when i started hiring you know i had like a dozen people i was making you know over a million dollars a year personally you know i got a bmw i started dressing nice and really that was like the the kinda sloppy like the first phase was like you know okay i can do all the stuff i wanted to do in college i can buy beer i can go for a nice dinners stuff wait how how old were you when you made your first if is that million profit yeah i think i was twenty twenty two or twenty three see there that's here oh yeah it was amazing you didn't go to college right or you dropped out i dropped out of college i i went to journalism school for like two or three months so you did a million in profit two years into being an agency i started when i was nineteen years old and so probably four years in something like that three or four years in what's massive was it was crazy i mean it felt like it felt like an absolute fortune and then frankly it was and at that point like that was when i was like oh like i'll just buy whatever i want like i would walk into best buy and just buy like a crazy tv i would buy you know the best speakers money could buy i would buy video games it's like whatever an idiot twenty three year old wants to spend money on i would spend money on that and ultimately was like this very eight hundred dollars you're like okay well that was my taste don't match my my my right now yeah it was very it was very kinda empty and he have you ever read rich dad poor ed andrew yeah he has that sam read that book he's got the quadrant thing do you know about that yeah people hate on that guy i'm not sure why but what what what about it well i mean any any business guy who becomes popular and start selling anything i think he sells a lot of shit sells like gold he sells like real estate course he sell a lot of but andrew you basically just described his thing i remember reading this book and i had this mental model then of what you're supposed to do in your career so basically he's like he has his four quadrant grit and it's basically he is the first one you're an employee you have a job and he's like for most people does what your parents tell you go to go to a good school so you can get a good job and they kinda make it sound like getting a good job is the point that is the like that's the end of the rainbow that's the pot of gold and what he's but he points out he's like you know basically you start as a edi then you go to the bottom quadrant s where self employed so you go from employed to self employed that's what you described barista to solo freelance web designer then you go to be business owner that's when you owned your agency and the last one is i he's like the goal the goal for everybody's to get i where you're an investor your money works for your money and you do whatever the hell you want and so you it eventually with time that you became you became an investor but like this path going from es is one that for me i didn't even really i didn't understand how the board game was laid out i didn't know where you're supposed to go right it's like playing a video game but not understanding you you need to save the princess from the castle it's like oh once i know that now i could start to move in that direction but until i even knew that i didn't really even understand what the hell i supposed to be doing this one diagram was very useful for me and that was in level two for you was between what a million dollars a year and what was your upper limit yeah i mean i was paying myself five hundred to a million a year and i was profiting more than that and i started inc businesses and so i had that classic thing where i had over confidence the way i would put it is that my first business was a very easy business so i did the equivalent of walking into the gym and i got lucky i picked up really lightweight weights and it built my confidence and then for the next five ten years i would walk into the gym and try and dead lift three hundred pounds but i didn't know that was hard right and so i started an e commerce business i started a restaurant i started multiple software businesses that i bootstrap and lost in one case to over ten million dollars but it was really fun because i would just be in the shower and i would think oh man that's a great business idea i'll start that right now today i had no filter whatsoever and it was really exciting frankly like i was just i was constantly starting new stuff starting a restaurant to an awesome way to lose money though oh yeah and i lost i think i lost a million bucks doing that cat furniture restaurants skin cream saas company you tried you you you did the for the full d castle on of like business ideas we had a blog we had a viral blog we tried to write a book for it we had a concierge service what was the viral blog we had clients from hell it was like really big on tumblr for a while do you know what no no something we we basically we would we would had have all these like we've go to conferences and meet other designers and stuff and everyone would bitch about their crazy clients and share screenshots of like insane emails they had received and stuff where that's it's just like the guy asking for them to make the logo bigger over and over again and so we started sharing those and it just went crazy viral and so we ended up making a book did we need to bring back tumblr tumblr was great i love the i love i love the tumblr days i i still go back and i'll read old people's tumble it's awesome i love it i mean twitter kind of is at now but i felt tumblr had a better environment and it was more friendly and better content i made so many friends from tumblr and i still meet people like at conferences that know me from tumblr back in the day what age are you win level three ended or level two ended i ended that probably like twenty seven i think that that was when i sold my first business what did you sell for and what was it so i sold it for seven million bucks and it was the one business i started in level two so i started all these different companies i so i had my original web design company medal it was profitable i would live off part of that profit and then the rest of it went to starting all those other businesses i talked about the one business that worked was i'm at toby from shopify and harley as well in twenty ten at a conference and at the time shopify is was pretty small and they said hey we really love your design work would you make some templates some themes for shopify and i was like oh you know i guess we could do these guys a favor they seem nice i tried to get them to pay me and they actually said no no this is gonna be like store right at the iphone or app store and i was like ugh like okay i guess so and so we did it i literally thought we're doing them a favor and we put up a bunch of themes in their store and we started making like ten twenty thousand dollars hawaii a month a month like basically immediately and what year what year was at twenty eleven probably twenty eleven twenty ten twenty eleven alright twenty eleven you're doing twenty or thirty grand a month is this called pixel union called pixel union and so i had the i had the original design agency i had pixel union and that started making quite a bit of money and then i had all these chaotic other businesses and basically what happened was i decided that i wanted to have like a nest egg i wanted to have enough money in the bank that i didn't have to worry about money anymore and because what i had what i had had is cash flow i had a ton of cash flow but i never kept much money in the bank i'd spend whatever i needed personally everything else would get invested even though i didn't really understand investing in these businesses i was inc and so i ended up getting an offer to sell that business for seven million bucks and it was three million upfront one and a half earn out and then the rest in stock in the new business and i remember i went to the atm on the day closed and i checked my balance i was in like a strip mall and i saw three million it was like three million one hundred thousand or something like that on the chip and i was like i'm done like i'm rich i'm good forever and that was a big mindset shift suddenly i had money more money than i could use to inc incubator businesses i'd also inc a lot of businesses and i realized that starting companies is really hard if you think about my failure rate i probably started ten different projects or companies and one of those worked really well and so there's a lot of pain and i had to lay a lot of people off and go through a lot of hard times to do that and frankly i felt pretty burnt out and around that time i was like like i guess i've gotta learn how to invest but to me investing was something that like guys and suits did like it was super boring i had no interest in real estate or stocks but i'd always heard about warren buffett and whenever i read but warren buffett that changed everything for me what i what i ended up doing is i had all the the inc incubator businesses i actually shut almost all of them down and i'd sold the that business for three million i had another one and a half coming and i also got dividends out of that business because i still in twenty percent of it and then medal by this point was making three or four million dollars of profit a year and so i went from burning a lot of cash and living a nice lifestyle to suddenly having a pile of cash and a lot of une uncovered cash flow coming in that just kept piling up so by that point if you think about if you're making four or five million dollars a year at this point i buy a really nice house not as crazy i could've have gone crazy but i i bought like a responsible nice house i bought you know a nice a nicer car bought myself like a porsche and i had a tesla which at the time was like super crazy and i started getting into investing at this point what was this twenty percent rule you had so basically i was like i i will spend up to twenty percent of my cash flow personally and the other eighty percent has to go back to investing and so i knew that you know on twenty percent of five million bucks you know i could live a pretty damn good life spending a million dollars a year i wouldn't go out of my way to spend that much post tax or pre pre tax so i would i would basically live it up as much as possible but then i also knew i'd always be compounding the rest and that model actually worked really well for me because i didn't have this mindset that so many entrepreneurs have where they're like shit i gotta live like a papa and then i gotta become a prince i gotta sell my company for some huge amount of money i was just able to live on cash flows the entire time sam can we talk about some of your poppers what the fuck is a proper tendencies you had sam chug of doctor pepper while you were talking so say what were you doing when you were building the hustle how did you live it were there any cheap gay yeah that you my wife or at facebook at the time so dinner was like i gave her tu wear containers and she would bring home prosciutto and cheese because they always had like sharp crude report so i was dinner was sponsored by by matter yeah so we we i i i was on a prosciutto diet because didn't get all fast the second thing i'm ashamed to say i did this but listen to this so do you guys remember when uber eats and door dash and what were the other ones a caviar so these meal delivery services all came out the same time and you would get twenty dollars for free for your first order so i built a iphone emulator on our computer where we created this ring where we were constantly referring each other to these like new so i basically had like five thousand dollars of free caviar so i would basically people would be like it's your startup up funded i was like no but we are fueled we're fueled by vc but we're not funded and so i did that for a long time i also would sneak on the bus and not pay and i would get caught all the time but the thing is is if they ask her your id you just say you don't have an id and so that was that's not it's not illegal not to have an so i got away with like two grand worth them bus tickets yeah there's nobody checks on san francisco they did i get trouble all the time but they would say you know do you your idea i'm like slap i don't have get an idea so i'll tell you you know but yeah so hopefully there's a statute of limitations on these things because i definitely broke the law a little bit i was also on i go a whole food scholarship as well let's just say that the the the hot bar was right next to the exit so so andrew you when you were spending twenty percent pre tax that's like you're spending forty percent of your post tax money that's a lot to be spending during that time and then you shifted it you you once you started investing you made a change you're like no no more twenty percent rule you changed it to some other rule right right what what did you shift to yeah i just kept dropping that percent over time as as the numbers got bigger i just kept dropping it and dropping it and dropping it and but not because you're getting less no not necessarily i in some cases was spending more the numbers just got bigger so around this time so so i'll talk about some of the things i started doing so i started angel investing so you know i'd meet a friend or some interesting entrepreneur and i'd invest twenty five grand in their company and if i look back like i probably should have bought stocks in real estate like i didn't understand the lack of liquidity and that and just how like high risk it is and crazy so i have a whole bunch of investments from that era i have no idea what's gonna happen with them but mostly a lot of that time was actually spent having this breakthrough moment of realizing that i don't need to be the ceo that i don't need to run my own companies and so at that time every single company i was the ceo that so is me and chris i'm the cf ceo he's the cfo and we're just jumping around like chickens with our heads cut off between all the different businesses and when i read about warren buffett i was just like oh my god this guy has obstructed business to the craziest degree to the point where he doesn't actually do anything except for a reed and buy like one business a year and the idea that you could just hire a ceo to run your company was kinda crazy like i think a lot of people have this feeling around you know why would someone come and work for me i felt like that all the time i felt i'm like yeah you're like what are you doing yeah this it's like why would like don't you know the math like this doesn't make any sense but then over time you realize like people want stability and they want surety and they wanna have health benefits and all the stuff you don't get and so i realized it's like there's this whole other class of people where they want to run a company for somebody else they wanna be a ceo they wanna be able to make you know millions of dollars but they don't necessarily need to make like a billion dollars and that was crazy for me when i started hiring ceos because before i knew it all the businesses started like doubling and the reason they doubled was because i was only giving twenty percent of my time to all the companies and frankly i didn't know what i was doing and i just started hiring better and better people to run my companies and there's this crazy inflection point where we started spitting out the company's hiring ceos and then buying new businesses and just putting ceos in to run those businesses and when we started doing that the numbers scaled really really quickly so you you did a lot of angel investing in this period and and i'll we'll talk about the rest of the stage but have you seen a good return from those investments because that's that was a good era yeah i mean i don't know to be honest the problem with angel investing is like i just still i've slowed down but i mostly just do it on gut and so i think i have like twenty five or thirty million dollars of venture and it's just been this like death by a thousand paper cuts thing i think if you take that cohort i had one my friend stuart who we used to share an office with i put seventy five grand into his business and then he sold it to workday and i ten x my money there and i think that that between that and a few other investments i think i've definitely got my money back from that cohort maybe made a good you know a reasonable return but the problem is i've just kept going and i don't really track it like it's all in one big excel spreadsheet somewhere in paid market twenty five million dollars of angel investments yes got the ton maybe even thirty that's an insane out of angel what that's this yeah that's fiscal irresponsible my friend i know i know this the problem is not gonna return all that way buddy how do why do you think you've returned thirty million dollars i don't think that no i'm not saying i've returned thirty million i've literally put thirty million dollars in venture i you say you broke you may be broken even right you think you think number no oh no to be clear i think you are so you're telling me you don't have a spreadsheet that just like if i have thirty no my friend no it doesn't matter they're billionaire if you or many billions of errors you track thirty million dollars that's not that's not couch money regardless of who you are no so i actually have i've when i say a return i mean from that cohort so like maybe i invested like two or three million dollars over that period and i'm saying i might have got that money back but right the rest so much of it was done over the last ten years in in bursts that i don't even know i don't know where we're at in terms of payback i honestly i don't track it because it's such a pain the ass to get mark to markets and i don't trust them and so i'm literally just going either they sell or we get liquidity or we don't and so it it's for me it's all marked at book value until i think it sounds crazy but that that is actually more par for the course i think for for the way angel investing works because i think if you're listening with you don't angel the us it sounds insane and there is a bit of it that's insane as in that's a very big number to to put it to it but these are like ten year odyssey people stop sending updates even when they get raise at up rounds you don't fully believe you don't fully know if that's you can't really take that and count that until it's fully realized and so it is very easy to lose track of the portfolio and where it's at because you don't really know where it's at that's kinda company raise money at some huge valuation and then a year later it's going out of business and so i've i've i've invested a lot of money in angel as well and like i track which company in which year i invested in but half of them don't send updates the other half they have markup ups and i'll put it in there but i don't count it as real net worth and then it's i'll and then oh another portion when they sell you don't know they're gonna sell until when the deal done a large part of the time i county as my net worth by the way as the principal i invested but half totally a hundred that's how i think about it too i think of it as ro and i think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker right poker has way better odds than ro if you're good at poker you can actually win you've got you know sixty percent odds when you play ro you got fifty percent odds it's a terrible game and angel investing is frankly a ro at table you're just having fun and it's fun to be able to say you know oh i gave this entrepreneur who ended up building this great company twenty five grand along the way but i've realized it's a lot more kinda solace less than playing poker it's more fun you feel smart playing poker you feel dumb playing ro also the the narratives we tell ourselves is just like where you're like i knew way i saw thought eleven was coming because i saw an eleven flash up over there and then that's why and then if you if you talked to a lot of angel investors it's like you know you bet on two guys when they had a different idea and then it turned you know you you bet on stuart butter when who's building a game and then it turns into slack and you know did you know you might have known that stuart was good but did did you really know you you know and i think a lot of people attribute skills where there was luck or and not not the other one way around that you're making your money you're making your money right at the beginning of the greatest bull market in american history and so starting in two thousand ten or so you're you know what their average returns are for last fifteen years for s and p five hundred before inflation i think it's fourteen percent which basically means you double your money every five years so what would that be one million become two million become four million so you would have four your money just doing that boring shit but that's way more boring yeah that's the thing i think mike one of my regrets looking back as i wish that i had bought apartment buildings or something really boring just as a diversification thing and stocks and just been really disciplined there and instead you know i was maybe i i was just shoveling you know a hundred thousand dollars a month out to all these different startups ups and then that number went up and up and up over time as i had more free cash to deploy and again like i have winners in there like i invested in spacex i've invested in some great funds there's some awesome companies in there but to sean's point like unless you're reporting the lps and making up numbers frankly with up rounds like you just have to wait yeah alright first of all thank you for sharing all those levels because it's it's interesting it'd be you don't have to and most people do not props for being transparent about it and also the takeaway i have is like it takes a lot wandering and you go through these arrows you go through these phases it's kinda of the same way you were talking about tumblr and it's like yeah had my team phase it's like yeah you go and experiment over there and then you kinda learn you have some fun but you kinda learned that's not it that's not the right path for me and and it sounds like you had a bunch of those and i'm glad you shared it i wanna ask you you you have a question on here do you really need to be a billionaire what are your thoughts on that i yeah we forgot one level we forgot one level what's the last so so last level is when i took my company public and i had tens of millions of dollars in the bank both in my company and personally and what's weird is guide reached the end right i think that's the goal that so many entrepreneurs think they want and what i realized is even then with all that money in the bank i was still anxious i still fought with my partner i still got irritated with day to day life problems like ultimately like it's kinda like travel we all think we wanna go to bali if only i moved to bali then i'd be happy the problem with moving to bali is your brain comes with you and it turned out my brain is just really anxious before i had anything i would wanna pump my own chest all the time because i felt like i haven't lived to my potential once you know i got lucky and kinda worked out i was like you know i'm gonna not talk about the shit anymore because there's more to life now and this burden does feel weird i don't even wanna bring it up so i'm just gonna be kinda a little more private about this why why not just act like that because i wish somebody had told me it's kinda like oh money didn't make you happy kinda figured that meaning you made a bunch of money and it didn't fundamentally change your overall level of happiness or these materialistic things didn't make you happy i think you're probably smart enough to have not been totally surprised by that what did surprise you well i think what surprised me was the weight of the money right so you know we i wrote in this in the prep doc but like this question of like do you really need to be a billionaire or do you wanna be a billionaire but you wanted it to be i wanted it to i always wanted to be because i didn't have enough money growing up money was a four letter word in our house right my parents thought about money all the time and so in my weird little anxious child brain i said okay i want as much money as possible if i have a lot of money then everyone will stop fighting and i think what was counterintuitive is that it didn't it didn't cause that so it actually caused fam familiar discord it didn't get me friends it isolated me from other people because i was unreliable what's the thing you wish somebody told you so you wish somebody told you hey these things are not gonna fundamentally make you happy the anxiety you're carrying you're gonna carry it over here too what do you wish that they told you instead the question is like what's the actual amount of money you wanna spend each year that makes you happy and just working in reverse from there and then figuring out okay what does my life's work after that i think overs shooting is a mistake that a lot of people make myself included and i think they think okay i need to be a billionaire or be worth hundreds of millions of dollars when in reality that is overdo it it's like you know look you have you have one you have a belly and you can only eat so much food why do you need a hundred x that amount of food if you have a hundred x the amount of food you need well it's actually kinda stressful because a it's wasteful you don't want the food to go bad and you gotta do something with the food and so the book frankly is like it's kind of like a letter to myself ten years ago to say like hey you don't need to go there like just like good things are not where you think that if money so you're in a weird position where your job is you know as an investor your job is you're doing a good job based on your returns so you're you're doing a good job based off how much money your your your clients or your you yourself make but if money wasn't part of it would you still be investing did you just get into that to make money or or is this how you'd spend your time regardless i really like relationships and i think business is a great way to build relationships that sounds kinda cheesy but like business is a shared language where if i meet even a like a guy who owns a plumbing company i know i'll be able to get along with him because we should speak the same language we can we can get into interesting in conversations and through that i can make friends and i've found that my for me like my zone of genius is like building relationships with people and so if i can build relationships with people and invest in their businesses or by buy their businesses that that like i'm really happy doing that i love doing that so andrew if you were gonna go back and you said you should calculate how much you wanna spend every year and then kind of work backwards from that so let's do the math what would you you get to go in a time machine you go back to twenty five year old you and you get to have this conversation what what would you write down on the pen and paper to figure that out well i think what you wanna figure out is you wanna say what do i wanna spend every year and then times it by twenty what do you think you would wanna spend every year back then i think i think a million i mean okay so let me put it this way so a million dollars you can live an incredible life and have one house going on incredible vacations like you can live in an amazing life if you wanna to fly private add another million dollars that's two million dollars and then you wanna buffer so call it three and that allows you you know you basically go and you you get into hobbies and toys and you collect cars or do whatever you want right so called three million bucks so what's three times twenty so sixty million dollars i think sixty million dollars if you've got a liquid that's you know you can live an incredible life and spend three to four million dollars a year and and it's awesome so that's your target i think about it that's your target then you'd work backwards from that and you also had these like three steps that you texted us i don't know exactly what they mean but you said launch pad enough and life's work what do those mean yeah i i think these are these really are the kind of goals that everyone should have so launch pad is like how do you make two hundred fifty k a year right and ideally passive and if you can make two hundred and fifty k year passive then you don't need a job and you have the freedom to be generative and start the things that you want past that enough is like what's the amount you what's the what's the number what's that number we're just talking about you wanna spend every year and how you work backwards from there so phase one might be you start a business let's say some online business it makes you two hundred and fifty k year passive great that's your launch pad then for the next five or ten years you try and build up to that net worth number that you really wanna get to call it you know twenty thirty forty million dollars whatever that is and then you've got complete freedom and then this is where the hard park comes in which is discovering your life's work it's like what is that thing that you're just intrinsically drawn to that creates meaning and also how do you take the byproduct of your machine you've now built a money machine right all your investments and all your businesses and the byproduct of that is money and how do you make meaning out of that money for some people it's compounding in more businesses for other people it's giving it away and doing phil for others it's doing art projects or whatever it is and i think that's the hard part is figuring out that second mountain they call it sean have you done the math like have you thought about that for you yeah with yours yeah i did i did a long time ago before i sold my first business i did this math my assumption was that i would spend three hundred thousand dollars a year and then i tried to do the four or five percent assuming that that's four or five percent of your total i forgot it was i i i remember getting to six million and i so what is that math that's yeah three hundred that's exactly it so three hundred thousand a year of spending i thought six million that's the target and i drilled that into my brain i said financial freedom is at six million six million means you know i could spend whatever i want and i made it like part of my like all of my passwords when i would log in it had the number six in it and i did all these things i just kept at that time i was like really focused on it and i think actually it was like the right it was the right way to think about it you know today i probably spend a little bit more than that so it's not like it's it's not like i was way off in my estimate but i think round number ten million is financial freedom for almost everybody and ten million is not that hard to get to if you do if you own a business you you should be able to get to you know let's call it one to two million a year profit a year and sell that thing for you know some between five and five and ten x multiple depending on what inter industry you're in that's not a hard way to get to ten million it's hard but it's simple yeah i guess like what i mean is like most people will never get to true financial independence where they're like yes i've made it i don't have to worry about money ever again right that's a very lucky few people few percentage of the population like i'll tell you this i did this thing the other night which i'm about really proud of i i went on linkedin and i searched my college class so i was like okay let me go look at duke twenty ten dude that's my that's my friday night routine i do it every friday and i don't wanna i do this on friday i got it by and i i got a reminder on my calendar at one o'clock am friday night i gotta like you joke this is literally what i did my kids went to bed my wife went to bed and i was like alright dig in baby let's do this i never done it before but i was like let's do this and i knew at the time i'm doing this for a kind of a f up reason which is i just wanted to feel good about myself i was like i kinda knew i was like i think i've done well relative to the people in my class but i knew maybe skill or intelligence or talent wise or even work ethic wise i was definitely average to maybe below average in my class and i so i was scrolling through i looking and it was amazing man these people who i i know these people these people were smarter than me part of working to me more talented than me they're doing like just kinda random jobs and i texted my call doorman i was man it's crazy that like this person or this one this one girl i remember i was like she literally could've have been president like she was polished she was a phenomenal speaker super hardworking just knew everything about everything and i was like and today she was like running she was like an e commerce manager at some e comm brand that sells like you know some food product online and nothing wrong with that that's not like a bad thing but i definitely feel like you know the potential was there for a lot more if somebody had kinda sat down and said look here's a blueprint here's a path that could get you to complete financial independence like if somebody our senior a comment said look how much do you even know how much money you want need i'm like none of us would have known it's like do the math you sort of get there you think okay maybe you get to five million dollars or ten million bucks and said do know how do you get there and i would've have been me as a senior would have said i have no clue how you get there is that salary and save up like what am i supposed to do and if somebody had said no no here's what you you could start a business i guess of this you sell for this multiple that whole thing might take you five to seven years maybe ten years total and by the time you're thirty one you might be there right like if somebody has sat me down i would have really felt like thankful and been like wow i don't have to go do that but i'm glad i know what i could i'm glad i even know what that looks like because i didn't know that my parents didn't do that so they didn't teach me that that's not something they knew right like i saw this great quotes you can't ask somebody for directions to a place that have never been and i guess like growing up i didn't i was asking people for directions to a place that they had never been and so therefore they were just giving me all kinds of screwed up directions to places that i didn't wanna go and so yeah i guess like this along with the way of saying i think when i looked at that class i guess like the the i went into it trying to feel good about myself actually i ended up feeling bad i was like man i feel like there was a lot of potential on the table and most people took basically safety and prestige like they had a good job at a great company and i'd rather have no job at my company right that's that's the shift that i wish like you know at least twenty five percent of those people could have done that and been in a totally different position yeah i see so many people do this to as startups where they they go you know my goal is financial freedom and then they go and start a venture back startup up and it goes back to that ro versus poker where it's like look if you just started a boring business like a trash hauling business or window cleaning business or whatever it is you get it to one or two million dollars of cash flow sell it or hold it you're set for life and instead they go off and they raise all this money and they don't realize that they really have a one percent you know call it a one to five percent chance of success and maybe a ten percent chance of like an okay outcome where they basically just make whatever they would have made over ten years in a payout you know if they've just done that or something i feel like so many people are trapped in that way of thinking and i think there's this other great book that really inspired me with mine which is called how to get rich as the best book i mean that's by far one of the best business books of i've read rich because i read a part of it i read like a third of it the book i mean the real the real takeaway is it's it's similar to my book in some ways is right where it's like at the end of the day the money like ruined the money like ruined him right he became like addicted to money and he basically in it goes look all my life i wanted to be a poet and instead i got obsessed with money and addicted to drugs and i wished that i just quit at thirty five he said he goes he goes i was i was a punch drunk boxer but instead of boxing it was making money and i ended up spending a hundred million dollars on crack and horrors because he actually became a he was a crack addict and he died with a partner and that was a prostitute like his his then girlfriend was a a prostitute he met but the book has like ten or fifteen chapters in each is a different lesson but the main takeaways is that he's a really wealthy guy and he keeps it real beautiful writing and he talks about how yeah he got he got drunk on it and he he talks about i mean this kind of thing we've been doing in this episode where we talk about the levels right what are all different levels of wealth and what do they mean and i remember reading it when my net worth was like five hundred grand and he's saying oh you know if you wanna be really if you you might think like fifty million is a lot but that's actually nothing you know here's what you got at two hundred and fifty million he's got comfortably poor comfortably rich yeah and it's got very different and all the levels are quite high you read that you get very humbled are you looking up the levels right now yeah but he has two of them he has levels of non liquid money and then he has levels of liquid money and so he says wealth measured in cash in hand or quickly real reliable assets so kinda like liquid ish assets and what he says is a hundred to four hundred k that's the comfortably poor four hundred to one million the comfortably off one to two million the wealthy and then it goes the lesser rich the comfortably rich the rich the seriously rich that's seventy to a hundred million what does rich start at hundred to two hundred the truly rich and then over two hundred million the filthy and super rich yeah it's a it it's a great chart that he made i love that chart yeah and by the way like i guess for what it's worth even though i went on this rant about like how you can kind of reverse engineer your financial independence i gotta a disagree with one thing that you said andrew interested understood i think you you have a i think am i characterizing this right i think you have a belief which is like you should kind of like focus on these increments like get to the two fifty k get a few million in the bank and then like start then you start kinda finding your life's work as you as you go right you decide how much money you really want get to a get to your enough number and then figure out your life's work is that correct yeah but i think that if you overs shoot that it causes a lot of stress right i had a meeting once i wanna tell you guys about i my company got acquired by twitch and twitch hires this new guy the guy who's currently the ceo of twitch just got damn clan and i go into dan's office and he's my new boss and he's like alright yeah wanna i wanna do it one on one you're wanna he has like five direct reports on one of his direct reports and he's like you know i always with my i i wanna have a good relationship i wanna understand where you're trying to go and then i could help you get so like you know what's the dream for you you know you're like a l i was like l seven at the time like if you wanna get to l eight like you know the like the the little ladder they create inside the company and i think l tan is like the ceo and there's no nine it's like some weird system where you get to eight then you get either get to ten or you don't think going going clear in sci yeah exactly i think bezos is a twelve or a thirteen or something like that and like that's the top level so he's like what's the what's the goal and i was like i in my head i was like do i tell this guy i don't really give a fuck about being at this company or do i have to lie and pretend i wanna be here when i'm really vest out for like the next year i was like alright let's go with the truth so i go honestly like i did this deal that's how i got here that amount of money kinda matters me i wanna invest that out i wanna have fun while i'm here i wanna do good work while here i wanna meet cool people but honestly like not looking for a long term fit here you know does not a one night stand it's like a one year stand for me and i tell him this and he said okay great he he does a flinch and i'm like okay i respect this guy he because i wanna waste my time then trying to figure out like you know your path here but he's like i also i don't wanna check out on you i was like i was that's my hesitation i didn't wanna tell you that because i didn't want you to totally write me off as was like a guy you don't wanna spend any time with for the next year because i'm not a part of the long term he like no and he goes so tell me what is the plan that outside of here and i go you know and this is where i went to like this is how i used to think at the time i had this insecurity which maybe wanna say something very ambitious i thought you know i i live in silicon valley in silicon you know in hollywood you're measured on your your beauty and your in silicon valley it's how ambitious is your story what what are you trying to change and disrupt in all the stuff so i said i said i really wanna start a school like a university so i to the speech and i tell them this thing and i don't know if you guys ever done this but you you have your material as an entrepreneur you're saying it to your employees your investors all the time the speech speeches that you kinda know the reaction that you get and if you always get like a nodding like oh wow that sounds great sounds really well thought through that's a great framework for that you start to get used to so give him my framework i say to do this you need three things you need skills you need capital and you need connections and what i'm doing right now is the next three years i'm building those three up i'm building my capital by being here i'm building my skills by doing this i'm building my connections by you know doing this and that's what i need to do the thing give him this whole speech and i'm so used to people being like oh that sounds really well thought through you know it sounds weird gonna be like mark w in the department and being like hawthorne like come on man like get rid is literally what he did today hey goes yeah i don't buy all that and he doesn't even tell me what i'm just like okay well that's all i got so so what do you want me to say he goes i don't believe in the deferred life plan he goes anytime i he's know he's like i'm older and wiser he's like you know i just if ever hear somebody who wants to do something and then they give me a bunch of reasons why they're not just going and doing it right now it tends to be a bad decision to to not go do the thing you wanna do you say it's okay if you don't know what you wanna do then sure you you go wander around you try to figure it out but if you know you're he's like you're an entrepreneur if somebody told you they wanted to start a business would you tell them first go to business school read these ten books first then go start you know go go do a practice session doing this go hire a coach no you tell them like start the business and you'll figure it out as you go that's how you you get good at business by doing business there is no real substitute to getting good at the thing besides doing the thing and he goes if you wanna do that you should go doing it i don't believe in the deferred life plan and ever since he said that to me you know there's something good about getting just like served like that just getting owned to your face and you're like thank you yeah that was like a real gift that you gave me because you could've have just like everybody else just nod it along it's said alright sounds good good luck and instead he kind of shook me up a little bit and change my frame on that and so that's the only one thing i would say andrew is like you have this thing of like go figure out your life's work which is i don't know maybe a better plan is to like start by saying what i really love doing you loved designing websites designing products and you might just been happier to do that and you might have made as much money if you had just like gone for that versus i think the way that maybe you do things but definitely the way i did things which was first i'm gonna go make the money then i'm gonna do the things i want and actually as i look back now and if i was gonna give advice to myself now i would say i don't think you need to do it that way that works that is one way way to work to make it work but you might be better off just going and trying to do the thing if you know what the thing is do you know do you know that parable the the fishermen and the business ma'am you know that one yeah i love that one so good okay so okay so there's this like you know wall street guy and he's on vacation on a small tropical island and he sees this man who's fishing down by the water and he walks up and he says hey what are you up to and he says i'm fishing for the morning and i'm gonna get a fish and i'm gonna feed my family and the guy goes oh will you ever think about turning that into a business and he goes well how how would that work and he says well first you get a couple other buddies and you fish more you get more fish and then you sell them at the market well then what well and then you would buy a boat and you'd be even more efficient and you could freeze them and you could ship them all over the world and you have a great business and then he goes well and then what and then he says well you did then get a fleet of ships well and then what after that well and then you take the company public and then what well and then you could retire and you could just fish all day and so the joke is like the guy is already doing the thing he loves why would he go and build this big business and i think it's like look do you wanna chop wood in your backyard or do you wanna own a sawmill do you wanna be ji from gi dreams of sushi or steve wells from chipotle i think that is the ultimate question of like what is your happy place and how can you optimize your life around being in that yeah i mean i remember one time i told that story and i was like wait what's the punchline you remember that sean i i was i totally sorry i'm like i'm not really sure what the takeaways but like should i go with like fish or i don't know you remember that no it's a good story though but andrew went when's the book officially come out july ninth it's actually a great book like i have a lot of friends that have come out with books and never enough is actually one that i sat down and read the entire thing not because i was trying to be your friend but because i thought it was awesome the writing is good what are you looking at sean i'm looking at the book well i had the same reaction i would've have said it's a good book anyways because i'm your friend but it actually he's a good i rented it in like three nights basically i read when it was still a pdf there's three there's three good stories i remember from andrew so there's the the charlie mon story so it's basically the the crazy way that you actually ended up meeting your hero and kind of almost did a business deal with them there's the pixel union sale and then buy back story i thought that was a great one of kinda like your first big win in terms of an exit and you shared the numbers and you talked about how it went down and then like how it went slightly wrong i like that story and then the last one i won't i won't give away the ending but the ending is dope and the ending was so good i was like did he just do this for the book like was like did he just make this ending so like he needed a good ending for the books so he just did this thing in real life or was that real but it it was it was a very good way to end the book i liked it it's all is all real dude thanks for doing this again and never enough what what's the best place to buy do you a website or amazon does it matter yeah just could've have never never enough dot com there's all the links there or you can just go on amazon and buy it there enough the pod