alright someone asked me an incredible question today they said if you had to pick one idea that could make you a million dollars this year and it can't be just a newsletter or a blog or an agency which are usually our go to what would it be what would you do one specific idea that you would do and then he also said and i wanna hear one specific idea that you would do to try to make a billion dollars that's a good question and me and sam are gonna answer that right now on this episode my i feel like i could rule the world to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never what's up we're doing our q and a and we got one question that we really love but is the question sean is it a billion dollar a 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 and then you know you own no big chunk of it okay hey what's a bit what's a billion here there okay look the company is worth one billion you're worth one billion all a billion it changes dramatically so i know a guy who sold a company for nine hundred million dollars nine hundred and ninety million dollars you know how much he made after the sale three million dollars that's how much he made he had he had four c cofounder or maybe five and he raised a ton of money and they sold it and he made three million dollars that's insane right and i don't i think that's an extreme case but i think there is many cases where you create a billion dollar business and you actually walk away with like eight percent of the company right which is still a ton of money but it's that's a wild experience it's like a small ton it's a small ton is what time is people think you get when you're when you make a company that big yeah it 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 dollar one alright so you go first for this one so a million dollars and is it net worth like and what do we say three or four years to do it yeah you got a couple years to do it you're gonna make a million dollars in profit so to make a million so i think that there if you wanna make a certain amount of money quickly you have to ask yourself is it gonna come through annual cash flow or is it gonna come through selling something like selling a business so for example if you have a business that's earning let's say three hundred thousand dollars a year you in year one you do fifty thousand year two you do two hundred thousand year three you do three hundred thousand that's not gonna add up to a million dollars however you could sell that business for maybe nine hundred thousand dollars or maybe a million dollars so collectively you can come up with a million bucks i think the easiest thing to do would probably be to sell the business if you wanna make that amount of money in a certain amount of time in like three years what i would do so first do you know quiet light brokerage yes so if i wanna make a million dollars in let's say three years i'm probably not gonna invent anything new i'm just gonna copy what works and i'm gonna try maybe not even do it better i mean there's four almost four hundred million people in america like i can kinda just figure out someone that already is doing something and copy it but put in slightly different is a gentlemen we're not gonna be better faster or cheaper we are simply gonna be also in the business of yeah yeah at all at all isn't so strategy yeah the me too strategies is that what this is like me also that's a different thing we don't want me to we don't want me to we don't want me to sorry the me also strategy that's we'll call the the me also strategy so i would probably go to quiet light brokerage the quiet light brokerage i've had a couple friends sell and buy businesses through this i've had one friend sell a business via quite light brokerage for ten million i had another buddy buy a company for three hundred thousand that ended up making eighteen million dollars a year in revenue and i know those guys that quite like brokerage and i've talked to them and basically quite like 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 all you gotta do is say i'm interested in this business and then they send you a packet of information about that business including the name who the owner is where it's incorporated how they got their first customers how where where they get their customer makes today what are the areas for growth they do this fantastic little interview with the person which is for buying the business very useful but also if you're gonna executing the me also strategy it is brilliant and in fact we have a friend who did this we have a friend who was looking at one of these websites saw a business for sale for i think like a hundred and twenty or a hundred fifty thousand dollars one of the smallest business for sale maybe on flip us somewhere or on something like that and he was like well i don't have a hundred fifty thousand dollars but i do have a lot of time to pick your brain and so he picked the brains of a bunch of people and then they were like cool you wanna buy it he's like no but you could you know you convinced me how easy this is so see you and went and recreated that and sold her for many millions more and but literally did that and i think once i heard that i realized oh there are easier ways at harder ways to make ten million dollars and the easier way is you go look at businesses that are already successful and you reverse engineer which one you could you could create and copy 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 you go to quite light or whatever you could use any of these brokerage sites we we both like quite like because it's a little curated so it's it's less filled with junk even though honestly a lot of the 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 two million bucks two million megabytes is a nice number right you could be even a little bit worse in this business and and and still make a million bucks you can if you sold it for two million after taxes you have a million dollars alright so here it is it's a fba business that 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 i could be called it a minute money printing machine and a money counting machine in this case they literally so this says launched in twenty twenty so three years ago it says this business sells money counting machines and counterfeit build detectors to local business government agencies restaurants financial services banks if i manage companies and non nonprofit is it one like this like this money counting machine that i have my have that right now so i have no for those now give it a run if you give it a run that's all i don't have it i don't have it plugged in but so i have i literally have a money counting machine here with counterfeit money on it when i sold my company jack smith my best friend he bought me this as like congratulations it's a hundred dollars 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 this is either gonna be a huge like paper or you're actually gonna use it good luck and it's a nice gift i i think this cost two hundred dollars as i great we should do that for the for any fan if you're going through the process of you're gonna sell your business just email us and we'll send you the counter as the good luck as our good luck charm from us to you whenever and the 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 really yeah was like it's fake the all the this it's a hundred grand cash that caused my it's a great trust test that you should just leave it out and see like you know what not only did you steal fake money but you're out of a job too well that's actually a test i do when i have like new 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 was like what's gonna candy bar and see what happens someone selling it literally a money cutting machine accounting machine shane one point eight million in revenue six hundred twenty five thousand dollars of net income net profit so they're selling it here and then if you go and you you it's a husband a 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 do you understand like ten hours a week got this they just don't have enough time and energy to devote a growing the business that anybody who steps in could do alright 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 twenty to thirty of these just to get a good idea get enough data points and i would find out which fits my interest so for example sean click where they have membership so they have a membership category they've got media which i know about media so i would do that one but membership is interesting i think the reason memberships are interesting is i think you could have a really really really niche community where you solve a very specific problem and i'll give you two examples so for like one could be so if you are if you have a job you maybe work you know and so you work whatever in industry and you know something but you have this problem called the knowledge complex where you think well everyone knows therefore it's not that interesting to teach and i think that's actually crazy i think for like two examples are automations for hvac owners another one is outbound sales for like chiropractors or for architects and i think what you can do with things like this is you can charge pretty high amounts so you could charge five hundred dollars a month where you get access to content that you update on a regular basis and then you have a community where all the other participants can share tactics and ideas that they're using to overcome the the problem that they've all signed up for another example is a community where you have a database with all the right people who you need to contact at a certain within a certain niche in order to get a sale done so for example let's say you're an agency or it could be like here's all of the buyers of media at the these companies that you update regularly and then you could have a community where people are discussing tactics and strategies in order to accomplish that task and i think when you look at like the the the problem or you're like you're thinking about what the customers is going through when they're gonna buy this which is well if i spend three thousand dollars a year on this if i only get one sale this is worth it for me and i get a positive roi and i think that sale is significantly easier than selling to consumers where you're having to do a lot of guess work with this if you do three thousand dollars a year in order to get to a million dollar sale i you'd have to look at what those multiples are but i think the multiples on the membership sites are like five times profit so you get to a million you need two hundred fifty thousand dollars in profit to get do it two hundred fifty thousand dollars in profit on a three thousand dollar year service it could be just you and part time employee or one full time employee i don't know what that math is but you don't need that many customers in order to hit that target and so i would do that over a consumer product because i could just talk to my customers and they could tell me exactly what they want and i'm basically providing a service that they're requesting on a regular basis in order to keep them here's the specific example of that exit five i think is the name of it exit five is like a community of b b marketers and i don't know what they pay per earth it's it's a little bit less than what you just said but i think they could be charging you know more like twenty five hundred or three thousand dollars but the big idea here is go get a hundred people paying you three rand a year and you can even make it exclusive be like this is a community for only a hundred and fifty of the top b b markers in the world we're gonna we're gonna invite you in and then you're gonna share ideas plus we have this database of whatever whether it's ad creative networks works we have this database of vendors or you know buyers with their contact info and we all openly share here it's like it's a sort of gift to get you know model and yeah the thing is we probably worth two three million bucks right now that that this guy's made and and you know five hundred to a thousand 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 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 five thousand people which is very attainable to get particularly if you give it a year you only need about a hundred to two hundred people to buy what you're selling in order to hit that target and you so your podcast doesn't need to be huge your twitter handle your cold email outbound strategy doesn't need to be huge and so that's probably what i would do to get to a million dollars what do you think about that well you have you basically sent two ideas right that was a two for one special you had go to quiet light or a business brokerage and find a business that you can either reverse engineer or legitimately so you reverse engineer we kinda say and that's i would say a little bit generously let's call it scrappy the crappy way to do things you don't have any money you you know you need to get i you you know rather than just try to come up with an idea from scratch when you're kind of a beginner the better way is to go learn what businesses actually work how they work why they work go look at thirty to fifty that's like a real world nba that you picked up and then find one of those that you think you could mimic and put your own twist on right that's that's ideal one you had by the way with that comes also you could just buy the business so for a lot of these even a two million dollar business you can go get an sba loan a lot of these will say that they're sba loan eligible so let's say that you're in the united states you can go get an sba loan put down ten to fifteen percent so if you can go get two hundred grand you could buy a two million dollar business that's doing six hundred six hundred k of profit per year and so you could actually go buy that business and just try to grow it because actually getting a business from zero dollars in revenue two million in revenue we'll point eight million revenues pretty hard relative to taking a business that's at one point eight and getting it to three point one million for example like you know adding an extra million of revenue to a business already working is actually much easier than going from zero to one for sure i think you got both options at the table there it's just more risk well yeah there's there's a little bit more risk because 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 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 a membership community for some niche right that's kind of like a idea it 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 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 right and there's a clear roi as opposed to like accountability or whatever it is know what i mean right nothing soft and fluffy alright so those are good i think there's really good in fact i think the first one you said is i think the right answer that's what i would in reality that's what i would go do but to make it fun i'm gonna 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 is like y how do i do i'd be alright look this is what we're doing you need to do this worst case scenario you're gonna go learn what a bunch a bunch a bunch of blueprints for successful businesses and maybe you don't pull the trigger on any of them but still was you could use of your time and best case scenario you find one of these that you say i could do that 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 because it's not hard to build an e commerce brand either on on amazon or or on shopify that can sell for million dollars but kind of like a boring answer so i'm gonna give you a more fun answer so here is here's one idea the four most beautiful letters in the english language r qs bs alright so what's the qs bs idea you're gonna create a q bs advisory firm well what is that a super niche technically this might be considered an agency but but i think will allow it because it's so specific in niche here not and off the beaten path so what here's what you're gonna do now when any company starts a tech company starts that's going to be qs sbs eligible that qs eligibility is what to say what qs usps is oh sorry qs usps is a tax treatment for qualified small business stock what that means is that if you're a business that fits like these five criteria which most tech companies fit then when you sell if you've held the stock for five years or even if it's a little bit less than that you can still kind of roll it over your first ten million dollars of your gain are gonna be tax free not only most tech companies most new c corp that hold for five years well it would would fall on there are some exceptions like you can't do it if you're a doctor or lawyer or real estate like there are things that are excluded but again that's kinda of the a point here curious bs advisory we're gonna help you figure out are you eligible or not and we're gonna provide a letter that says we attest to the you know the belief that this is gonna be qualified small business stock now why is this easy to why is my strategy do this well if i'm trying to make money kinda like you described with the membership i need to create ten times more than i'm taking right this is a general rule of life that's probably a good rule of life create more value than you're trying to take and that's what i'd be trying to do here so i was looking for something where with a small amount of work i could create a lot of value for my customer well or that sounds generic but like in this case if my stock is gonna be q usps eligible that might save me ten million dollars down the road and that's a pretty big huge benefit so would i pay five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars for you know in legal fees in order to an advisory fees in order to protect my possible ten million dollar gain i would and i think a lot of people do and so what what i would do here is i would build a advisory firm that says we are q usps experts we know the ins and out to q usps were respected i would hire maybe lawyers or accountants that have done this before and i would say hey on a as needed basis i'm gonna when i get a customer i will pay you whatever three hundred dollars an hour five hundred dollars an hour for your time to do an assessment and write a letter that basically assess the eligibility you think for usps now usps is not like a black and white thing it's not like a usps is basically when you when you get the sale you declare you say this falls under q usps but if you ever got audited you'd have to be able to protect you know defend that why did you say it was q usps eligible and so what companies and individuals do is they will go to go get a letter that basically says we as experts have looked at this business and we believe that this is gonna be q usps this is qualified from all business stock you know like the four zero nine what's it called the four zero nine yeah four zero so what when in order to do a bunch of stuff with your business you yeah a lot of times tech companies have to get valued every year for every premier every year you should get valued and then that also is necessary when you wanna issue new stock or whatever for employees or for investors you and there's set a benchmark four ninety but there's a lot of companies that do this as a service where you spend five or ten dot five hundred to ten thousand dollars and you don't actually give them that much information you give them your financials and then they ask you to submit like ten publicly traded competitors and then they just like say alright we think that your valuation is blank and you you spend five to ten thousand dollars i think for that you're basically want it to be low usually so usually what you're trying to do is get a low four so that every basic options are priced low 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 and it's kinda a cro capitalism a little bit like they'll be like yeah yeah yeah we'll make it low and they or we'll we'll be fair and then they won't at you and they like set it really low but yeah basically you're you're what you're suggesting is doing the same thing for usps which is and four nine is equally valid idea but what i would do is i would i would create this from what i like about the usps thing is it's a little bit higher ticket so typically these people will charge let's say ten to fifteen thousand dollars for the initial at attest station letter i don't know i'm saying that word we're 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 so genuine help so for example oh you're gonna sell secondary there's things you might do wrong when you sell secondary that could disqualify you there's disqualify 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 qs eligibility and so it's just a insurance policy it's a cover your ass it's a legal thing it's something people don't wanna do themselves just too high risk 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 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 crunch base and i would say don't you want this ten million dollar exclusion for you it's it's per person by the it's not per company so it's per tax return so let's say there's a company with that's gonna be gonna be big every single one of those executives is gonna want fair of stock to be qs 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 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 up upfront or a monthly recurring fee or an annual recurring fee fifteen nine fifteen fifteen hundred dollars a year or two thousand dollars a year and we will kinda make sure where your advisory on that so that you know you're covered at the end of the day that's a pretty brilliant idea actually you know if you just think about it right how do get to let's say we talked about to sell a company for over a million dollars let's just round up and say you gotta have three hundred thousand dollars of of annual net profits how do you get to three hundred thousand of annual net profits if you're charging you know roughly ten thousand dollars a year you only need thirty customers a year thirty customers a year i've taken shit bigger than that come on you can't get to a million dollars this way you can't get it anyway right i think what holds a lot of people back would be there's not gonna be a bunch of these so this this is not like you can't bring up ten thousand of these like you know social media marketing agencies there gonna be a million of those you have to have some expertise or partner with people who have expertise so they sent 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 so many upsell to that which is like the key to selling a company is they say alright well how does this grow and you say well do these companies also need a four zero nine at four zero nine eight 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 is great don't need to be a law firm so there's rule all all kinds of rules around who can own a law 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 that's i've worked with someone who does is if everybody actually needs a letter feel free to email me i'll i'll i'll route you to the guide you can you can actually use because what are gonna be like the mob and take cut from making an introduction you should i gotta get my beak wet too alright yeah that's actually better than my idea by the way because i actually think this is simpler because it's already a service others are providing and you're just basically connecting yeah yeah so i would look for things like that i had like five other ideas that would fit this but okay for this sense 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 before we get to the billion dollar idea oh hold on what time is it it is time for the thrill of the shell sam you're up your first time provided to the thrill of the show for those who don't know this is where we shameless shi 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 got have attributes if we're gonna do this we go thrilled of the time i'm gonna try and keep this one short because the short this might be a short so but basically i remember in two thousand and seventeen i went to nerd wall at nerd dot com i went to their office tim chen was the ceo and founder he invested in the hustle and i remember being like tim i'm freaking out man my expenses went up because of payroll from thirty thousand to eighty thousand dollars a month and at the time they had just rented twitter's old office and they were you know they probably had a payroll of three million dollars a month or maybe even five million dollars a month and i remember he looked at me funny and he was like trying to be empathetic and he was nice and and he kinda like was nice by saying oh wow wow yeah i understand and i was like tim i'm so stressed out about this and what he said to me was basically look you kinda have to detach yourself and your payroll needs to just you just it's just a number on an excel sheet and you just have to like figure out do i deploy this much money here and what's my outcome going to be and what's my profit going to be and that didn't sit well with me until about twelve months ago so i launched this company called hampton joanne hampton dot com it's like a community for founders who are doing at least a million of revenue but the average members is like twenty five million a year and i remember like that freaking me out forever we had a team retreat last week and i went out there and right now we've got sixteen full time employees or fit fifteen including me and then we've also employed i think fifty facilitator now so and what like eighteen months we've created what's that seventy or sixty five jobs something like that and i am so not stressed about it this year this is the only time i've not been stressed about payroll and providing people because the way that we've looked at it is exactly how tim has explained where it's just like what's my input what's my output and this idea of being like a capital all i've never had that where it's like been as clear cut as well i hire this person i get this much out after three months it's completely changed how i've how i've run this company and it's made me so much more relaxed and i don't know what made that shift other than his conversation but you know what talking about have you like been through this well we both used to be kind of like oh if for entrepreneur you're a product maker and like we'd be sitting there right you know you're right in the hustle and you know i'm sitting there in in designing things and working with the just trying to make a product but there is an up level of that which is at as once you build the product and the product has part which hampton does has product market fit people like it they use it they they're in it now you're a capital all basically you're taking you're 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 gonna get more output than the input and sometimes you'll miss you know not gonna be a hundred percent but no 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 peer of yours was the key yeah and that's by the way what whole the the whole one of the whole things about hampton is that you have peers with other entrepreneurs that are of similar sized company that that that you have and anyway that like learning i remember having our team off site at previous companies and i'm like like this person just had a baby basically i just had a baby how am i gonna create enough revenue in order to like provide for this kid because that's how it feels at first before you're like no you didn't i do remember yeah i like the one who did that hey jess when's our baby shower i just i this year it's been oh or you'll be like this person costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars there's no way that's a fair salary right it's like well that's not house how i'm from are you yeah like that yeah can i live in you do you have three beds in a bath i'm not eighty two hundred thousand a dollar 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 fifty million in revenue we're building groups for that join ham dot com alright let's do the billing dollar one you you want me to go first can i go first okay go alright i'm gonna steal one of your lines so sean what if i told you i had an idea this is me your line i'm leaving what what if i told you i had an idea that elon musk himself would be bigger than tesla would that interest you do i'd be fairly interested do you know who i think his name is kai fu lee do you know who that investor is is the no 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 in terms of like why they're gonna beat america and he was saying that this thing is going to replace forty percent of jobs inside the next twelve years would that interest you i i would love to replace forty percent of jobs in the next twelve years i think about that off now if you're thinking i'm talking about ai you're wrong here's it here here's what it is it's humanoid humanoid that's what that's the technical term basically imagine robo cup or imagine machines and i think that those whole business of humanoid which is robots to automate a lot of processes a lot of people think like just blue collar jobs but that's not entirely true it's like every type of jobs so elon musk said that the tesla has is working on humanoid i think it's called opt is what it's called and he went on to say that 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 gonna be bigger than our car business bigger than self driving bigger than solar it's gonna be bigger than everything and i don't think you guys realize how big this is going to be i invested in this company in a space called fig and i talked to brett ad hoc we adam him on here and he basically has me convinced that this is gonna be like the biggest industry mover or the in the next like ten or fifteen years and i think that what i would do invest in figure yeah is that is that a did i tell you the the t time no no no no i've never told you that that's funny but what valuation three hundred million dollars i think okay that's not bad and i invalid that's not that bad well i invest and i invested a lot for me which i think is around sixty thousand dollars well yeah he's like your hero so you know you actually just paid for some time yeah i paid for access i paid for him to reply to a text but basically that that was a lot of money for me i i don't normally invest that much but my reasoning is is like this could i could see it going on business which is incredibly likely i could see it selling for three billion dollars or i could see it becoming like a fifty billion dollar company but it's like a 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 reason why i think this would be a big think this is gonna be like one of the biggest things that happens in the next fifteen years i think that the people who are working on this space are typically like hardcore hardware engineering nerds and i think that i could spend a year going to every meetup up going to car the carnegie mel 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 cole the emailing the brett ad hoc 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 tangent like the areas that you're not attacking that are interesting i think i can get them to explain to me these problems i think that i think this is so big that there's gonna 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 like a 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 kinda like do the rest that's gonna take me fifty or eighty years who knows how long that's gonna it take me but if you wanna 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 wanna do it in like ten years rather and so i think i would go into the humanoid space what do you think about that well as you know i love that idea because i was gonna 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 least literally ring that out already i have that will you send me that and i'll say it with my lips and i was like i fine bro well let me tell you something interesting alright let me add you so obviously a hundred percent agree i think i i actually was specifically thinking like warehouse robots like i would even just kinda narrow it down and be like alright if i was really gonna do this i would try to figure out what job in a warehouse i can eliminate by using a robot which is what like packing boxes basically i would look at the minimum wage labor class and i would say nobody wants minimum wage essentially the workers don't wanna be minimum wage the employers don't wanna pay minimum wage and get like kind of a flaky output and so i had a friend once that was tell me he's like i invest in companies with no product market fit risk my friend michelle and i said what do you mean i've never i just thought every startup up has product market fit that's the whole point you're trying to get to product market fit he goes no i invest with no product market fit risk i never heard debt before and he goes i'm just looking for technical risk meaning if you could build it the job is done and he's like of course you'll still go sell it but like there it will be so easy at that point the market will obviously absorb this if it can actually do it there are many things like this so like self driving if you can actually make self safe self driving cars cars that do not crash that are you know self driving and obviously there's always the edge cases but there's an infinite market demand for people not to want to be driving and sitting in traffic and having their car parked instead of having it go run around and earn the money by dropping people off and so he his idea you he invested in this pizza robot company so it was like basically was awesome 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 heck 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 go with this so he's like you know if you're domino's do you wanna pay you know whatever i don't know what they pay fifteen dollars an hour for somebody who's gonna call in sick they're gonna be checking their phone they're gonna be goof off they're gonna be eating pepperoni off the pizzas they're gonna you know they're gonna 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 twenty four seven never calls in sick never complains never asks you for more money and never nebraska asked for a raise never spits in the food never does would you rather have that it's like oh of course you would always have the robot that makes the perfect pizza and he's like making a pizza is incredibly like it's a it's a sandbox 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 what 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 gonna you know so so what i would do is i would go and do exactly what you said like got mit go to carnegie mel and be like hey guys we're building a pizza robot and what we do there's whatever how many pizza chains you know how many pizza restaurant location how many pizza chains in the us and by the way there was a company called zoom zoom zoom i forget that went out of business and people made fun of them they're like in the headlines they got totally mocked they raised five hundred million dollars that was cool and that definitely could work 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 eighty thousand pizza chain pizza restaurants in the country eighty thousand and you would start with the chains because the chains actually have the most to gain by doing this right and they would budget you they'll budget they'll they'll sign letters of intent like i remember when boom supersonic the airplane company came out at yc and they were like yeah we have a hundred million dollar purchase order from like richard branson if we could build this plane they're gonna 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 it or believe it that was the bet and i like that idea you too i'll i'll tell you know the think about the robotics thing before i like test i like tech risks a little bit more than like demand risk for sure yeah yeah i agree meet me too even though that's not at all how i've you know thought about it before but if i was gonna go try to build a billion dollar company i would go try to build one with only tech risk and not demand risk so there's here i'm a tell you a little little story here so shout out to this guy abe you probably don't know abe but his boss kevin ryan came on the pods so kevin ryan comes on the pod he's fascinating but like he had this aura of i'm a badass who does badass things but i'm kinda busy and so of course ben applied ben's law so the the ben's law for those who don't know is you don't try to contact sean you contact ben ben is the faster more approachable smarter better better human being to to approach and get the insight on and and get in touch with me then trying to go to me directly and so ben applied ben's law ben goes and he finds kevin ryan's ben and so he finds the number two that's you know like there and so he finds this guy hey abe murray and i was crime to abe newsletter and he just had a good one which he goes he goes why the consensus view of robotics is wrong and he goes i think that most people think of you know the future robots is this humanoid and maybe a humanoid that walks and has arms and legs is the is the eventual solution but that might be too far out right now and actually we should look at the most successful robot in the world today what is it the dishwasher it's installed and everybody's home already it's a robot dishwasher it replace that job of having to wash dishes for you know the majority of homes and it goes it doesn't have arms and legs it doesn't look like a human it is a purpose built robot that solves one specific need and they have some company called renovate robotics and the picture is basically it's a robot that sits on a roof that does roofing jobs so it'll go and it'll replace a roof basically it just goes up and down your roof you know or like not replaced but like you know lay down the roof or whatever like you know install a roof on a on a home and he's like if this works it's gonna be he's like we just did the first robotic installed roof if this works you can you have lower cost higher quality more like consistency more availability you know for for roofing companies and so i like this idea of these purpose built specific robots the equivalent of dishwasher and pizza mason sauce and roofing robots if i was gonna do the billing dollar yeah that's what i would do but i was their home your home homepage labor is the biggest challenge for roof our robots make roof 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 a 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 you creating a social product that people love which is so much more rare and more challenging have you heard the elon musk quote the the only real laws or physics everything else is of recommendation no but that's brilliant alright so that's a great idea i think these purposeful robots that's a great idea i came up with says you well and know i'm saying think that's these these these this robot idea i think is is the right idea by the way here's a way to like create more luck like this our buddy fur has this space in san francisco called founder inc f dot inc and what he did i was like so what's the plan he's like i'm gonna recruit like the smartest hackers i can find and just be like hey here's a free office here i'm gonna help you out and i'm gonna invest in you before you even though what the hell you're doing and i'm gonna help you get these off the ground i was like well that's great but how are you gonna get the best hackers because i'm a give them toys so what 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 three d printers drones laser cutting equipment robotic arms stuff that the average hacker can't buy you know the average you know twenty two year old engineer can't go by this you know fifteen thousand dollar thing or thirty thousand dollar thing but fe con can buy it and he's like i'm just gonna 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 the guy who's this a company called orange wood labs that basically they have this robotic arm that can do whatever you program it to do so when i went in there they were like watch we're gonna make it you know make a margarita watch this 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 everything you ever done powder coating and i was like no like you don't really dangerous too was like no stop asking questions and they're like well i think everything is powder coat yeah it's basically like how you you know all you do it on floors you do on any medals or whatever like for car or something like that so they're were like yeah this thing can powder coat basically bet better and faster like automatically and so we could do jobs at like you know one fifth of the price of a human being because we just give them the robot the robot just goes and does it and then it comes home and that's it and so i was like oh interesting but there's a lot of people building stuff like this and one way to increase serendipity is to like go to these kinda hardware labs or go find out where they hang out just go talk to people see what they're what they're building and they're a lot of these people who do this they're not they're not a lot of them don't care about business a lot of them are on oregon it's like the the typical like scientists who wears like who forgets to put one sock on and only wears like one sock or like their shoes on on the wrong foot it's like they're just like these brilliant people who don't necessarily care about stuff and i think if you could be the organizer you can win what do you have alright so safari path to a billion do you want the dark idea or you want the light idea do you want the the good idea or the evil idea which one do you want i don't know that that's a i wanna go dark i think but okay i really both but i'll do the dark one fast so here's the here's the big pitch for the dark idea and for some other country so that's it you could figure the rest down from there what palmer lucky has done with andrew for the us defense department do it for israel do it for yeah do it for another country go find a country that wants you know advance weapons technology and i'd be like i'm gonna recruit the brightest minds and we're gonna give us like you know a fifty million to a hundred fifty million dollar contract and we'll get started here dude palmer on a tear lately and i would literally go look at the map for andrew i'd be like they built this like missile that can fly itself you know and lives in this like vending machine i don't know you saw that video of like yeah it's amazing he's on a tear inside i'd be like cool do you pick from the integral menu we're gonna 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 this 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 ongoing right they're on deal stream so go to a bit website called deal stream come my that was kinda of funny well they could be on what deal stream 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 they're there and they're not that expensive you could buy colleges for like five million dollars ten million dollars so to do this you're gonna 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 if somebody really if if mega billionaire genius wanted to buy stanford or harvard what what would it even cost could it i don't even know what the would would it be like a a harvard a hundred plus billion dollars i mean the endowment alone i think it's like what the down alone is almost a hundred billion dollars right it's hard to even been it's the whole it's gotta be five hundred billion it might like these are companies that are worth they're certain universities are essentially properties that are worth you know a facebook they're crazy they're crazy harvard endowments is is fifty three billion so yeah i don't know they it a hundred to two hundred billion three hundred billion something like 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 i went belmont you went to belmont what's the tuition at belmont back then it was thirty thousand let's see what it is now belmont university tuition thirty eight thousand dollars alright so thirty eight thousand dollars and how many students go to belmont let's say five thousand five thousand per year per year per or the whole whole university you could say let's say eighteen hundred per year alright so let's go this round up to two thousand so even a small small private where where is belmont i even know where national tennessee it looks like they have seventy three hundred students so two thousand per class let's say cool so seventy six million dollars top line that's not counting endowments it's not counting grants and research it's not counting the fact that it's tax free that it's has like all these other benefits like we so you can actually see see the numbers by the way that belmont annual revenue is four hundred and sixty four million dollars their expenses are three hundred fifty million dollars so they make a hundred million dollars year profit only have two hundred million dollars in liabilities and they have one point five billion dollars in asset and that's for a a bill where a university so that's the game plan we're we're building one of those now what are we gonna do so we're gonna 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 a creditor that i 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 a physical place because i think it adds to the prestige we will have a large online component but whatever now the main goal goal here is we gotta brand this school and so what are we gonna do we're gonna make it a bit of a luxury product meaning it's gonna 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 gonna sponsor competitions for like about math 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 gonna sponsor ton of competitions guess what those cost pizza the currency is a essentially you provide three pizza there is no competition when i was doing our esports company that we sold to twitch i was like alright wanna create the world's biggest high school esports league and we did in like less than a year that's what it costs like four hundred fifty pizzas is what it cost me to like sponsor these programs it costs nothing and so we're gonna go and we're gonna first we're gonna get in front of them now when i why did i go to duke university i went because i in fifth grade duke did something called the nationwide talent identification program and i'll be damned if my mom didn't wanna find out if her kid was talented and so we take this test and we take this test and it's the version of like a like one of those model competitions have them mall when you're at twelve yeah it's a beauty bad it's like sports but for brown people so still my mom puts me in this i really i actually i think every kid and my school took it they just went to the school and they were like hey we're trying to identify the most talented gifted talented kids also parents can you put your income on the statement as well so exactly is that a impacts your iq a little bit and you know we gotta get paid so i got a score back and a goody bag and literally the goody bag was a rubik's cube and i i don't know what the hell is going on but whatever that is i'm gonna go find the marketing coordinator that did this do talented advantage program we're stealing with that we're gonna go get them all their young fifth sixth grades we're gonna be identifying the special you know special gift and talented of kids so making it super prestigious you already know the name gonna have some old money shit right you know you know you know we're going we're i've already done this before with the private school names yeah it's gotta be like bridge mod oakland waldorf war you you head be excels yeah exactly so we're definitely going that way we're gonna have our own entry exam so we don't take the sat because we're not peasants and so you're gonna we're gonna go from city to citi and we're gonna have our own interest exam it's gonna be a six point exam i don't know what that means but let's just say that's what it is now what else are we gonna do you know these speaker bureaus where you could go pay like fifty thousand dollars for obama to speak yeah we're doing that more like two million dollars for obama but yeah okay well we're we got a budget alright and the budget gonna be like we have like a six million dollar speaker budget so when i'm raising this money for this i'm gonna basically raise fifty to seventy five million dollars maybe a hundred million dollars for this and a lot of that is front loaded in brand building and one of the things we're gonna do is about five to six million dollars a year speaker fees and so i'm basically gonna pull the sam bank freed without the fraud so you know sam bank took the money and basically it was like how do i tom brady wash everybody that f t x is like a thing and it's legitimate he's like tom brady larry david steph curry this arena oh this guy is like a super connector in hollywood gonna put a hundred million dollars into his fund and now he's gonna make he's gonna give me you know dinner with bill 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 through 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 have just been an incredible approach by an entrepreneur like it actually would have been very like lauded of how he did it in the same way that like you know uber is is sort of praised for the way it just like brute force its way into to 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 speech speeches to our kids and we're gonna also spend a ton of money on direct marketing so no university really goes d except for the low end university of phoenix type of shit that's crazy by the way they are amazing at it they are really at it it built up they're like five billion world your business doing in the world of like direct response there's like financial newsletters then there's like omaha steaks who like crush it in the stamps that the world and dysfunction and then like video game people and then universities university of phoenix crush it i think i think them and like wholesale sale are in the top like twenty of spend on google yeah yeah exactly and you i technical institute running tv ads and stuff like that that's what i would do so i'd i basically go through podcast podcasts i'm gonna blanket them every every intellectual podcast that parents listen to i'm gonna blanket it with with ads for this and the ads aren't apply apply now come here the ads are gonna be about how hard it is to get in about it it's gonna be more native stuff about controversy is it right or wrong that the school is so hard to get into that's only for the gift and talented that they're discriminating and only allowing the smart kids in and i would actually drum up controversy around that in order to to build the brand because there's no better brand than a brand that of something you can't get into so there's this amazing article that says lessons you can learn from for profit universities on cost per click advertising the university of phoenix in the last five years has spent three billion dollars in marketing on google alone it's estimated that are spending roughly five million dollars a month and they receive roughly seventy thousand to eighty thousand clicks per month off of google app that's insane that is insane that's why what else would i do okay so i'm spending a ton of money on ads i hired the best branding agency in the world i'm spending money on other speakers fees again i'm spending spending spending now how do i make money okay well obviously you have things like intuition but i actually think there's another another way you could do this it involves my good old friend n t's okay so hear me out hear me out you're gonna respect this idea when you're here have you ever seen when a stadium launches that they sell something called ps cells do you know what those are is that like season ticket holders for a certain period of time or like club members think you're paying twenty five fifty thousand dollars oh you must be getting tickets no no you got a personal seat license and the license just allows you to buy the ticket you can't even buy the ticket without the license so literally imagine every chair in the stadium and they basically have their own license each one has its own license you have to buy license in order to buy the tickets once you buy the tickets option now you can now you can sell it now you can sell the license you sell whatever right they use this to fund raise so i kinda have this idea about universities which was if i wanted to start a university let's say i was gonna have you know five thousand or ten thousand students a year well why wouldn't i sell ten thousand why wouldn't i meant a ten thousand n package around and again i built brand up i have a real story here unlike most entities have a real story and the story is this what would it be worth to buy a seat at harvard to own one seat in every admissions class at harvard you could use it for your own kid you could gift it out as a scholarship or you could sell it to somebody who wants to go to well yeah because the the the major value rental property the value of a good diploma it should go up every decade so like belmont university they don't have any street cr so like my value isn't going up a harvard to stanford goes up but then if they have a controversy like penn state it goes down correct and so i wanna have ten thousand admissions license essentially so this is a a 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 gonna pay your rental link you're gonna get a piece of the revenue or piece of the profits from the from the from the from the tuition now i think that you could sell these for probably at least twenty five thousand if not fifty thousand each right so like i think that's a low end for what you could do if you can tell the story properly and your boys a good storyteller teller so let's say we get we end up getting to fifty thousand dollars a piece we sell ten thousand of these i just raised five hundred million dollars 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 pcs or billionaires to fund this thing and so i think what you could do is do maybe ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars per per seat here sell ten thousand of these and you know we're gonna price these all in east that's just five eth five ethan if you own you know a seat at this prestigious university and so i know if i do it year one but maybe year two i would move to that once i've built a little bit of the brand momentum and i would say you're gonna own something that's gonna pay you back every single year so you might have spent ten grand on it but you're gonna get back you know two grand a year or a thousand dollars a year in and income plus you own this prestige asset that's gonna appreciate over time and you could sell your whole seat later i think you answered the shout of this question i think that's that's that it'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 ps cells you do normal tuition on top of selling this initial seat it's just that person gets a rev share of the tuition the biggest thing that's wild here is that you can go on to deal stream which i am and i'm looking at universities that you can buy here's the for eight point five million dollars that you can purchase fully accredited which i don't know what the value of that is and you get a campus yep this particular university it had peak enrollment in two thousand seventeen with two million in revenue this is wild like here full year accredited university southern california a fully accredited university in soc cal alright twenty five million it's accredited its degree is recognized all around the world they get the school can offer f one 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 the us citizen somebody in china and so we are gonna go ham on international students we're gonna you that's gonna be a big part of the marketing so this has the the school has about nine hundred 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 is has title nine is possible and i think with title nine i think that means you get government funding for sports yeah yeah exactly you're eligible for for getting funding from it and then this is crazy right so i would you i would just keep my eyes peeled for about a year i would go around and you one thing that every rich person likes is the idea of like fixing education and i would just go tell him this is a school that you would have wanted to go to right it's a school that is you know based around people who actually build things and make things it's gonna be a school that prioritizes projects over lectures it's a school that is you know it's it's competitive and 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 the harvard of stanford and 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 checks i think that was a nine point five out of ten pitch i think you did pretty good you did a great job by starting it off of what do you think harvard worth and i'm like i i don't even know unlimited money not it's it's it's not even sell probably or even viable rather what's stanford worth what's university of pen i like it's i don't know it's they're it's invaluable almost that's a that's a very good pitch bravo alright 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 word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back