Topic · My First Million
Beyond business ideas, MFM regularly surfaces high-quality thinking on how to build and preserve wealth. This topic collects episodes where the hosts go deep on investing frameworks, asset allocation, contrarian financial bets, and the mental models behind financial decisions.
89 briefings found matching this topic. Sorted by publication date, newest first.
Feb 20, 2026
The man who turned Jamaica's beach into a $5B luxury monopoly started by hauling air conditioners.
Butch Stewart built Sandals by spending so aggressively on the guest experience that no competitor could match the value proposition at his price point — the spending itself became the moat.
Read →Feb 16, 2026
Scott Galloway runs out of diplomatic patience and spends an hour saying the things people in his tax bracket usually hire PR firms to obscure.
Galloway's thesis: the institutional and political conditions that made U.S. equities uniquely attractive have shifted enough that geographic diversification is no longer a tax-loss trade.
Read →Feb 13, 2026
Sam and Shaan stop explaining AI and start showing what happens when you actually build with it.
Shaan argues that AI agents completing actual tasks — not just generating text — represent the more significant shift, and Do Anything is his proof-of-concept for this claim.
Read →Feb 5, 2026
A weekend with MrBeast, Scooter Braun, and Nick Mowbray produces three lessons that are simpler and harder than you want them to be.
Intensity as strategy: the billionaires who stuck out weren't smarter than the millionaires in the room — they simply refused to accept 'good enough' at the scale where millionaires are satisfied.
Read →Jan 29, 2026
Tyler Denk built Beehiiv to $1M ARR in a year, and the actual story is less about product and more about what he calls the 'marketing kill shot.'
The marketing kill shot is a single story that makes a product's audience self-select — Beehiiv's was positioning itself as what Substack should have been for professional media operators.
Read →Jan 23, 2026
Foam party hats and star registries don't sound like businesses until you learn how much money they make.
The best small businesses are often in categories too embarrassing to attract smart competition — foam party hats and star registries win because ambitious people would rather lose in a sexy market than win in an ugly one.
Read →Jan 21, 2026
Morgan Housel spends an hour making the case that most people are bad at spending money for the same reason they're bad at investing: they confuse performing wealth with having it.
Most money anxiety comes from treating wealth as a scoreboard rather than as fuel — the accumulation becomes self-referential and the actual use of money gets permanently deferred.
Read →Jan 12, 2026
David Senra has read more founder biographies than anyone alive, and his conclusion is that greatness and balance are mutually exclusive — not occasionally, but structurally.
Balance is structurally incompatible with greatness — not occasionally, but always. The founders who built lasting things were consumed by them, and the trade was real, not metaphorical.
Read →Jan 9, 2026
Shaan quit a $120K job at 24 to be strategically broke, and the real story is that he made that decision less like an entrepreneur and more like someone who'd already done the math.
Shaan's case for strategic brokeness: the worst-case scenario from quitting was 'one year broke, then find another job' — once he accepted that outcome, the decision became straightforward.
Read →Jan 8, 2026
Sam and Shaan drop the performance and answer the questions nobody asks on a formal podcast.
Sam and Shaan each name a significant business mistake they've never discussed publicly, suggesting there are lessons the audience hasn't received yet that could be more valuable than the success stories.
Read →Jan 6, 2026
A year-end reading list that reveals more about what Sam and Shaan actually believe than anything they've said all year.
Sam and Shaan both endorsed Die With Zero as meaningful, suggesting they're actively reconsidering the relationship between wealth accumulation and time allocation — not just preaching it.
Read →Dec 31, 2025
Shaan flies to Jesse Itzler's house and comes back with a four-step annual planning ritual that's more about identity than strategy.
Jesse Itzler's 'Get Light' concept starts the annual planning process with subtraction rather than addition — identifying everything you're carrying into the new year that no longer serves you.
Read →Dec 30, 2025
Alex Smereczniak makes the case that franchising is the most systematically ignored path to serious wealth, and the numbers are hard to argue with.
Alex Smereczniak argues that franchising is the most systematically undervalued wealth-creation path in America because startup culture stigmatizes it as uncreative.
Read →Dec 22, 2025
Chris Camillo turned $20K into $60M by paying attention to things Wall Street is too data-driven to notice.
Chris Camillo's social arbitrage method identifies consumer trends through behavioral observation before they surface in institutional research or financial models — a genuine information edge in an efficient market.
Read →Dec 18, 2025
The annual live Milly Awards turns a year of business ideas into a verdict on what actually mattered in 2025.
The worst investment of the year segment is the most valuable because it forces specific, accountable analysis rather than curated retrospectives.
Read →Dec 8, 2025
A late-year episode where Sam and Shaan get unusually personal about systems, self-narrative, and the mechanics of actual change.
Shaan's 5-year journal system surfaces progress measurements automatically by showing the same date across multiple years — removing memory distortion from self-assessment.
Read →Nov 24, 2025
Ring's founder walks through the real story of building a $4B business — including the part where he ran out of money and the part where ADT tried to destroy him.
ADT spent enormous resources trying to litigate Ring out of existence rather than compete on product — Siminoff survived the lawsuit partly through luck and partly by refusing to settle on terms that would have ended the company.
Read →Nov 19, 2025
Shaan catalogs every business he tried before making his first million — and the most useful part is how he explains why most of them failed.
Shaan distinguishes three types of failure in his pre-million businesses: bad idea, bad timing, and wrong founder — and the diagnosis matters because each requires a different fix.
Read →Nov 17, 2025
Sam Parr's pre-million business failures form a more interesting autobiography than any success story he's ever told.
Sam's 17 businesses before his first million include a hot dog stand, sports equipment flipping, online liquor retail, and an anti-MBA book club — none of which were obvious precursors to The Hustle.
Read →Nov 14, 2025
Alex Hormozi's actual hiring philosophy: intelligence first, skills second, and fire fast when you're wrong.
Hormozi's hiring screen is general intelligence above all else — his claim is that smart people in wrong roles fix themselves, while specialists in wrong roles don't.
Read →Nov 7, 2025
Andrew Wilkinson ranks business models by desirability and the list is more honest than anything you'll find in a business school curriculum.
Wilkinson's business model hierarchy: SaaS and content businesses sit at the top because they generate revenue without adding headcount; agencies and restaurants sit at the bottom because every dollar of growth adds management complexity.
Read →Nov 5, 2025
Ryan Smith turned down $500M for Qualtrics at 19, and the discipline that made him say no is the same discipline that eventually made the company worth ten times that.
Smith's framework: focus compounds in ways that optionality doesn't — keeping multiple paths open isn't hedging, it's a way of committing to none of them.
Read →Oct 30, 2025
Shaan asks Cathie Wood directly about ARK's underperformance — and her answer tells you more about conviction investing than any apologia would.
Wood's core defense of ARK's underperformance: she is managing to a five-year horizon, and judging a conviction portfolio on a two-year drawdown misses the point of the strategy.
Read →Oct 28, 2025
The founder-to-CEO transition has a specific failure mode — Sam and Shaan name it and explain why most founders hit it even when they know it's coming.
The founder-to-CEO failure mode is that founder instincts — speed, gut decisions, overriding process — become bottlenecks at scale rather than advantages.
Read →Oct 21, 2025
Greg Isenberg and Sam run through five AI tools that actually change the math on solo income — not theoretically, but with specific use cases and revenue models.
Isenberg's core claim: AI has collapsed the headcount and capital required to build a solo business to the point where the constraint is now taste and execution, not resources.
Read →Oct 17, 2025
Five counterintuitive rules for building a life with asymmetric upside — including one about best friends that will make you uncomfortable.
The asymmetric life thesis: most people optimize for stability when they should optimize for variance, because the best outcomes come from unexpected combinations, not careful execution of expected plans.
Read →Oct 13, 2025
Rick Marini and Jeff Bonforte bought a gay dating app they didn't use, turned it into a $2B public company, and learned more about their own biases than they expected.
Marini and Bonforte identified Grindr as a classic PE opportunity: defensible network effects, an underserved community, and institutional disinterest creating a valuation discount.
Read →Oct 6, 2025
Daniel Negreanu has won $50M at poker by reading people accurately under pressure — and his framework for doing that translates to sales, hiring, and negotiation in ways that are more specific than you'd expect.
Reading people under pressure: Negreanu's framework isn't about tells or body language — it's about understanding the logic of another person's decision-making, which reveals information regardless of whether they're hiding it.
Read →Sep 30, 2025
Will Guidara ran the world's best restaurant by institutionalizing one idea: every guest interaction is a custom experience, not a standardized service.
One Size Fits One: the difference between hospitality and unreasonable hospitality is identifying what this specific person needs right now and delivering it — not executing a standard experience with warmth.
Read →Sep 26, 2025
Jesse Cole turned a minor league baseball team with $268 in the bank into a national entertainment brand by deciding to compete on experience instead of sport.
Competitive repositioning: the Savannah Bananas stopped competing on baseball's terms and started competing on entertainment terms — a decision that required abandoning the audience that wanted the old product.
Read →Sep 19, 2025
Thomas Braziel made a career buying claims on bankrupt companies at a discount — and the FTX trade is the most public version of a strategy he's been running for years.
Distressed investing: buying claims or debt against bankrupt companies at a discount to recovery value — a market that is consistently inefficient because most investors find it too complex or too illiquid.
Read →Sep 17, 2025
Chris Voss spent decades negotiating with people holding hostages — and his five principles work in business because the psychology of high-stakes conversation doesn't change based on the stakes.
The hijack moment: every high-stakes negotiation has a point where composure breaks — the professional negotiator keeps theirs and creates conditions for the other party to lose theirs.
Read →Sep 12, 2025
A billionaire blueberry farmer, a Broadway economics lesson, and Jerry Seinfeld on greatness — this is MFM operating at its best as a curiosity machine.
The blueberry billionaire made his money at the distribution layer, not the farming layer — a recurring MFM pattern where the real wealth accumulates at the point of aggregation rather than production.
Read →Sep 10, 2025
The man who invented both the McFlurry and the Stuffed Crust Pizza never worked at McDonald's or Pizza Hut — and that's the whole point.
The creator of the McFlurry was an independent contractor, not a McDonald's employee — illustrating how the QSR industry has historically captured most of the upside from innovation while paying inventors a fraction of the lifetime value.
Read →Sep 5, 2025
The creator economy's biggest secret is that you can build a $5M-$10M media business with a small, passionate audience — if you stop optimizing for reach.
Sam and Billy Parks argued that a dedicated audience of 50,000-500,000 highly engaged followers in the right niche is worth more than 10 million general-interest followers because purchase intent and product fit compound.
Read →Aug 28, 2025
Robert Greene spent 25 years studying power and came to MFM to argue that most people are playing the wrong game with the wrong timeframe.
Greene argued that specialists beat generalists not because of the skills themselves but because deep expertise creates a learning feedback loop that accelerates over time while breadth keeps you permanently in the shallow end.
Read →Aug 25, 2025
Howard Marks spent 79 years learning that most investors' biggest problem isn't a lack of knowledge — it's the inability to behave correctly when they're scared.
Marks argued that most investors' underperformance relative to the S&P 500 is behavioral rather than analytical — the cost of panic selling and euphoria buying exceeds the cost of stock-picking errors.
Read →Aug 20, 2025
Eric Glyman built Ramp to $100M ARR in 18 months by doing exactly the opposite of what corporate card companies expected him to do.
Ramp's core insight is that the corporate card industry is built on misaligned incentives — card companies make more money when you spend more, so they have no structural reason to help you spend less — and flipping that alignment is the entire product thesis.
Read →Aug 18, 2025
Three stories about people who bent reality through sheer stubbornness — the banker who funded the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bitcoin millionaire locked out of his wallet, and the man who refused to stop.
Amadeo Giannini built Bank of America by identifying that the entire banking system was designed around creditworthy customers and that the enormous market of people without traditional collateral was essentially unserved.
Read →Aug 13, 2025
Hayes Barnard went from $4 an hour to a $4 billion net worth by learning to sell inside rooms where everyone else had already given up.
Hayes Barnard's core thesis on outperformers is that the differentiating factor is comfort with prolonged uncertainty — the ability to stay productive in the gap between where you are and where you want to be without collapsing the gap prematurely.
Read →Aug 6, 2025
Hormozi's $100M Money Models thesis in one line: most businesses fail not because the product is bad but because the money model creates the wrong behavior at the wrong time.
Hormozi's money model framework: the structure of how and when customers pay determines what behaviors the business can afford to engage in, which shapes the product, the team, and the culture more than any stated mission does.
Read →Aug 4, 2025
Tim Ferriss has enough money to do anything and has spent the last decade figuring out what anything actually means — this episode is the most honest version of that conversation.
Ferriss argued that 'how much money is enough' is the wrong frame — the better question is 'what are you currently doing that you'd stop doing if money were removed from the equation,' because that list is the actual constraint.
Read →Jul 30, 2025
The new viral video format isn't short-form — it's cinema shot on an iPhone, and the creators who figured this out first are pulling audience away from both TikTok and Hollywood simultaneously.
Wesley Wang proved there's a massive underserved audience for narrative short films distributed on YouTube for free — the kind of content that used to require festival distribution is now a viable organic play.
Read →Jul 24, 2025
Six people who built remarkable things share the one habit they'd force every founder to adopt — and the answers are more uncomfortable than inspirational.
Hayes Barnard's risk framework reduces to a single question: 'Can I live with the downside if this goes completely wrong?' — not 'what's the probability of success,' which he considers unknowable in advance.
Read →Jul 22, 2025
The real estate guest who went bankrupt on his first deal taught more about risk management than a decade of MBA case studies.
Starting $15M underwater on your first deal is not exceptional bad luck — it is what aggressive leverage looks like before the market cooperates
Read →Jul 4, 2025
Sam's college friend bought a $3.4M packaging business for $200K using a deal structure most acquisition entrepreneurs don't know exists, and the insight that unlocked it was embarrassingly simple.
A forgivable seller's note lets you buy a business with minimal upfront capital by having portions of the purchase price forgiven when the business hits milestones
Read →Jun 30, 2025
Mike Novogratz turning $30M into $2.3B at Fortress would be a great story on its own — but the more interesting part is what he built after blowing it up.
Fortress's structure — multiple uncorrelated strategies under one brand — was architecturally unusual when launched and became an industry model after SoftBank's $3.3B acquisition
Read →Jun 27, 2025
The episode title is a deliberate misdirect — this one is actually Shaan's Berkeley talk on why billionaires are often less happy than people running $10M businesses, and what that implies about how to structure your life.
There is an optimal business size — roughly $5M to $50M — where identity, relationships, and daily work stay aligned; most people optimize past it
Read →Jun 2, 2025
Matt Mazzeo's argument that AI is a go-to-market strategy — not just a productivity tool — reframes the entire question of how agencies and service businesses should be built in 2025.
AI as go-to-market: the agencies that win don't use AI internally to work faster — they position AI capability as the product clients are buying
Read →May 22, 2025
The Bessemer anti-portfolio isn't just a funny list of missed investments — it is a systematic catalog of the exact cognitive errors that separate good investors from great ones.
Bessemer's $140B Shopify miss: they had the information and the meeting — the misjudgment was structural, not informational, based on a framework that screened out what they were looking for
Read →May 16, 2025
Scott Galloway's investing record isn't the point — his decision-making framework for picking asymmetric bets is.
Galloway turned $2M into $15M by buying distressed FTX bankruptcy claims — an arbitrage most investors never consider because it requires tolerating ambiguity over a multi-year horizon.
Read →May 14, 2025
Ankur Nagpal shows up with a tax strategy and six business ideas, and the tax strategy might actually be more interesting.
Direct indexing — owning individual stocks instead of ETF shares — allows tax-loss harvesting at the position level, producing after-tax alpha without changing your underlying market exposure.
Read →May 9, 2025
Mohnish Pabrai's investing framework is almost embarrassingly simple, which is precisely why so few people actually follow it.
Pabrai's 'simple = genius' rule: the most reliably profitable investments are usually simple businesses you can explain in one sentence, not complex ones that require an elaborate thesis.
Read →May 5, 2025
Whatever the most valuable founder skill turns out to be, it's probably not what the title implies — this episode is a demonstration of it rather than a definition.
The framing of a single 'most valuable' skill forces a clarity exercise most founders avoid: if you had to rank capabilities, what would actually sit at the top?
Read →May 2, 2025
Jess Mah's business ideas are the least interesting thing about her — her framework for generating them is what's worth stealing.
Mah's business ideas matrix filters opportunities on two axes (market size vs. execution difficulty), targeting the high-difficulty quadrant specifically because easy ideas attract competition that destroys margins.
Read →Apr 11, 2025
Sam and Shaan use tariff chaos as a prompt to talk about how they actually make decisions when the macroeconomic environment becomes unpredictable.
Sam and Shaan's live response to the tariff announcements reveals their actual decision frameworks: they both moved toward domestic or experiential businesses and away from imported-product exposure.
Read →Mar 25, 2025
The boring children's content empire hiding in plain sight — CoCoMelon's $3B rollup is the most unsexy great business of the decade.
Moonbug built a $3B media company by rolling up YouTube children's channels — CoCoMelon, Blippi, and others — and monetizing through licensing, merchandise, and streaming rather than ad revenue alone.
Read →Mar 21, 2025
Corporate espionage isn't a relic of Cold War thrillers — Rippling vs. Deel just proved it's alive, litigated, and stranger than fiction.
The Rippling vs. Deel lawsuit alleges a planted spy inside Rippling feeding competitive intelligence to Deel — a reminder that information asymmetry in enterprise SaaS is worth more than any feature.
Read →Mar 14, 2025
Flea markets and true crime are both built on the same consumer psychology — the pleasure of finding something real in a world of manufactured everything.
Flea market culture is growing because it offers discovery-commerce — the experience of finding something unexpected — which is the one thing that optimized e-commerce platforms have systematically engineered out.
Read →Mar 3, 2025
Sunshine Exteriors is the sweaty startup origin story at its most legible — a teenager with a pressure washer and no employees who figured out the unit economics before tenth grade.
Sweaty startups — local service businesses requiring physical presence — teach unit economics faster than most business education because every mistake is immediately measurable.
Read →Feb 28, 2025
Brent went from $50K a year to nine figures by buying businesses no one else wanted — and the 'accidentally bought a $1M business for $0' story is exactly as good as it sounds.
Small business acquisition using seller financing can produce extraordinary returns because motivated sellers care more about terms than headline price — most buyers never negotiate structure.
Read →Feb 17, 2025
The Iron Mountain story is the real episode here — a company that literally stores the world's most sensitive secrets in former salt mines turns out to be a better DOGE metaphor than DOGE itself.
Iron Mountain is a $5B real estate business built on institutional inertia — companies pay for physical document storage indefinitely because the cost of migrating is always higher than the cost of the monthly contract.
Read →Feb 7, 2025
The NBA bettor who made $100M didn't have an edge in basketball — he had an edge in finding mispricings that the market hadn't corrected yet, and the NBA was just the venue.
Sports betting edges are information arbitrages — the market sets prices based on public information, and anyone with better private information can find consistent positive expected value before the market corrects.
Read →Feb 5, 2025
Nick Mowbray grew up poor in New Zealand, sold hot air balloons door to door, bet on David Beckham's face at the wrong moment, and still built a multi-billion dollar toy company — the failure catalog is the curriculum.
Zuru's model is a self-funded product flywheel: launch, generate cash, use cash to fund adjacent product lines, repeat — no VC, no exit timeline, no board pressure.
Read →Jan 29, 2025
Sam and Shaan spent a weekend with 12 billionaires and came back with a theory: the thing separating them from everyone else isn't intelligence or work ethic — it's environment selection.
Fish where the fish swim: billionaires find opportunities through strategic positioning in high-density information environments, not through grinding harder than competitors
Read →Jan 24, 2025
Andrew Wilkinson runs a $180M+ holding company and his most important strategic insight right now is that AI is about to make most software businesses worthless — except the ones he owns.
The K-shaped AI future: businesses either become dramatically more valuable or get commoditized — there's no stable middle ground
Read →Jan 17, 2025
Shaan goes solo to argue that most new graduates are playing the wrong game entirely — and that the five moves that actually lead to a million dollars are almost never the ones anyone recommends.
The salary monster: using W-2 income as an identity signal creates decision-making patterns that protect current income at the cost of future upside
Read →Jan 15, 2025
Ramit Sethi has talked to thousands of high-earning couples about money and arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: income doesn't solve money dysfunction — it amplifies it.
The four money archetypes: avoider, worrier, spender, and saver — and how each archetype creates predictable conflict patterns when paired with a different type
Read →Jan 10, 2025
Sheel Mohnot has built and sold companies three times, and his five current ideas are specific enough that someone listening will build one of them before he does.
Affinity retirement communities: charging a premium for co-living among people with shared strong identities (specific religious communities, founder cohorts, subculture groups) rather than generic amenity-based competition
Read →Jan 3, 2025
Jesse Itzler doesn't set goals — he designs years, and the specific practices he uses to do that are more operational than motivational.
Misogi as annual practice: one genuinely uncertain challenge per year where failure is possible and the attempt itself changes your sense of range — not a goal, a calibration
Read →Dec 9, 2024
Timeleft built a $1M MRR dinner club app in two weeks with no employees, and the story of how it actually works reveals something important about what people are actually paying for when they buy 'community.'
Timeleft's actual product: algorithmic stranger-matching for dinner, solving the adult social coordination problem rather than selling meals — the business model clarity is what makes the economics work
Read →Dec 5, 2024
Three stories about people who built something significant by operating from a completely different set of assumptions than everyone around them — and the thread connecting Fenn's treasure, Saylor's Bitcoin play, and Ralph Lauren's brand is the same.
Forrest Fenn's treasure hunt as desire engineering: the search is the product, and Fenn built a decade of genuine human engagement without technology or subscription infrastructure
Read →Dec 3, 2024
Dharmesh Shah went from $4 an hour to a $1 billion net worth, and his framework for how he did it compresses into four principles that are harder to argue with than most wealth-building advice.
Leverage as the wealth variable: the difference between a career that produces income and one that produces wealth is whether output is decoupled from time — and the specific moves at each stage that increase leverage
Read →Nov 21, 2024
TikTok isn't a platform you market on — it's a product discovery engine, and these six ideas are proof that the next consumer hit will be born in the scroll.
TikTok's Creator Rewards Program pays creators enough per view on long-form content that a dedicated channel can become a standalone revenue stream before any product is sold.
Read →Nov 19, 2024
Three people making money in ways that shouldn't work — and one extended argument about whether prediction markets are gambling or the most honest information system ever built.
Martha Stewart was running the Hormozi playbook in 1990 — personal brand as the core product, with licensing and merchandise as the revenue layer — but without the internet to distribute it.
Read →Nov 15, 2024
Leila Hormozi's story is genuinely unusual — not because she went from broke to $100M, but because the mental framework that got her there was built in crisis, not in comfort.
The Dickens Method is a specific visualization technique — imagining every domain of life at full cost of current inaction in 10 years — that Leila credits with her actual decision to change, not just the desire to.
Read →Nov 11, 2024
Ryan Petersen built Import Genius before Flexport, and the data-business he almost didn't pursue contains the best argument in this episode: boring data products that answer specific questions are more defensible than anything that sounds cool.
Import Genius was a boring data business Ryan built by pulling public shipping manifests — unglamorous, defensible, and profitable before Flexport existed.
Read →Nov 2, 2024
Political campaigns are the most advanced marketing operations in the world, and this episode makes the uncomfortable argument that the tactics that win elections are mostly the same ones that sell products.
The Trump 2016 earned media playbook: deliberate controversy as a distribution strategy — every provocative statement generated coverage worth hundreds of millions in paid equivalency.
Read →Oct 30, 2024
This is the episode where Sam and Shaan drop the premise of a business show and just answer questions — and the answers about gut punches and who they'd spend 24 hours with are more interesting than most of their idea episodes.
Sam and Shaan's actual investment philosophy is simpler and more boring than their idea output: concentrate in things you understand, own equity, minimize complexity.
Read →Oct 28, 2024
Garry Tan's origin story is more interesting than YC's brand suggests — and his framework for spotting extreme winners is specific enough that it's worth returning to every time you evaluate a startup.
YC's edge over most Silicon Valley investors is structural, not analytical: it sees more companies, applies consistent criteria, and benefits from the network effects of its own portfolio.
Read →Oct 23, 2024
The annual sprint framing is the excuse — the real episode is a grab bag of ideas about prestige hacking, monument economics, and why Ken Fisher's marketing playbook is one of the most underrated in financial services.
Jamie Beaton's prestige hacking: converting an extreme personal achievement into an institutional brand gives you credibility that's harder to challenge than any individual track record.
Read →Oct 14, 2024
The HBO documentary naming Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto sent Bitcoin into a frenzy of skepticism, and Sam and Shaan's reaction is less about who built Bitcoin and more about what the mystery itself is worth.
The Satoshi mystery functions as a feature: Bitcoin's ideological case is strengthened by the founder being absent and anonymous, which prevents the asset from being attacked through its creator.
Read →Oct 8, 2024
Elad Gil has invested in more unicorns than almost anyone in Silicon Valley without running a fund, and his framework for deciding where to put early-stage capital is more specific and reproducible than most investors are willing to share.
Access is the binding constraint in angel investing, not evaluation: most investors optimize for better analysis of companies they see, when the real leverage is seeing better companies.
Read →Oct 4, 2024
What Rich Weirdos Taught Shaan at a PE Conference
The low-status technique: arriving at conferences without performing your resume forces genuine conversation and makes you memorable by contrast
Read →Sep 20, 2024
Isaac French Turned $2K Into a $7M Airbnb Exit Before He Was 26
French competed on the photogenic quality of the physical space rather than location or price—the fire pit and outdoor shower beat proximity to downtown
Read →Sep 13, 2024
Sara's List 2024: Ten Pre-IPO Companies Where an Employee Might Get Rich
Sara's List evaluates pre-IPO equity potential for employees, not just company size—a $100B company can still give employees bad outcomes
Read →Sep 6, 2024
Nick Gray's $10M Thought Experiment and the Art of Making People Like You
The $10M thought experiment: most people would live almost identically to how they do now—which is either reassuring or alarming
Read →Sep 4, 2024
Guy Spier Has Studied Buffett for 25 Years. Here Is What He Actually Learned.
The Posse: every successful long-term operator has a small group that enforces intellectual honesty—find yours before you need it
Read →Aug 26, 2024
Jesse Pujji Bootstrapped Ampush to Nine Figures Using GLG as a Cheat Code
GLG as a bootstrapping cheat code: join as an expert, take paid consulting calls, use them to gather customer discovery while getting paid
Read →