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

23:17That'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 exercise, we're doing one. Now let's move on to the main event, the billion dollar idea. By the way, do I get a thrill of the shill before we get to the billion dollar idea? Oh, hold on. What time is it? It is time for the thrill of the shill. Sam, you're up. Your first time providing the thrill of the shill.

23:46For those who don't know, this is where we shamelessly shill one of our companies. But we have to do it in a thrilling way, meaning we got to provide some value, some entertainment, some insight. We got to provide something, a little something. We got to have attributes if we're going to do this. Here we go. Thrill of the shill. I'm going to try and keep this one short because this might be a short episode. But basically, I remember in 2017, I went to NerdWallet. NerdWallet.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.

24:17My expenses went up because of payroll from$30 ,000 to$80 ,000 a month. And at the time, they had just rented Twitter's old office. And they probably had a payroll of$3 million a month or maybe even$5 million a month. And I remember he looked at me funny. And he was trying to be empathetic. And he was nice. And he was nice by saying, Like, 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 kind of have to detach yourself and your payroll needs to just... It's just a number on an Excel sheet. And you just have to figure out, do I deploy this much money here?

24:52And 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 12 months ago. So I launched this company called Hampton. Joinhampton.com. It's like a community for founders who are doing at least a million in revenue, but the average member is like 25 million a year. And I remember that freaking me out forever. We had a team retreat last week and I went out there. And right now we've got 16 full-time employees or 15 including me. And then we've also employed, I think, 50 facilitators now. So in like 18 months, we've created, what's that, 70 or 65 jobs, something like that.

25:30And 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 allocator. I've never had that where it's like been as clear cut as well, I hired this person, I get this much out after three months. It's completely changed 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 I'm talking about?

26:04Have you ever been through this? Well, we both used to be kind of like, oh, if you're an entrepreneur, you're a product maker. And we'd be sitting there, you're right in the hustle. And I'm sitting there designing things and working with the industry, trying to make a product. But there is an up level of that, which is once you build the product, and the product has part, which Hampton does, has product market fit. People like it, they use it, they're in it. Now you're a capital allocator. Basically, you're 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.

26:36You have to deploy that in a way that's going to get more output than the input. And sometimes you'll miss, you're not going to be 100%. But knowing that that's the job makes it easier. And it sounds like having the right conversation at the right time from somebody who's a peer of yours was the key. Yeah. And that's, by the way, one of the whole things about Hampton is that you have peers with other entrepreneurs that are of similar size company that you have. And anyway, that learning, I remember having our team offsite at previous companies. And I'm like, this person just had a baby. Basically, I just had a baby.

27:13How am I going to create enough revenue in order to provide for this kid? Because that's how it feels at first. Or you're like, no, you didn't. I did, remember? I am the one who did that. Hey, Jess, when's our baby shower?

27:30This year, it's been... Or you'll be like, this person cost$250 ,000. There's no way that's a fair salary. It's like, well, that's not how you... It's a house where I'm from. Are you a house? Yeah, can I live in you? Do you have three beds and a bath? If not, I'm not paying you$250 ,000. So that's been my biggest takeaway this year with running Hampton. So anyway, if you're... Particularly if you're listening to this and you do at least 50 million in revenue. We're building groups for that. Joinhamton.com. All right, let's do the billion dollar one. You want me to go first? Can I go first? Okay, go.

28:02All right, I'm going to steal one of your lines. So Sean, what if I told you I had an idea? This is your line. I'm leaning in. What if I told you I had an idea that Elon Musk himself would be bigger than Tesla? Would that interest you? I'd be fairly interested. Keep going. Do you know who, I think his name is Kai-Fu Lee. Do you know who that investor is? He's 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 why they're going to beat America. And he was saying that this thing is going to replace 40 % of jobs inside the next 12 years.

28:43Would that interest you? I would love to replace 40 % of jobs in the next 12 years. I think about that often. Now, if you're talking about AI, you're wrong. Here's what it is. It's humanoids. Humanoids, that's the technical term. Basically, imagine RoboCop or imagine machines. And I think that this whole business of humanoids, which is robots to automate a lot of processes, but a lot of people think just blue-collar jobs, but that's not entirely true. It's like every type of job. So Elon Musk said that Tesla is working on humanoids. I think it's called Optimus is what it's called. and he went on to say that at a recent investor call, he was like, not a lot of you people are talking about Optimus or robots, but I think that's crazy because this is actually going to be bigger than our car business, bigger than self-driving, bigger than solar.

29:33It's going to be bigger than everything. I don't think you guys realize how big this is going to be. I invested in this company in a space called Figure and I talked to Brett Adcock. We had him on here and he basically has me convinced that this is going to be the biggest industry mover in the next 10 or 15 years. And I think that What I would do invested in figure. Yeah, is that is that did I tell you that the 30th time? No, no, no. I've never told you that. That's funny. But what valuation? 300 million dollars, I think. Okay, that's not bad. And I invested. It's not that bad. Well, I invest and I invested a lot for me, which I think is around$60 ,000.

30:12Well, 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 was a lot of money for me. I don't normally invest that much. But my reasoning is, I could see it going out of business, which is incredibly likely. I could see it selling for$3 billion, or I could see it becoming a$50 billion company. But it's like any angel investment. I think the likelihood of it going out of business is incredibly high. But basically, here's my reasoning. If you are reasoning why I think this could be a big company, I think this is going to be one of the biggest things that happens in the next 15 years.

30:51I 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, going to Carnegie Mellon, which I think a lot of these folks come from. And I think I could find a handful of people and do a really good job of organizing these people around a company. I think that I could do a good job of cold emailing the Brett Adcox of the world and getting in with them as well as some of the older guys in the space and making them open up to me and say what are tangentially the areas that you're not attacking that are interesting.

31:24I think I can get them to explain to me these problems. I think that... I think this is so big that there's going to be more of these robots than there are humans. And I also think that when you... In order to create a billion-dollar company or a company that can net you a billion dollars, that's just... You have to go huge. And 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 do the rest. That's going to take me 50 or 80 years.

31:58Who knows how long that's going to take me. But if you want to make it in a short amount of time, you pretty much have to raise VC and you have to do it in an industry that's like a tidal wave where you're just trying to catch that wave. If you want to do it in like 10 years, rather. And so I think I would go into the humanoid space. What do you think about that? Well, as you know, I love that idea because I was going to say that idea. And you said, no, can I say that idea today? And I said, all right. That's not what I said. I said, I've literally written that down already. Can I have that? Will you send me that?

32:26And I'll say it with my lips. And I was like, all right, fine, bro. Well, let me tell you something interesting. All right, let me add to it. So obviously, 100 % agree. I actually was specifically thinking like warehouse robots. I would even just kind of narrow it down and be like, all right. if I was really going to do this, I would try to figure out what job in a warehouse I can eliminate by using a robot. Which is what? Like packing boxes? Basically, I would look at the minimum wage labor class and I would say nobody wants minimum wage, essentially. The workers don't want to be minimum wage.

32:59The employers don't want to pay minimum wage and get like kind of a flaky output. And so I had a friend once that was telling me he's like, I invest in companies with no product market fit risk. It's my friend Vishal. And I said, what do you mean? I've never, I just thought every startup has product market fit risk. 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 that 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.

33:30It 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 safe, safe self-driving cars. Cars that do not crash that are self-driving. And obviously, there's always the edge cases. But there's 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 his idea, he invested in this pizza robot company. So it was like basically... Which was awesome.

34:01Zoom. Yeah, well, there was a few of them at the time. I don't think any of them worked out. There's always like these waves and it's like, it was too early the tech wasn't there and all the companies crash and burn, but like the next wave should start right now. And actually that's maybe where I would go with this. So he's like, you know, if you're Domino's, do you want to pay, you know, whatever, I don't know what they pay$15 an hour for somebody who's going to call in sick. They're going to be checking their phone. They're going to be goofing off. They're going to be eating pepperonis off the pizzas.

34:27They're going to, you know, uh, they're going to get in fights with the other people there and you know, then they leave and then you have to replace them and then you have to train that new person or would you rather buy one machine that prints a perfect pizza every single time 24-7 never calls in sick never complains never asks you for more money never asks for a raise never spits in the food never does it 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 sandboxed thing it's like not like a robot that can do anything it's a specific robot that can make a pizza it can flatten the dough into a perfect circle apply the cheese apply the sauce whatever bake it for a certain time and then put it in the box and cut it and like that's what that needs to do and I'm gonna you know so what I would do is I would go and do exactly what you said like go to MIT go to Carnegie Mellon and be like hey guys we're building a pizza robot and when we do there's whatever how many pizza chains you know how many pizza restaurant locations how many pizza chains in the US And by the way, there was a company called Zoom.

35:29Zoom, Zoom, I forget, that went out of business and people made fun of them. They're like, in the headlines, they got totally mocked. They raised$500 million. That was cool. And that definitely could have worked. I think they screwed it up. They like went, they like made restaurants that you could go to. That was not right. There's 80 ,000 pizza chain, pizza restaurants in the country, 80 ,000. And you would start with the chains because the chains actually have the most to gain by doing this, right? And they would help you. They'll have budgets. they'll sign letters of intent. I remember when Boom Supersonic, the airplane company, came out at YC and they were like, yeah, we have a$100 million purchase order from Richard Branson.

36:06If we can build this plane, they're going to buy it. So now the question is, do you think me and this pack of nerds behind me can build this plane? That's the bet. And whether you do or don't believe it, that was the bet. And I like that idea. Me too. I'll tell you another thing about the robotics thing. I like TechRisk a little bit more than demand risks for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Me too. Even though that's not at all how I've thought about it before. But if I was going to go try to build a billion dollar company, I would go try to build one with only tech risk and not demand risk. I'm going to tell you a little story here.

36:44Shout out to this guy, Abe. You probably don't know Abe, but his boss, Kevin Ryan, came on the pod. 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 kind of busy and so uh of course ben applied ben's law so 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 approach and get the insight on and get in touch with me than trying to go to me directly. And so Ben applied Ben's law. Ben goes and he finds Kevin Ryan's Ben.

37:23And so he finds the number two that's, you know, like there. And so he finds this guy, Abe, Abe Murray. And, uh, I was subscribed to Abe's newsletter and he just had a good one, which he goes, um, he goes, why the consensus view of robotics is wrong. And he goes, I think that most people think, uh, you know, the future of robots is this humanoid and maybe a humanoid that walks and has arms and legs 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 in everybody's home already.

38:00It's a robot dishwasher. It replaced that job of having to wash dishes for the majority of homes. And he 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 replace, but like, you know, lay down the roof or whatever, like, you know, install a roof on a home. And he's like, if this works, it's going to be, he's like, we just did the first robotically installed roof.

38:36If this works, again, you have lower costs, higher quality, more like consistency, more availability for roofing companies. And so I like this idea of these purpose-built specific robots, the equivalent of dishwashers and pizza making robots and roofing robots. If I was going to do the billion dollar idea, that's what I would do. Listen to their homepage. Their homepage is labor is the biggest challenge for roofers. Our robots make roofers twice as productive and improve safety by reducing work at height. Easy. That's an easy sale. And I'll wrap this up. Another reason why robots are interesting is you are only working within the laws of physics.

39:15And the laws of physics, 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, because that's an infinite number of options. Within hardware, it's just like so much simpler and straightforward versus generating demand or creating a brand that people love or creating a social product that people love, which is so much more rare and more challenging. Have you heard the Elon Musk quote, the only real laws are physics, everything else is a recommendation?

39:54No, but that's brilliant. All right, so that's a great idea. I think these personal robots... That's a great idea I came up with, says you. Well, I don't know what I'm saying. This robot idea, I think, is the right idea. And by the way, here's a way to create more luck like this. Our buddy Furkan has this space in San Francisco called Founders Inc, F.Inc. And what he did, I was like, so what's the plan? He's like, I'm just going to recruit the smartest hackers I can find and just be like, hey, here's a free office. I'm going to help you out and I'm going to invest in you before you even know what the hell you're doing.

40:31And I'm going to help you get these off the ground. I was like, well, that's great. But how are you going to get the best hackers? He goes, I'm going to give them toys. So what do you mean toys? He goes, I took the first floor of the entire office. There's no desks. It's just a hardware robotics lab. He's like, so I'm buying like 3D printers, drones, laser cutting equipment, robotic arms, stuff that the average hacker can't buy. You know, the average, you know, 22 year old engineer can't go buy this, you know,$15 ,000 thing or$30 ,000 thing, but Furcon can buy it. And he's like, I'm just going to make it available for free and come in here and work on it.

41:04And so now he's got in that lab, there's a guy who's got a brain device that you put on your head and it like makes you more focused. There's a guy who's a company called Orangewood 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 going to make it, you know, make a margarita. Watch this. We can make this. And the application they're doing is painting or like, I don't know, powder coating or something like that. Yeah, powder coating. You ever done powder coating? And I was like, no. It's really dangerous too.

41:34I was like, no, stop asking me questions. And they're like, well... I think everything is powder-coater. Yeah, it's basically like how you do it on floors, you do it on any metals or whatever, like for a car or something like that. So they were like, yeah, this thing can powder-coat basically better and faster, like automatically. And so we could do jobs at like, you know, one-fifth of the price of a human being because we just give them the robot, the robot just goes and does it, and then it comes home and that's it. And so I was like, oh, interesting. But there's a lot of people building stuff like this And one way to increase serendipity is to like go to these kind of hardware labs or go find out where they hang out.

42:07Just go talk to people, see what they're what they're building. And 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 unorganized. It's like the typical like scientist who wears like who forgets to put one sock on and only wears like one sock or like their shoes on on the wrong foot. It's like they're just like these brilliant people who don't necessarily care about stuff. And I think if you can be the organizer, you can win. What do you have? all right so my path to a billion uh do you want the dark idea or you want the light idea do you want the good idea or the evil idea which one do you want oh i don't know uh that's i want to go dark i think but okay i can give you both but i'll do the dark one fast so here's the here's the big pitch for the dark idea anduril for some other country you can figure the rest out from there.

43:01What Palmer Lucky has done with Andruil for the U.S. Defense Department, do it for Israel. Do it for another country. Go find a country that wants advanced weapons technology and be like, cool, I'm going to recruit the brightest minds and we're going to give us a$50 million to$150 million contract and we'll get started here. Dude, Palmer's on a tear lately. And I would literally go look at the roadmap for Andruil. I'd be like, oh, they built this missile that can fly itself and lives in this vending machine. I don't know if you saw that video of like, yes, it's amazing. He's on a tear inside. I'd be like, cool.

43:35Do you pick from the Andrew rule menu? We're going to figure out how to build those and you guys will own the IP. That's what I would do if I really had to, you know, if I was, if I wanted to go into more of the gray or dark areas where it's, you know, there's a bit of war and destruction involved. But here's the light idea. Here's another idea. Um, we're buying a university. Okay. So what are we doing? There are a lot of colleges for sale. more than you would think. Are they on Quiet Light? They're on DealStream. So go to a website called DealStream. Come on, that was kind of funny. Well, they could be.

44:09DealStream is literally like Quiet Light. It's just a different name. It's the same idea. It's a business brokerage. But if you look at colleges for sale, they're there and they're not that expensive. You could buy colleges for like$5 million,$10 million. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now, and let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard.

44:40I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean, branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, Well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.

45:09So to do this, you're going to need a lot of money. But the good news is that universities are worth a lot of money. Like, what would you peg the value at? Let's start at the top end. Like, what do you think Stanford or Harvard is worth? Somebody really, if mega billionaire genius wanted to buy Stanford or Harvard, what would it even cost? I don't even know. Would it be like a Harvard, a hundred plus billion dollars? I mean, the endowment alone, I think it's like, what the endowment alone is almost a hundred billion dollars, right? So yeah, it's hard to even, it's the whole inside. It's gotta be 500 billion.

45:43It might like, these are companies that are worth, sorry, universities are essentially properties that are worth, you know, a Facebook. They're crazy. Harvard endowments is 53 billion. So yeah, I don't know. 100 to 200 billion, 300 billion, something like that. Yeah, like so big that it's hard to understand. Hard to even fathom, right? Not for sale. Can't be bought, essentially. Same thing with Stanford. Now, let's even go to like a Belmont, right? So like, let's just do some quick math here. I went, Belmont University. You went to Belmont. What's the tuition at Belmont? Back then, it was 30 ,000.

46:15Let's see what it is now. Belmont University tuition,$38 ,000. All right, so$38 ,000. And how many students go to Belmont? Let's say 5 ,000. $5 ,000 per year, per year or the whole university? You could say, let's say$1 ,800 per year. All right, so let's go. Let's round up to$2 ,000. So even a small, small private school. Where is Belmont? I don't even know where it is. Nashville, Tennessee. It looks like they have 7 ,300 students. So$2 ,000 per class, let's say. Cool. So$76 million top line. That's not counting endowments. That's not counting grants and research. It's not counting the facts that it's tax-free, that it has all these other benefits.

46:53So you can actually see the numbers, by the way. Belmont's annual revenue is$464 million. Their expenses are$350 million. So they make$100 million a year in profit. They only have$200 million in liabilities, and they have$1.5 billion in assets. And that's for a middle of nowhere university. So that's the game plan. We're building one of those. Now, what are we going to do? So we're going to go buy one. What are we buying? We're essentially buying two things. I want the campus and I want the liquor license. And by liquor license, I mean the accreditation. As long as it's already accredited, I don't want to have to go through that process.

47:33Now, 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 here is we got to brand this school. And so what are we going to do? We're going to make it a bit of a luxury product, meaning it's going to be only for the elite of the elite. So, yeah, we have to have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. We have to be known for, we're going to sponsor competitions for like mathlete type of competitions, hardcore science competitions.

48:07We are going to go around the country to high schools and basically be like, we're going after gamers, programmers, and hardcore math kids. And we're going to sponsor a ton of competitions. Guess what those sponsorships cost? Pizza. The currency is essentially you provide free pizza. There is no competition. When I was doing our esports company that we sold to Twitch, I was like, we want to create the world's biggest high school esports league. And we did in less than a year. Guess what it cost? 450 pizzas is what it cost me to sponsor these programs. It cost nothing. And so we're going to go and we're going to first get in front of them.

48:42Now, why did I go to Duke University? I went because in fifth grade, Duke did something called the Nationwide Talent identification program. And I'll be damned if my mom didn't want to find out if her kid was talented. And so we take this test and we take this test. Is that like the Indian version of like a, like one of those model competitions they have at the mall when you're 12? Yeah, it's a beauty pattern. It's like sports, but for brown people. So my mom puts me in this. I really, actually, I think every kid in my school took it. They just went to the school and they were like, hey, we're trying to identify the most talented, gifted and talented kids.

49:16Also parents, can you put your income on the statement? as well. Exactly. Because that impacts your IQ a little bit and we got to get paid. So I got a scoreback and a goodie bag. And literally the goodie bag was a Rubik's Cube. And I don't know what the hell was going on, but whatever that is, I'm going to go find the marketing coordinator that did this Duke Talented Advocation Program. We're stealing that. We're going to go get them while they're young. 5th, 6th grades. We're going to be identifying these special gift and talented kids. So we're making it super prestigious. you already know the name's going to have some old money shit, right?

49:51You know, we're going... I've already done this before with the private school names. Yeah, it's going to be like Bridgemont, Oakland. Waldorf.

50:03Kennedy Excelsior. Yeah, exactly. So we're definitely going that way. We're going to have our own entrance exam. So we don't take the SATs because we're not peasants. And so we're going to go from city to city and we're going to have our own entrance exam. It's going to 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 going to do? You know these speaker bureaus where you can go pay like$50 ,000 for Obama to speak? Yeah. We're doing that. More like$2 million for Obama, but yeah. Okay, well, we got a budget, all right? And the budget's going to be like, we have like a$6 million speaker budget.

50:38So when I'm raising this money for this, I'm going to basically raise$50 to$75 million, maybe$100 million for this. and a lot of that is front loaded in brand building and one of the things we're going to do is about five to six million dollars a year in speaker fees and so I'm basically going to pull the Sam Bankman Freed without the fraud so you know Sam Bankman Freed took the money and basically was like how do I just brainwash everybody that FTX is like a thing and it's legitimate he's like Tom Brady Larry David Steph Curry this arena this guy is like a super connector in Hollywood I'm going to put a hundred million dollars into his fund and now he's going to make he's going to give me dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

51:16And that's what he literally did. And although he did a bunch of screwed up things, honestly, it's kind of inspiring the way he just threw his weight around using money to 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. It actually would have been lauded of how he did it. The same way that Uber is praised for the way it just brute forced its way into different cities and actually 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 speeches to our kids.

51:55And we're going to also spend a ton of money on direct marketing. So no university really goes D to C except for the low-end University of Phoenix type of shit. That's crazy. And by the way, they are amazing at it. They are really good at it. They're like$5 billion in your business doing it. In the world of direct response, there's like financial newsletters then there's like Omaha Stakes who like crushes it and the stamps.com of the world and erectile dysfunction and then like video game people and then universities. University of Phoenix crushes it. I think them and like Full Sail are in the top like 20 of spenders on Google.

52:33Yeah yeah exactly and you know ITT Technical Institute running TV ads and stuff like that that's what I would do. So I'd basically go through podcasts. I'm going to blanket them every intellectual podcast that parents listen to I'm going to blanket it with ads for this and the ads aren't apply apply now come here the ads are going to be about how hard it is to get in about it's going to be more native stuff about controversy is it right or wrong that the school is so hard to get into that it's only for the gifted 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 build the brand because there's no better brand than a brand of something you can't get into.

53:14So 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$3 billion in marketing. On Google alone, it's estimated that they're spending roughly$5 million a month and they receive roughly 70 ,000 to 80 ,000 clicks per month off of Google. That's insane. That is insane. that's wild what else would i do okay so i'm spending a ton of money on ads um i hired the best branding agency in the world i'm spending money on the speaker's fees again i'm spending spending spending now how do i make money okay well obviously you have things like your tuition but i actually think there's another another way you could do this it involves my good old friend nfts okay so uh hear me out hear me out you're gonna respect this idea when you're here have you ever seen when a stadium launches that they sell something called psls do you know what those are.

54:08Is that like season ticket holders for a certain period of time? Or like founding club members? You would think you're paying $25 ,000,$50 ,000. Oh, you must be getting tickets. No, 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 the license in order to buy the tickets. Once you buy the ticket, now you can sell it. Now you can sell the license. You can sell whatever.

54:37right they use this to fundraise so i kind of had this idea about universities which was if i wanted to start a university let's say it was going to have you know 5 000 or 10 000 students a year well why wouldn't i sell 10 000 why wouldn't i mint a 10 000 nft package around this and again i built the brand up i have a real story here unlike most nfts i 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...

55:14Well, yeah, because the value of a good diploma, it should go up every decade. So like a Belmont University, they don't have any street cred. So like my value isn't going up. A Harvard, a Stanford goes up. But then if they have a controversy like Penn State did, it goes down. Correct. And so I want to have 10 ,000 admissions licenses, essentially. So this is a ticket you buy. There's one of one. You own it. You could decide if you use it, if you gift it, or if you rent it out to a student that year, and it's going to pay you rental income. You're going to get a piece of the revenue or a piece of the profits from the tuition.

55:50Now, I think that you could sell these for probably at least$25 ,000, if not $50 ,000 each. So I think that's a low end for what you can do if you, again, tell the story properly. And your boy's a good storyteller. So let's say we end up getting to$50 ,000 a piece. We sell 10 ,000 of these. I just raised$500 million. Okay. So yeah, that's a pretty big initial set of funding. But I think you could do that to get this off the ground without having to go get rich VCs or billionaires to fund this thing. And so I think what you could do is do maybe 10 ,000 or$20 ,000 per seat here, sell 10 ,000 of these.

56:28And we're going to price these all an ETH. That's just five ETH. Five ETH if you own a seat at this prestigious university. And so I don't know if I would do it year one, but maybe year two, I would move to that once I built a little bit of the brand momentum. And I would say, you're going to own something that's going to pay you back every single year. So you might have spent 10 grand on it, but you're going to get back two grand a year or$1 ,000 a year in income. Plus you own this prestigious asset that's going to appreciate over time and you can sell your whole seat later. I think you answered the shit out of this question.

56:59I think that's a very compelling argument. I would probably do normal tuition, but I understand that. You do normal tuition in addition. That's the beauty of these PSLs. You do normal tuition on top of selling this initial seat. It's just that person gets a rev share of the tuition. The biggest thing that's wild here is that you can go on to deal stream, which I am, and I'm looking at universities that you can buy. Here's a university for $8.5 million that you can purchase, fully accredited, which I don't know what the value of that is. And you get a campus. This particular university had peak enrollment in 2017 with$2 million in revenue.

57:38This is wild. This is wild. Fully accredited university Southern California. A fully accredited university in SoCal. $25 million. It's accredited. Its degree is recognized all around the world. The school can offer F-1 visas so you know we're getting that international student money. Because you know who likes being accepted into a hard-to-get-into program in the United States more than a U.S. citizen? Somebody in China. And so we are going to go ham on international students. We're going to, you know, that's going to be a big part of the marketing. So this says the school has about 900 students enrolled in undergrad, MBA, and DBA programs.

58:15There's one physical campus and one branch campus. So I think this particular one has, it says Title IX is possible. and I think with Title IX, I think that means you get government funding for sports. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're eligible for getting funding from it. This is crazy, right? So I would just keep my eyes peeled for about a year. I would go around and one thing that every rich person likes is the idea of fixing education and I would just go tell them, this is a school that you would have wanted to go to, right? It's a school that is based around people who actually build things and make things.

58:50It's going to be a school that prioritizes projects over lectures. It's a school that is competitive. And it's not online. It's not online. And we're trying to build the next brand. These old brands, even the best, the Harvard's, the Stanford's, whatever. 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. I think that that pitch would get a lot of people excited to cut. you know, I think, I think that was a 9.5 out of 10 pitch. I think you did pretty good. You did a great job by starting it off of what do you think Harvard's worth?

59:28And I'm like, I don't even know unlimited money. Not it's, it's, it's not even sellable. Probably it's not even buyable rather what Stanford worth. What's university of Penn? I like it's, I don't know. It's there, it's invaluable almost. Um, that's a, that's a very good pitch. Bravo. All right. Well, that's, that's the episode that is the how to make a million bucks and how to make a million dollars from your boys at My First Million? A million and a billion. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

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