Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en so yeah my guy is um dan gilbert um and the reason i thought he was super interesting i’ve talked about him a little bit in the past but this guy has had a freaking massive year so uh you know two years ago or something he was worth like six seven eight billion dollars uh baby billionaire now he’s worth 57 billion wait five minutes seven five seven fifty seven he’s number twenty one one of the wealthiest people in the united states um and this is he’s had a crazy couple years so i think it was about two years ago he had a massive stroke so he was on the golf course with a friend and uh the doc the friend just happened to be a doctor and he said oh that’s weird i’m having these symptoms so his doctor got him to the hospital and they he had a stroke in the hospital and in the hospital they were able to do this special procedure that if he hadn’t been in the hospital he might have died or it might have been way worse right so he got super lucky yeah and you know as lucky as one can be having a stroke horrible thing and uh now he’s been basically rehabilitating himself and getting back on his feet for last two years and so he’s had this horrible personal tragedy but at the same time he’s become worth you know 6x uh you know as much and i bet he would give it all away to not have had the stroke or whatever so it’s super fascinating um this guy he described it really well when they ipo’d they just ipo’d his mortgage business he said this is a 30-year or sorry an overnight success 30 years in the making so this guy’s been at it for a really long time i think he’s super interesting because he started with nothing um his dad owned a struggling detroit bar he worked in pizza delivery he just kind of stumbled into hustling and was a good sales person and he started a business and that business was a company called rock financial which became quicken loans which i’ll talk about in a second um one of the reasons i think he’s really interested interesting is that he’s invested into revitalizing his home city so his mission is to revitalize detroit and get it back on its feet because it’s struggled a lot um he’s like a capitalist batman in detroit and i’ll talk about some of the cool stuff he’s done um and one of the things i like about him as well is that he uh he uh does a lot of stuff that might not work he takes big swings takes big risks that he think can make the world better um and he invests in all sorts of crazy ideas uh he also has five kids which i think is pretty freaking cool uh i love to see that with these you know billionaires they’re not just like miserable by themselves and they care about kids and stuff and seems pretty family focused um and then you know he’s been through these personal challenges this stroke and then also his eldest son was born with this disease called neurofibromatosis which is like super rare and he’s poured a bunch of money uh his own money into funding research around that disease so it’s been fascinating um so he said uh there’s a quote he said when i when we grew up all i wanted to do was do two things own a sports team and a casino and now he owns both so this is kind of like a childhood dream and his companies are quicken loans which is the largest home mortgage lender in the united states they’re bigger than wells fargo which is freaking crazy uh he owns the cleveland cavaliers the basketball team and a few other sports franchises until recently he owned a casino i think it was called jack which owned a whole bunch of casinos but i think he sold it and then he also owns rock ventures and rock ventures is where all the big swings happen and all the philanthropic stuff happens so um they own a ton of real estate almost all in detroit and then they do venture capital and they’ve invested in everything from uh restaurants to uh you know real estate businesses hotels crazy tech companies and all sorts of other stuff he owns rob report which is like one more thing can i tell you a few more things that he owns that’s interesting um so he owns i think he owns fat head do you know fat head yeah yeah i believe sports it’s like those like big hands and stuff and like yeah yeah weird if you’re a kid and you want to put like a like the face of michael jordan on your wall it’s like a decal that you put on your wall i think he owns the whole thing he just bought dictionary.com and thesaurus.com um totally random we were actually we helped him i know him i’ll talk about that a little bit but uh we helped him with that acquisition a little bit oh no way so you know about it it was like a it’s like a 20 million dollar revenue thing or more maybe um it’s been doing that for like 10 years i i mean i don’t have any insider information these are guesses um and am i right yeah yeah he owns dictionary.com and um and like when you talk to him about why he bought it he’s just like you know i think this is cool like he’s just like i had all these ideas of things i could do with it he’s not like going oh i bought it for x times ebitda and i’m gonna make a 20 return and this is what i find so cool about this guy is he’ll just say yes so he owns like rob report which is like a magazine for rich people dictionary.com um he owns or has a very large stake in shinola so shinola has this like insane hotel in they make watches uh he owns stockx which is like a it’s basically like a stock market for sneakers and watches which is awesome because like he co-founded it he’s i know he’s like in his hell is he in the 70s yet he’s like 50 50 something 56 i think he’s that young wow okay that’s a little bit older than like a sneaker head uh and he totally i he’s a co-founder i didn’t know that so he was it he esports he’s got investments in esports like just all sorts of stuff and then he’s also a large lp and a lot of venture funds kind of quietly like he’s the largest lp in ludlow ventures he’s got his own venture fund and so you look at it and he’s got this barbell right he’s got a really kind of dull boring you know mortgage business which is really innovative in and of itself just what he’s done is kind of like brad what he’s done is like basically taken this fragmented crappy industry run by banks and small lenders and like built out this massive structure and been very innovative around culture and other stuff so let me let me just give the history of what happened though so basically in 1985 him and his little brother uh start rock financial which is basically a independent mortgage lender so when someone you know needs a house or whatever it is they go to them they figure out they basically make them an offer to lend them the money and then i think they go sell the risk so they would lend them the money and then they would sell it off to a bank over time um and basically in the late 1990s company grew into a huge business one of the largest uh independent in the united states and with the dot-com boom they launched an internet strategy where they just made uh rock financial i think it was rockfinancial.com or digitalmortgage.com or something like that and in uh and in 2000 what was it no 1997 or something intuit acquired their business because they were like oh my god this is like you know this huge disruptive digital finance thing and so um what ended up happening is the dot-com boom blew up and in 2002 he came back and he bought his business back so he sold it for a ton of money into it first sale was 90 million okay is that right he basically i i don’t know i don’t have the exact number here but um something like that so you know the guy made a lot of money especially for the 90s but he wasn’t like a crazy billionaire yet then he raised money from investors so himself and some friends went back to intuit bought it back i don’t know what the number was and what’s interesting is they kept the quicken loans name so intuit owns quicken the financial personal finance software and they branded it quicken and so now there’s this weird other business they own called quicken loans even though that’s an intuit brand so it’s kind of a funny uh thing and it just kept hibiscus he took it took it back got rid of all the crap into it that added and started growing at a great again and this whole time he’s living in detroit and watching his own city totally fall apart so in the financial crisis uh you know detroit i think went bankrupt and he meanwhile is like super rich and living out in the suburbs and he says it we’re moving back into detroit and he moves his entire team uh into detroit so he had four thousand or so uh employees they literally bought if you actually go to detroit there’s this it’s called campus martius or something and it’s right in the center of downtown this huge building and he moved everywhere and there and he basically said for my own employees and for the city we’re just going to fix it and so he built uh casinos he built like a private security uh firm so if you walk around there’s like there’s like normal police and then there’s like dan’s police um he bought billions of dollars of derelict buildings uh you know literally like you go there and there’s like skyscrapers and he’s just it’s like going to chicago and he’s like oh yeah i own the sears tower and this and this and like basically all of downtown detroit he owns like 20 30 percent of and um he also just announced that he’s going to pay off 300 million dollars of property taxes for detroit residences so this guy really really cares about detroit and since since he started it it’s now become the largest uh independent mortgage business in in the united states uh you know they’ve gone public they had this huge ipo um and it’s been it’s been a crazy story i love about this guy is just he’s got such a crazy collection of businesses i think if i remember correctly i think i’m probably i think i’m right but i believe he sold it for 90 he bought it back for like 20 and i think he took it public did he take it public like either recently or right away quite recently like it was like like uh six months ago and he owned most of it when it went public he owned like 85 or 90 of it and it went totally crazy what’s the market cap now the market cap is let’s see here market caps 46 billion dollars wow so yeah where’s the other 10 billion come from just as other just as otherwise a lot yeah a lot of real estate you think the cavaliers are probably worth you know five hundred million twenty we’ve forgotten about that whole part you know all these stockx is worth i think a couple billion dollars now um so he’s just got this crazy collection of stuff and and so chris and i got to meet him um the other cool thing about this guy is like he’s just a wild card like i so i read about him in the new york times they did this profile of him and i i have this habit of just cold emailing people i think are interesting and like 95 of the time i just don’t hear back but i wrote him an email at like one in the morning and said hey you you know i’d love to meet you and i get an email back like five minutes later and he’s just like yeah sure and then i got a follow-up from his assistant and we ended up flying to detroit and it you know sometimes when you go and meet these billionaires they’re like whatever you know you walk in you get 20 minutes with them that’s that he was like incredible they like planned this whole tour of detroit it was like this two-day thing like ever they set us up in their hotel um and then dan spent like two hours with us and he’s just this super nice guy he’s like deeply interested in what we’re doing um and super engaged and like every business i mentioned to him he’d be like how does that work how can we get involved what can we do how can we do it like he wants to say yes to ideas which i always find really inspiring right because i think some of these people have gotten really rich they’ve gotten rich by being like hyper disciplined and just saying no to everything but he says yes before no that’s really interesting that’s what shawn acts like and i usually i usually say no to everything sean says yes to everything and my joke is that like i’m like my success is probably gonna be quite predictable and it will be really good sean’s success is he’s gonna go completely broke and die like young or he’s gonna become a billionaire super fat like you know it’s like a it’s a high risk high reward thing and that’s not the reality but that’s my joke i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back