Shaan delivers a presentation he gave at UC Berkeley called “How to Make a Million Dollars After You Graduate.” He covers five core principles: starting now, playing the game ten times, building skills (build, sell, get lucky), moving near ambitious people, and then gives three specific “white belt business” ideas anyone can pursue — a marketing agency, a real estate apprenticeship, and entrepreneurship through acquisition.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host)
Why This Talk and Who It’s For [00:00:00]
Shaan: If you clicked this video, it’s probably not the first video you’ve ever clicked like this. There are a ton of videos on YouTube promising you how to get rich quick. And I get it — everybody wants that. I wanted it too.
Let me guess: it didn’t work. You did not, in fact, get rich quickly. And that’s not your fault. Because most advice on the internet either comes from people who themselves never got rich, or it’s too vague — things like “work hard, find your passion.” As bad a reputation as “get rich quick” has, the truth is it is actually possible to get rich quickly. You can get rich slow, you can get rich quick. But most of the people doing these videos have never done it themselves.
A few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk at Berkeley, and the talk I chose was called “How to Make a Million Dollars After You Graduate.” I gave that talk because that’s what I wanted when I was a college kid. I didn’t know any better — I thought, what am I doing all this studying for? I wanted to get a job that would be successful, give me money, and then I’d be financially free. The problem was, the whole time in college, nobody was explaining to me: what do you actually go do to make that happen?
This talk has some core principles at the beginning and at the end I give specific ideas — I call them my white belt businesses. Things I would actually go do if I wanted to make this process faster. It took me about ten years, but I think I could have done it in about four if I knew what I was doing.
So this is it. I’m doing it. This is my get-rich-quick video. Enjoy.
My Credentials (Why Listen to Me) [00:04:00]
Shaan: Before we get to the advice — rule number one: never ask directions from somebody who’s never been to that destination. Never trust a bald barber for a haircut.
Here’s my basic resume so you know I’m legit. I’ve started over ten companies. Three of them have sold. I’ve invested in over a hundred others. My current portfolio of companies I own and operate will do close to $100 million this year in revenue. When I was in my twenties I started off completely clueless, and I went from clueless to that. I think you can too. It took me about 15 years — I think you could do it faster if you knew better.
One of my companies, Bebo, got acquired by Amazon. I started a newsletter company called Milk Road that got bought after about a year. I also have a podcast that’s pretty popular and a Twitter that’s pretty popular. Justin Bieber follows me. He did not respond to my DM, so that’s a soft spot.
Okay. I’m legit. Do I have permission to continue?
My Story: From Premed to Broke on Purpose [00:07:00]
Shaan: This is me in 2010. I’m sitting in a classroom and I am painfully average. Average grades, average social life. Not bad enough where I had a great comeback story brewing — nobody was rooting for me because I was just in the middle.
I went to Duke University and I thought I was going to be a doctor. Premed. I spent my whole college career taking physics and biology and chemistry. Finally my last semester, when I was done with all those requirements, I took the blowoff class — my roommate always took rocks-for-jocks type classes, and it was called Getting Rich. I took it for an easy grade.
Instead it was the most important class I took in my entire college career. I met this guy. Mr. Cool Haircut. He walked in and asked a question: who here wants to be an entrepreneur someday, who here wants to be wealthy and be a successful entrepreneur? Everybody’s hands went up. Then he said, cool, you’re all seniors — you’re graduating in a couple months. Who’s already working on their business idea? One hand went up. Who knows they’re going to go start a startup when they graduate? Two hands went up.
He said, wow. So out of 100 percent of people who wanted to be an entrepreneur, almost none of you are actually going to be one. What’s up with that?
And the person said, well, I do want to start a company someday, but I got a great job at UBS. Another said McKinsey. Everybody had great jobs lined up.
Andrew Wilkinson has a quote that explains it well: going to business school to become an entrepreneur is like reading a book about basketball history because you want to join the NBA. In the same way, getting a job at a business to learn how to run one — that doesn’t really work. That’s not what actually happens. And instead, what will happen to you is what Nassim Taleb calls the three most harmful addictions in the world: heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
As soon as you get on that path — you have the job, you have the salary — it is very, very hard to get off. That is the first trap.
Step 1: Courage to Start Now [00:13:00]
Shaan: Step one is not about intelligence, experience, or strategy. It is about courage. And that courage is the rate-limiting step for 99 percent of smart people.
If you consider yourself a smart person, instead of pouring more water into the bucket of intelligence or information — reading the next article, learning the next strategy — look at your courage bucket and make sure it is full.
Courage is like toilet paper during a hurricane: it is in scarce supply. It is not on the shelves.
I decided when I graduated from college that I was going to spend a year being strategically broke. I chose that phrase instead of “unemployed” because it got people to ask intelligent questions: what does that mean? Why are you doing that? And I had to have a real answer.
I calculated what I call the freedom number. Not your desired net worth — that’s a maximum. You want to calculate the minimum number: the minimum salary you need to have maximum freedom. For me, I needed roughly $15,000 a year to live on. That was my target. My friends were targeting six-figure salaries, working banking jobs 80 to 90 hours a week. I was going the opposite direction. I tutored stats — even though I was a C+ stats student. I taught basketball at a school for autistic children. That paid me my $15,000 in the minimum amount of time — maybe four or five hours a week — and I had 80 hours a week free to do whatever I wanted.
Here’s what our apartment looked like. Our art was a towel on the wall. An ugly Craigslist couch. We slept on air mattresses. Three people in a two-bedroom apartment. That was our kitchen — I don’t know why we nailed the garbage bag to the wall. We just didn’t spend money on anything that would decrease our freedom.
We used that time to start our first business. And it worked right away — we had a brilliant idea, brilliant co-founders, and a huge success!
Oh wait. That’s not at all what happened. We decided to start a sushi franchise even though restaurants are terrible businesses and we knew nothing about food. I started it with two buddies who were equally clueless. It failed badly. Reality punched us in the mouth. We lost about $225,000 of prize money we’d won to do it. Now instead of being called entrepreneurs, we were labeled failures.
Step 2: Play the Game Ten Times [00:22:00]
Shaan: This is the second fork in the road. The first was: are you even going to get started? The second is: are you going to quit after the first failure?
Imagine there’s a piece of paper with ten circles, and under one of the ten circles is a prize. The other nine say “try again.” You pick a number. You lose on round one — that makes sense. You only had a one-in-ten chance.
But here’s the trick: even though the game is rigged against you — nine out of ten odds in my favor — you have one tool at your disposal: you get to play as many times as you want. If you get to play ten times, your odds of winning go up to about 65 percent. You’re now an odds-on favorite.
The game of entrepreneurship: you have to have the courage to start, and then you have to have the endurance to try ten times.
It took me ten years to be successful — about ten attempts, technically eight or nine years. That’s about normal. Of all my friends in San Francisco in our early twenties who wanted to be successful — a couple of them got it in their first, second, or third try. But most of us, it took about ten tries. After ten years, almost everybody is successful.
The great quote from Naval: startups fail, but founders don’t. The startup itself might fail. But you won’t fail if you play the game ten times.
Step 3: Win Even When You Lose — Build Your Skill Stack [00:28:00]
Shaan: The third thing you need to do is answer this thought experiment: if you know you’re going to lose many times — probably the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time — can you win even when you lose?
People at Berkeley came up to the whiteboard and wrote answers. You win when you lose because you learned lessons. You met great people. But the one I want to draw your attention to is the skills you will build while you fail.
Even though your startups will probably fail — even though you believe in your heart there’s no chance this is going to fail, this is totally going to work — the one thing you can certainly control is your skill stack.
There are three master skills you must build:
One: Learning to Build. You’re going to have to choose one way to build, one way to make things. It doesn’t have to be with your hands. It can be engineering, robotics, Elon Musk-type stuff. You can build things with code — learn to program. You can build things as a designer. You can learn how to make content: a podcast, a YouTube channel, something. Pick a path, pick the one you’re drawn to, and practice it nonstop.
Two: Learning to Sell. Learning to sell is how you get the thing you made into people’s hands. This is Facebook ads, Google ads, content marketing, newsletter writing, copywriting. In-person selling, phone selling, cold emailing, digital marketing — one of those paths you have to pick. Your startups will fail in part because the selling wasn’t great. But you’re going to build those skills one inch at a time, so that when you actually have a good idea, you’ll be able to execute it.
Three: Learning to Get Lucky. There are four types of luck. First: blind luck. You’re standing still and lightning strikes. It happens, but you can’t count on it. Second: motion luck. Fortune favors the bold — you do so much stuff that you just get lucky more than the guy who sits still. Third: spotting luck. The prepared mind. A guy spends his whole career analyzing stocks, then reads a report everyone else ignores, and knows it’s a winner — because he’s seen a hundred mundane things and can recognize an outlier. It’s like dating — you’ve gone on a hundred bad dates, which actually prepares you so that when you meet a remarkable person, you recognize it. Fourth: reputational luck. Luck is like a magnet. You are the world’s best deep-sea diver, renowned for it — so when somebody discovers a sunken treasure across the world, their first call is to you. This is why making content online is so valuable. If you get a reputation for knowing about X, people start calling you, and other people’s luck becomes your luck.
Step 4: Move [00:38:00]
Shaan: Number four — move. People don’t like to say this because it sounds harsh, it sounds like a lifestyle choice. But if you want to increase your odds of success, move.
Every city has a whisper, something to it that is its promise. If you want to be an actor, go to Hollywood. If you want to be in finance, go to New York. If you want to be in tech, go to Silicon Valley.
Proximity is power. Simply being near people who live the life that you want to live is the fastest way to become that person. Being around a crew of people who are chasing the same dream conspires toward your success.
Step 5: Three White Belt Business Ideas [00:40:00]
Shaan: The last thing — three specific ideas you can actually pursue. I call these white belt businesses: businesses that anybody can do with very little experience. They’re not the best businesses, but they’re great starter businesses. Like a kid starting a lemonade stand — it’s just an easy one to get into.
Idea 1: A Marketing Agency.
You want to learn that skill of how to sell? A marketing agency is a forcing function. Most people don’t feel qualified because they don’t know anything about marketing. Here’s how you do it:
Pick a version of marketing you like. Maybe it’s video production, making little YouTube commercials for products. Maybe it’s Google ads, helping local businesses get discovered. Maybe it’s Facebook ads for e-commerce. Maybe it’s TikTok — the new new field. Whatever you’re interested in, pick one.
Then go to a friend or family member who has a low-stakes business — Aunt Patty who’s selling her little stuff out of her basement. Say, Aunt Patty, can I help you sell these? You’re going to take a starter budget, maybe $100 a month, and you’re going to figure out how to sell that online.
You’re going to study every free course on YouTube, join every Facebook group, subscribe to every thought leader on that topic. And then you’re going to run your own ads at the same time. Learning and doing simultaneously.
A great target: a senior living facility. They charge $3,000 a month per bed — that’s $36,000 a year per customer. Even if it costs $500 or $1,000 to acquire a customer, that’s still super profitable for them. You offer to run their ads for free. Use that as your bootstrapping mechanism to learn. After you’ve done it three or four times, you go to every other senior living facility in other areas: “Hey, I did this for this company, I can do the same for you.”
Your goal: eventually get to ten customers paying you $5,000 a month for marketing services. That’s $50,000 a month in recurring revenue — a million-dollar business, built off literally just hustle and commitment to learning how to market through one channel.
Idea 2: Real Estate Apprenticeship.
You know more dumb millionaires in real estate than in any other industry. Take that as a backhanded compliment — it means you don’t have to be a genius for it to work.
Here’s what my friend Alex did. He drew a five-mile radius around where he lived, contacted every real estate developer in that radius, and said: “Hey, I’m Alex, a young kid who lives nearby. I see that you’re really successful. I’d love it if someday I could take you to lunch and learn from you. Maybe somebody helped you earlier in your career and this could be your opportunity to do the same for me.”
He got lunch meetings with everyone. For whoever he vibed with most, he made an ask: “I know this is unorthodox, but I’d love to come help you in your business for free. I’ve got a ton of time on my hands. I can’t think of a better place to learn than with you. Would you be open to working with me for three to six months? I’ll work completely for free, I’ll work harder than anyone you have. My goal upfront — and I’ll tell you this — is that in a year I want to go into this business myself and try to buy my first property. I hope at that time you might be one of my investors, but no strings attached.”
He did a one-year apprenticeship with a local real estate developer, learned everything, located his first property at the end of the year, bought it using money from that guy who trusted him. This is a path anybody could take. One year from now, you can already own your first property. To be a millionaire in real estate only takes a single property — one fourplex or one eight-plex can be enough.
Idea 3: Buy a Business.
This is only for — I’ll say — the top five percent in either brain power or experience. Someone who’s worked in the real world five or six years, gotten an MBA, managed people, or is just that high-IQ and driven. If you are that person, this path is incredibly interesting.
It’s called entrepreneurship through acquisition. You buy a business that is already working — it’s been working for years — using other people’s money.
We did an episode with Sarah Moore. She graduated from college and wanted to buy a business instead of start one — she didn’t have a great idea. She searched locally for any business already doing about a million dollars of profit a year. She wanted to buy it using an SBA loan and some seller financing. She was able to buy, of all things, an egg carton business — the styrofoam containers for eggs — using zero of her own money. And this business does millions and millions of dollars a year in profit.
This is the fastest way because you’re buying something that’s already past the startup learning curve. It already has cash flow. Then you just run it better — because maybe you’ve built the skill of digital marketing and the current owner has never run a Google ad in their life.
Summary [00:58:00]
Shaan: Five steps to get rich. The real steps:
- Have the courage to start — and start now.
- Don’t quit on the first failure. You’re going to need to try ten times.
- Learn to build, learn to sell, and learn to get lucky. That is your core skill stack.
- Proximity is power. Move around other people who are as motivated, hungry, and ambitious as you. It will, like osmosis, make you better faster.
- Be impatient with action, patient with results. The impatient action you should take is one of those three businesses: a marketing agency, go apprentice for a real estate developer and become one yourself, or buy a business that’s already working using SBA money.
I hope that was helpful. If it was, leave a comment below.