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 yes all right so Xavier Neil I’m sorry I feel like I’ve been talking most okay it’s really interesting so Xavier Neil is my new favorite billionaire so this is my second section this is my segment of the show called my new favorite rich guy so this guy is essentially like a Elon Musk type of dude in France but instead of trying to send rockets to Mars this guy just operates in his own style but he’s got the same kind of alcohol like no [ ] give him attitude like a Branson or an Elon Musk and I never heard of this guy so I’ll tell you how I discovered him so I discovered him because he created this thing called 42 have you ever heard of the school called 42 no so it waits to me in France he’s in France he so I’ll tell you his kind of like life story so age 19 he creates this business called minitel minitel is essentially a sex hotline a phone service you call it so calling someone a sex line and at 19 he creates this thing and it goes gangbusters and so he’s doing really well makes a few million bucks off this then he either creates or investing bye-bye as a stake in something called world net sold a few years later for 50 million bucks right before the dot-com crash and then his big thing that he did was he created this thing called free and free was like a t-mobile it’s like a mobile carrier and at the time in France all like SMS phone plans are all very expensive so he created that he undercut everybody he created the like lowest cost way to have you know a cellular cellular service and so 3d became this huge company and so his net worth ballooned to like six point six billion dollars I’m looking him up now this guy’s my favorite person ever yeah he’s he’s very legit and so he was like alright look what I want to do now I want to do more baller [ ] and so he was like okay I’m gonna create this thing called 42 so he was like I’m gonna create a computer science school with no teachers and no staff so all he did was create those dopes facility with a bunch of computers and if you get into 42 you just come and the computer is your lesson plan so it’s like a video game there’s like a challenge it’s like hey you need to make a that could be x y&z you’re like okay and it’s like you have the internet and you have some people next to you and like you guys need to figure out how to get past this level and so you start doing the program and so it’s self-serve you do it you do a bunch of like projects to level up plus you create your own you know like projects or ideas so somebody created I don’t know like somebody could create like a coronavirus tracker right now because that’s a timely little website you can yeah I’m looking it up now they have 2,500 students yeah and it’s actually closed right now because the physical facility it closed here but it was a wild idea I don’t even know how successful it’s been I don’t think it’s been a wild success but I love his bet so he was like yeah I’m gonna put a hundred fifty million dollars into this so he built one in France and he built one here in Fremont for a hundred million dollars in California and it was just like so what a rep with a radical idea what a way to bet your money and try to like change the world over and over and over again and then he did this thing in in France he’s like okay how do I build like startup ecosystem here so he created this thing called station F and if you just think it’s like the [ ] NASA facility it’s like this huge huge but like I don’t know how many football fields long office or hanger or co-working space and he’s like alright I’m gonna make the dopest place for any investor to come when they’re in Europe here here’s some space to go hang out entrepreneurs you’re starting companies come over here and build your company here’s an office space restaurants come here at the bottom fill this place up you know gym whatever so he created his own little oasis how like Tony Hsieh did in Vegas this guy did in France this guy’s amazing agent F what what I just love this guy style so first of all I’ve looked it up now he’s not perfect 2004 he was indicted and detained for a month for misuse of company assets which occurred in several of his sex shops that he was a shareholder in and he ended up getting a two-year suspended prison sentence for misuse of company assets so he’s certainly not perfect I don’t know I’m just reading about this one thing though in addition to all this he owns the rights of the song my way by Frank Sinatra which I love the only one of the largest newspapers in France it was super interesting guy what I’m curious about people like this and Andrew Wilkinson is gonna be on the pot is he gonna be on unless you say yeah next the next episode basically so Andrew kind of Andrew not exactly but kind of does a soy in the same way as well until we have to ask him about this what I want to know is how do these people manage so many freaking projects right cuz like I I can’t even manage what I have on my plate and like right so it’s nice never live it so they you know they hire hire people to run their [ ] right so like I worked with a guy Michael birch who’s kind of like this like billionaire type of dude and he created this incubator with his totally different model or everybody owns all the equity in all the projects and you know he picked me to run this around the show for him so he truck and he trusted me he’s pretty hands-off we checked in but like he let me run the show so I was looking at this guy Xavier Neil and he’s got somebody this woman from Google who runs station after being the big facility he’s got somebody who runs his investment fund and the guy that guy was telling the story goes you know we don’t have board meetings but I was like Xavier don’t you want to know what I’m doing with your fund and say yeah sure tell me and he’s like he goes I told him I said hey we invest in all these companies I think we should double down on these winners and make make less small investments and do more on the winning company so what do you say okay he goes he goes I’m not turned I’m not doing this to make more money I’m doing this to make more companies invest in more companies I was like what he’s like he’s like you could double down but don’t stop investing in new and like new small small companies and then the other thing that they talked about in his thing kind of like what you’re saying how do you manage this they’re showing like the guy showed his email inbox all the emails from this guy and I’ve noticed this a lot of wealthy busy people their emails look like text messages so like this guy will write him a long email about like hey we’re thinking about this plan here’s what we could do here paisan hey okay cool or like literally it’s up to you all good it’s like up but number two the letter you okay where do I see this screenshot there was a story I think I was like a Forbes or Bloomberg story or something about this guy in there but I think this is a pretty common thing amongst the people who do a lot of I guess it’s gonna be like if I buy like like I’m talking about how I’m gonna buy like a just a toy car like a fun car I guess it’d be like the equivalent of meat bucket a car and like letting someone use it and it’s like dude I don’t care just make sure it comes back in one piece so you know the thing I guess the thing I want to clarify because when Andrews coming on on Tuesday I’m I like Andrew for the same reason I like this guy and they’re totally different right Andrews not gone to jail and didn’t start a sex hotline and it’s not a billionaire like well we don’t know that for sure yeah this guy or this guy has about 20 years on but I guess like the thing the thing that stands out to me is I respect above all else people who do [ __ ] their own way people who have their own they are original thinkers and decide to live life on their own terms that’s kind of what I got out of this guy is I think I feel like this guy Branson Elon Musk the thing I like about them and they’re definitely have lots of flaws and lots of you know messed up things that they do but I just respect that they don’t just follow a normal societal PlayBook they live life on their own terms they will be they basically you know Marshalls me do their own drum or whatever that’s what I like about them that’s what I like about Andrew he’s done it completely his way which is very non-traditional do you think this guy speaks good English this French guy yeah let’s uh he’s alright [Music]