Honestly I think bright and ambitious puts you far ahead of the game in commercial real estate brokering, as someone who heard stories from his father growing up.
Combine competent pedestrian execution of a services business with understanding Internet marketing at all and...
I think you could similarly have a very healthy education++ business within two years by starting from the sentence "Many tech people want to put their wealth / earning power into real estate and don't know how" and then continuing until your domain name is the obvious answer.
Heck there's an option for someone to literally build a business using nothing but shoe leather and messenger apps connecting capital from tech capitals and the few capital-constrained non-bozo real estate developers in tier 2 cities.
"I'd really like to take a shot at that 10 unit building in an up-and-coming neighborhood but we're soooooo short on capital right now."
"How short?"
"$60k!"
"... You're joking, right."
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Sadly all of my favorite banking emails are only in the public domain because they were eventually used as exhibits in regulatory or legal proceedings, which means there must be some hidden iceberg of beautifully written barnburners sitting somewhere that I'll never get to read.
Congrats to @Wise (née TransferWise) on the direct listing.
They took a user pain point which the financial services industry had long underserved and delivered a 10X better product at a substantial discount to the prevailing costs.
(I was a long-time happy user.)
In spirit of honesty I’ll mention that I haven’t needed it in last two years because a) the shape of my funds flows is different now and b) I figured out the right combination of financial institutions to buy JPY more-or-less directly w/o a middleman and then transfer it.
Which is far, far more work than the average person should ever have to do for international transfers, so I’m glad “Just use Wise” is a thing I can confidently tell just about anybody in my social set.
For the longest time the limiting factor on startup formation was likely interested proto-founders, which PG and YC intervened on directly by making starting a startup a higher status activity, creatively marketing it to geeks, and smoothing the path into it.
But it turns out that startups aren't started by founders they're started by *founders working together* and so creating medium-to-high trust ties between individuals in the community is the next limiting reagent, and so...
Just having this on the desk has made me acutely sensitive to that number and how it moves. Not quite sure how anxiety versus medical effect of CO2 trades off, but an example:
"Close window and door to have quiet environment for therapy": +200 PPM.
You can quickly project that to what it looks like if I try to keep the office quiet for the entire workday.
Saying something I've said before: I would have had a *very* different house hunting experience if I had known that I was going to do multiple years of WFH from one of the rooms.
I wonder when the various industries start taking that into account?
1) You're literally anywhere you need to be at any time to advance the plot.
2) You pass through, without acknowledgement or any difficulty, any law/border/legal regime/etc which would impair your business of being a Bond villain.
And then you get terminated with extreme prejudice in Act 3.
A random thing I learned while doing fundraising for VaccinateCA: the largest charitable funder in the U.S. isn’t a ginormous foundation or a billionaire.
Fidelity is a ginormous financial services business which has a loosely affiliated 501c3 charity. That charity takes donations, mostly from the middle class, and then bookkeeps them on a per-donor basis. The donor later makes a recommendation for Fidelity to fund another charity.
This is called a “donor advised fund” and they’re common in tax planning / wealth management for folks who both have enough money to get advice and think charity is a priority for them.