From youth, we're taught to earn, not to create wealth...

The contrast in truths to financial freedom can teach us much.

THREAD: 10 powerful contradictions on $, life and sovereignty:

🔥Financial hell is just a definition, written by other people.

Sartre: hell is a tiny hotel room w/ 3 others.

No fire, no brimstone.

It's simply allowing others to shape your reality.

Wealthy = reality shaper.

More wealth does not = more freedom.

"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty." ~ Socrates

This is the law of diminishing utility.

Your power is in knowing how much is enough.

How to Get into PE/VC w/o a job or experience?

The land ofthe gilded loafer isn't just for those from Ivy's 🧵

#1 Go where they already want what you're selling.
- Bunch of us on z twitter looking for SMB, RE, storage deals & employees

If someone finds me deals/operators in my target. I'd pay 'em.

Who can you solve a problem for already in the space?

#2 Find deals, get paid
- You could get a % of carry (profits)
- Or a finders fee for the business
- Or even a position as a scout if you find a lot

We've ALL had deals go super wrong.

1 Deal did 500% return in 3 years, and this early 1 also went to ZERO

A THREAD about a deal of mine and the dark side of investing in SMB business...

👇👇

Invested in a very small CPG company to take a large minority position.
- $50k invested
-$50k in debt
- $$$$$ in time & stress

This was a TON of $ for me.
(Dang that's still a lot of $, I hate losing $20 bucks)

My Pain in 60 Seconds:
- the company went to $0.
- lost all the $
- ended up ruining my friendship w/ the founder
- wasted a year trying to fix it
- now can’t even look at this type of food 🤢

PE/VC Terms 4 DUMMIES, a 🧵

When I started in finance, I had to google what a mutual fund was.
Not my 💡moment.

How bout I save you the embarrassment of doing what I did & asking if I had to "carry" something when they said I got carry... 🤦‍♀️

Top terms to know (so u sound supa smart):

#1 Equity kicker
- Aka a sweetener
- An option to buy equity...
- At a discounted price...
- Bc u invested in a company today...
- Like when they throw in hot dog when u buy a car (same same really)

#2 Full ratchet 🔧
- If company u invest in goes down in value...
- 🔧 for preferred shares protects u from...
- Getting diluted (aka owning less of company)

How fast did Venezuelan $ become worthless? (PS I was there).

May 2015 bolívar lost 25% value in week; $300 = $1
May 14, $400 = $1
May 21, $500 = $1
July 3, $600 = $1
Feb 2016 $1k = $1
Nov 9, $2k = $1
Nov 21, $3k
Feb 2018 lost 99.6%, 25k = $1

Today $248k = $1

In economics, things take longer than you think, then happen faster than you think.

Don't be left holding the last Bolivar. Asset up.

This was a tragedy.
Started by incompetent politicians
Finished by idealistic citizens

I saw it happen in Venezuela & in Argentina.

5 things turned a newsletter I did on the side for 10 hours a week, into a 7 figure business with a bunch of businesses shooting off of it.

#1 Give me your money first. Do a founders offering
Before you spend time on creating any business, test the market. I ALWAYS test the market

I don’t care for opinions. I care for your dollars. we start with a pre-sale before we even have the product.

#2 Choose your price, then add a zero to it
I ALWAYS underprice. It’s a personal fault. Don't be like me.

I found the more we raised the price, the more we sold, and THE FEWER CHARGEBACKS and HEADACHE we had

Don’t be afraid to price higher!

How do you oversee multiple businesses?
How do you make sure you're growing?
How do you focus on the right things?

I get asked these questions CONSTANTLY and

SCORECARDS: A thread on how I oversee 15+ businesse's at a time, 1 snapshot at a time:

First up: There are probably MUCH better and fancier ways than all of these...

Keep it simple, stupid. There is no exact right way I can show you.

Goal is --> what gets measured gets managed

So you wanna run a media biz?
Scorecard that got us our 1st 25k followers at Contrarian Thinking.

Grow Baby Grow - Marketing spreadsheet

WHY PASSIVE INCOME IS CRITICAL? And how to get it?

1st Why?
Out of a job for a year is NORMAL
- 60% of American adults live with chronic illness
- 42% have more than one
- 1/4 Americans will have a disability (That’s 61 MILLION PEOPLE)

Even for us young hustlers:

- 1/4+ of today's 20 year olds can expect to be out of work for at least a year bc of a disabling condition before they reach retirement

And yet we SUCK at saving:

65% of households lack a mere six weeks of take-home pay on hand.

37% of respondents unable to cover more than a month of normal spending.

Can't believe I'm saying this...

I'm actually concerned we may default on our national debt.

Anytime a country has gone to 130% det / GDP it has been a metaphorical point of no return.

The country has defaulted, a 🧵based on an industry report that got me humming.

Story time: Over the past 200 years

98% of nations that hit 130% defaulted on their debt (usually through inflation.)

Japan is the only one in 200 years that hasn’t defaulted BUT

Japan is rare...

Japan is a nation:
- in budget surplus (i.e. they run a net profitable biz)
- internally funded (i.e. they buy their own goods)
- with a Net Int’l Investment Position (NIIP) of +70% of GDP (aka they save a lot, and can ask for their $ back from other countries i.e. US.)

Investors as Influencers? It's a thing now

I want to invest in a portfolio of "influencer investors" & their funds

Who do I need to know??

*Even Investors worth $46 Billion are getting "influencey"* A 🧵

Investors are going to increasingly become influencers IMHO

Why?

L-E-V-E-R-A-G-E

Leverage is the multiplier

If you REALLY like a deal, you don't just go ALL in. You go 110%+ in.

There are four types of leverage:

Labor + Capital + Code + Audience

Audience is the new kid on the block.

About 30k of you contrarian hooligans follow me here since I started regularly twittering* 6 months ago

To celebrate: a mega-thread of my fav threads I've written.

18 threads to teach you more than an MBA on M&A (& cost ya way less 😉)

(1) Playbook on using laundromats to create boring but predictable cashflow

https://twitter.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1378032046447202306

(2) How to buy land for $10k and make $1.5k/ month on it

https://twitter.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1379070634173599746

Everything in life has rules. How you negotiate pay, buying a company, getting equity, or just a new job.

If you don’t spend time understanding the frame of deals, you’ll get taken to the bank just about every time.

Don't get taken to the bank⬇️

#1 Every Deal Is About 1 of 2 Things
Money or power.

Every deal.

People will disagree with me here. They’re wrong. So figure out what is important to the other side and you’re already ahead.

#2 Every deal has two aspects: Price & Terms

The saying for dealmakers:

"You can have your price and my terms, or my price and your terms... but you can't have both. "

Secret: Control the terms, you control the price

Every human should have their rules for life thought out.

What drives you? What is your own personal set of commandments? What lines will you never cross?

I asked my Navy SEAL man, Chris, to write out his 10 rules for life:

#1 Only prove your love, not your worth

- The loudest is a target
- Under-promise, over-deliver
- Humility in everything
- Don’t make excuses for your standards
- Always stay ahead

#2 Strength through conflict and competition

- Iron sharpens iron
- Resiliency is a purpose
- Complacency kills

15 Quotes That Changed my Life.

Each time, every time.

A thread on how others words can engrave your soul:

I started a practice 10 years ago.
Every book I read I would write down the words that spoke to me.
Creating my own bible.
So that when times were dark, I had a light.

These are the ones I come back to again and again.

Emotion haunted his face. It was anguish, some kind of anguish, and the dull, stoic anger that hangs in the eyes of repetitive, ill-paid work.

- Shantaram

The next wave of influencers = investors.

This has NEVER happened before.

BEFORE - You couldn’t invest alongside the big names unless you were a big name.

In fact - the secret in investing was “fake scarcity.”
- limited investors
- only institutions
- minimum check sizes
- no public information

Now it’s democratizing.

I’m going to invest in a deal w/ - @Keith_Wasserman

I’m in @gregisenberg fund

I harass @ShaanVP frequently for his deals

I’d like to get in w/ new buds @fortworthchris & @awilkinson & @sweatystartup

Boring businesses + online marketing = rocketfuel

10 Ways to Make 6-7 Figures off Your Twitter/Social..

The threads I wished I read when I first started:

How she hit $100k in social-driven sales w/ @stephsmithio

https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1392202564473556993?s=12

@dvassallo hitting $250k in sales for 15 months of part-time online work:

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1374043016692830208?s=12

Candy to cash.

He makes $10K a month operating vending machines??

How @quinnjmiller plays the Charlie Chocolate of robotic machines game.

A 🧵

Give me the numbers baby....
Monthly run rate: $15k
Margins: 65%
Net profit: $9,750
Number of machines: 27
Total investment into biz: $50k
Time involvement weekly: 20hrs

What he could sell his biz for... $371kish maybe $400k

80/20 Rule Matters: What he sells most of?
12oz coke
I buy this item for $.33 (each) & sell for $1, this is a 67% margin

The story that changed my life...

That kept me up at night.

That was worse than any nightmare.

- a suburban man, who gets up at the same hour every weekday morning,

- takes the same train to work in the city,
- performs the same task in the office,
- lunches at the same place,
- leaves the same tip for the waitress each day

Comes home on the same train each night

- Has 2.3 children
- Cultivates a little garden
- Spends a 2-week vacation every summer which he does not enjoy
- Goes to church every Christmas and Easter

Attention Arbitrage

Or as I like to call it:

"How Kardashians became Billionaires w/ Glorified White Label Makeup"

And how influencers monetize, a 🧵

@KylieJenner became the youngest billionaire.

Sold her biz for $600M, Worth $1.2B.

With her Instagram posts.

She maximized your attention… into her bank account.

Then @KimKardashian copied her.

Then the rest of them whose names I can't remember joined in.

Oh hey there... so you wanna buy a laundromat?

I heard ya. SO - some of the tools we use to buy 'em.

Also remember - he who keeps it stupid simple wins. A thread on deal docs:

How do I know this isn't a lemon?
Oh that's a good q. You need a deal calculator.

Here's how we measure it. Super simplified but it lets you not waste time on sh*t.

It's not an IOU, it's an LOI (letter of intent):
Fancy way of saying, Hey Homie, I'd kinda like to buy your business.

BUT I'm not proposing, we're not exclusive, we're just dating. Cool?

WHY to RAISE A FUND or How to Get people to Give you $$$?

I've raised for big players (Goldman, SSgA, First Trust, EEC) to the tune of literally tens of billions...

(Hand slaps face for not getting more equity)...

A thread:

At @GoldmanSachs (should I name drop again 🙄) we were shown a study on generational wealth...

Almost 100% of the wealth was made 1 of 5 ways:

Lucky Sperm Club (ok it said Inheritance)

Owner of a Business

Marry Rich

Public Co C Suite Exec

Asset Management

The last one is intriguing...

Building a fund and then a fund family (a group of funds)