Just playing around with tables in the visual editor
Knowing what you know now, how would get rich if you were 21 again?
*to make this more practical, I don’t care about answers like “I would buy Amazon stock in 1999” or something like that. I’d like to hear more practical things:
I asked several people:
Neville Medhora (Me):
I would have started collecting an email list far earlier. I started writing on the web around 1998, and only in the last 5 years did I start to collect emails and build an audience.
Go where the action is (Wanna be in movies? Move to Hollywood. Wanna be in tech? Move to San Francisco . Wanna be in weed? Move to Denver). I started to notice that friends who simply lived in San Francisco knew all these tech people just by proximity.
Put more money into investments I think will REALLY work out. I made money on some stuff I was 90% sure would pan out, but only put chump change in…therefore got chump change out.
I would copy the shit out of successful people, at least when I was young.
Noah Kagan (AppSumo, SumoMe):
Knowing what you know now, how would get rich if you were 21 again?
1.) Buy real estate.
2.) Got equity and stuck with companies like Facebook (Noah was #30 at Facebook).
3.) Work for free for anyone who was a millionaire.
4.) Followed through on stupid ideas. Uber was one of them.
5.) Make stronger effort to invest in products I really liked then.
Sam Parr: (HustleCon, TheHustle)
Things I would have done at 21 to become rich.
When asked what being rich meant, my favorite author said the following:
£1m – £2m ($1.53 million – $3 million) The comfortable poor
£3m – £4m The comfortably well off
£5m – £4m The comfortably wealthy
£16m – £39m The lesser rich
£40m – £74m The comfortably rich
£75m – £99m The rich
£100m – £199m The seriously rich
£200m – £399m The truly rich
£400m – £999m The filthy rich
Over £1bn The super rich
For the sake of this post, let’s say that $16m liquid, a number that I agree with, is the threshold for “rich.”
So, if I were could go back in time 6 years ago to when I was 21 and have a do over at the $16m threshold, here’s what I would do:
Move to San Francisco – I moved here when I was 23, but wish I came here earlier as the odds of making meaningful cash outside of Silicon Valley are much lower than if you lived here.
Get a job driving Uber – I would focus on starting a company. But to pay the bills in the near term, I’d drive Uber during the day.
Start a niche blog that would break tech stories – I’d start a blog/newsletter/content site covering tech news. If this were a few years ago then it would have been a blog. The topic would be tech news. Tech is booming right now, and was more so back then. The legacy media companies have no idea what they’re doing, so I’d spend 1-3 years writing 5-10 blog posts a day about insider tech news. The goal would be to grow my monthly unique visitors to around 10m monthly uniques. Not too high that it’s unobtainable, but not so small that it’s not meaningful.
Sell the blog – after hitting $5m in revenue from ads and conferences (yes, I’d also launch a conference), I’d sell my company to Hearst or Time Warner for $15m-$20m. I’d position myself as some media millennial prodigy. Big execs love that stuff.
Things I wouldn’t do:
Not move to SF. If you want to make it in tech/startups then it’s a huge disadvantage to not be here. It’s like acting and LA. Could you make it as an actor while being based out of Nashville? Yeah, maybe, but it’s a lot harder.
Raise money. I’d own 100% of the business so I could get rich faster.
Sell courses. It’s a trap. I think courses can only (most of the time) make a couple million a year in revenue and aren’t crazy sellable businesses. Making $1m won’t make you rich fast…need to sell a business.
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora
P.S. Leave your answer in the comments, you never know who it could help :)
