Practical Guide to Getting Rich

We discuss strategies for starting your own company, from high-risk VC-backed startups to acquiring existing small businesses. We cover different funding options like venture capital, SBA loans, and getting investments from people who believe in you. Advice is tailored based on intelligence level. We also warn about the risks of demanding a higher salary without increasing your value to the company.

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Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I'm thinking more about like, you know, bridge loans or whatever, like loans for growth once you do acquire. I don't

Malcolm Collins: have access to that. Yeah. I get that. Advice to normal people.

Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway. Yes. As being loans are, are great and they do provide a lot of opportunity.

Malcolm Collins: However. Let's. Let's go into what I would suggest is the number one way that, that I would look at creating a company.

If I was an average milling to above middling intelligence person living in the U S

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, there's a person in our family who would really, really love, loves money. And definitely encourages us to make money. And whenever she's been unhappy with how much money we're making, her advice is always just tell them to pay you more.

Malcolm Collins: Which is my mom who's not with us anymore, but she would always do this.

Just be like, I'd be like, Oh, I'm making this much. And she goes, that's not enough for you. You just need to tell them to pay you more. And I was like, I'll get fired if I do that. You [00:01:00] know that, right? Yeah. She goes, you just need to be firm. And I think so many older generations are this way. This isn't like, just go and, and bang on doors at offices until you get hired.

But one of the things, you know, if you look at online influencers and stuff like that, sort of the place they always end up, whether you're talking about girl defined or Andrew Tate or even Trump is trying to teach people how to make money. And they'll create these little universities for me because it's true.

You know, if you're building your own little community, you know, one of the things that's easiest to promise them is financial independence and wealth. So you promise them that you get them to waste money on that. And, and it ends up, you know, some, I think some of it is pretty good. So you look at like hustle university and stuff like that, like what Andrew Tate is doing and some of the other ones it's reasonable.

He has to figure out how to tell idiots how, like, because, and I'm not saying that he disproportionately attracts idiots. I'm saying if your reach is wide enough, no matter who you are, a huge [00:02:00] chunk of that is going, the majority of that is going to be idiots. It has the same, because you know how dumb the average person is?

Well, half of them are dumber than that. Exactly. You've got to be selling them all sorts of stuff like... Dropshipping and stuff like that. Like ideas that anyone can focus on. But the

Simone Collins: great thing about what he's doing that I really respect is most people who I see online who are selling these kinds of programs, they're like sort of pyramid schemes and they're based around coaching.

Like I'm a coach, you be a coach, you make money like me, blah, blah, blah.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn't really work.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, she's one of like a million. What I like about what Andrew Tate is doing is he's giving people very concrete, very practical, often like very unromantic, you know, they're, they're not sexy.

They're not about becoming a famous, beautiful coach that everyone wants to follow. You know, it's, it's about copywriting. It's about dropshipping. Like you said, it's about opening an online shop. It's about very like straightforward stuff that most people could do. And for which. With the exception of copywriting there is demand and, you know, I don't think AI was ballooning when he first [00:03:00] started this copywriting course.

So I do admire. what Andrew Tate is doing with that. But you're absolutely right. That, that is what you typically see when some influencer tries to start teaching their audience to make money.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I want to start by being clear that I actually think that he is probably the most honest in terms of what he's promising people of all of the people I have seen do this.

Yeah. So good on him. But we're going to do something a little different because you know, I have my MBA from Stanford, right? Like I am in terms of making money probably one of the most educated types of people there, there are, you know, Simone got her degree from Cambridge and technology policy and we have done something that gave us a huge insight that normal people don't have, which is called a search fund.

So not only did we learn how to raise money from investors, like we've done venture capital, both of us have worked in venture capital, so we know that whole industry but we went out there and we had to find a company to buy. So we were emailing, you know, thousands of company CEOs every week interviewing.

I think [00:04:00] you got an average of 80 interviews a week, finding out how, and you did this for about two years, finding out how just hundreds if not thousands of companies worked inside and out, how they were built, everything like that, which gave you an, and these are normal companies. These are not like VC companies.

So the first thing I would say to people interested. is if you are uniquely intellectually gifted. So I'm going to like break this into categories. And if you're okay with high risk, high reward opportunities, go to Silicon Valley, go live in a hacker house meet the VCs, start, you know, get working on startups, uh, go that route.

You can even go the VC route. You just have to be very ambitious, very hardworking. And, and know that you are very intelligent and I mean, actually well

Simone Collins: networked. You have to be well networked to get the deal flow. You need to actually find. No, you don't need to be

Malcolm Collins: well networked. You become well networked.

You have to be able to become well networked. Oh, sure.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You have to have the potential for sure. Yeah. You don't have

Malcolm Collins: to start out that way. The network you go into Silicon Valley with is pretty irrelevant.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: that's totally true. As long as you're [00:05:00] able to build it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, you have to live in Silicon Valley, which is a shithole right now, but and there's a few other places you can do this out of.

You can do this out of Singapore. You can do this out of London, maybe. But that's really it. Maybe, maybe, there's some other places. No, I've looked at the ecosystems for doing VC in other countries. And it's just really bad. They almost never end up with economic successes. We can go deep into why this is.

Actually you are better off at having a big success in a country that is smaller than a country with a medium sized economy. So like if you're in Korea or Japan or Germany, you're much less likely to have a huge economic success starting like a startup style company than you would in a country like, norway or Finland or Sweden or Estonia. So keep that in mind or Singapore for that matter.

Simone Collins: And the reason why just to give a little bit of color there for Malcolm's hypothesis is that nations that are so small basically have to start