Thiel Fellowship Mafia, 4 Companies For Sale, How To Lose Time & Money

designed to be skimmed

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor, I'm the author of this newsletter. Every week I'll send you an email covering ideas, lessons & tools to help you start or grow your business.

These emails are designed to be skimmed. Enjoy. 🧠 ☕️

⚠️⚠️ Warning – This newsletter is longer. 1,100 words. I'd suggest skimming or reading during your commute

Today's Outline:

  • Dealing With Stress

  • Thiel Fellowship Mafia

  • Companies For Sale

  • How To Lose Time & Money

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💡 Business Lessons

Last week was probably one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in a while.

Overall stats:

  1. 70+ hours of work in 5 days

  2. Close to 25+ coffees

  3. 2 flights

  4. Very little (and poor) hours of sleep

I think my stress threshold is high.

But by Friday at 6 PM I was feeling burnt out. I closed my laptop, went to the gym and signed off for the week.

The stress between growing companies, raising capital, and making employees happy can add up quickly.

3 things I reminded myself come Saturday that made me feel better and helps me reset:

  • If it’s hard now, what will this look like in the future?

    • I really hope 1 year from today the deals I’m looking at have an extra 0. Or we have double the number of employees. Everything I’m building today is big to me, but I want it to be small in the future. Reminding myself I'm early makes my "problems" feel smaller.

  • What would this look like if it was easy?

    • The fact is, doing cool shit in business is hard. Growing companies, teams, investments, it's hard work. If I want an easier life, I can do less interesting work. But that’s not my goal. Understand that difficult days are the trade-off for having the opportunity to pursue interesting work.

  • Don’t skip workouts for work.

    • Obvious one, but the easiest way for me to reset my mood is sleep, exercise, music and showers. Skipping workouts makes sense when the to-do list is long, but becomes counterintuitive afterwards.

🎯 Thiel Fellowship Mafia

The Thiel Fellowship is a program designed by Billionaire investor, Peter Thiel (the guy who turned a $500k investment in Facebook into a $1 Billion tax-free return).

The Fellowship encourages young founders to leave university and work full-time on their startup ideas.

By the numbers, there have been 400 participants who receive a $100,000 grant and 2 years of support from the program. With zero equity taken.

Unlike the Forbes 30 under 30 lists, the Thiel Fellowship has a 0.1% acceptance rate and over the last 12 years have built a star-studded alumni network.

Founders like Vitalik Buterin and Dylan Fields (Founders of Ethereum and Figma, respectively) are alumni. Hell, even the co-founder of OpenAI was a Thiel Fellow.

The deeper you dive into the alumni the quicker you realize they are some of the most elite founders. Here are a few highlights:

Austin Russell – Founder of Luminar – Youngest Made Billionaire as of 2021 (he's 27 today). His company went public and develops Lidar technology (helps with self driving cars).

Joshua Browder – Founder of DoNotPay – An automated legal firm to help consumers fight legal tickets. The guy is 26 years old and his company is pretty badass. You can automate everything from fighting a parking ticket to increasing your credit limit.

Laura Deming – Founder of the Longevity Project – Ok despite my fascination of 20-something billionaires, Laura Deming is probably my favorite on this list. Click on that link I added for her; she breaks down how her VC firm is investing in companies, drugs, and research that shows how people can live longer. And it's very simply written (for example):

Jeremy Cai – Founder of Italic – Originally started OnboardIQ – Jeremy probably has one of my favorite styles of personal websites. But his story of leaving OnboardIQ is commendable because he turned around and started Italic which is now valued around $500M. A perfect example of the idea that winners win.

Ritesh Agarwal – Founder of OYO Rooms – Valued at $8B. This story is insane because it took Agarwal only 8 years to build one of Indias largest hospitality brands that according to Wikipedia "As of January 2020, it has more than 43,000 properties and 1 million rooms across 800 cities in 80 countries".

💰 Companies For Sale:

One of the best ways to learn about business is study companies for sale.

You quickly learn Twitter Auto-DM companies sucks & low margins kill companies.

Here are 4 I found last week I'd consider buying (or replicating) if I was searching.

The 2 best things to sell on the internet:

  1. Supplements

  2. Cosmetics/Skin Care

The reason?

  1. Crazy high margins (you can sell a $2 lipstick set for $60).

  2. Subscription revenue

  3. Light-weight to ship

Every number on this business listing from the valuation to the margins look promising for an entrepreneur looking to get into e-commerce.

There are so many unsellable companies.

This is one. The truth is it's for sale for $140,000 and made $109,000 in profit last year.

But here's the thing – people look at these companies and say "you're buying a job".

Which... is true. But the amount of people that I know who hate their job & make less than $109,000 annually is incredible.

I think there's a real opportunity to buy some of these service companies and regain your time as an owner instead of an employee.

Is it the best business in the world? No.

Could it be better than your existing gig? Probably.

Recently listened to this Nick Huber podcast on MFM.

It was the first time I truly saw behind the scenes of how someone can use their platform on Twitter, Email Lists, Podcasts, etc. to gain serious distribution for their service companies.

Buying a capital raising software and partnering with Real Estate influencers for distribution would be a great GTM strategy.

Drone Topography – Horrible multiple. Don't buy this business.

But the potential to build something similar that can scale well is definitely there.

They use Drones to map out construction sites or existing properties and give managers insights during inspection and build periods.

📚 Quick Read

Main takeaways:

  1. Nobody goes broke from spending

  2. Nobody loses all of their time from self indulgence

Until Next Send ✌️

-Connor

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