4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I made my first million when I turned 30 years old, but I'm going to walk you through every single business I tried before I made something that worked. |
| 0:08.0 | And Sam, you can roast me for how bad my ideas were. |
| 0:10.9 | I feel like I can rule the world. |
| 0:12.8 | I know I could be what I want to. |
| 0:15.8 | I put my all in it like no days off. |
| 0:19.1 | All right. |
| 0:20.1 | So I did this previously. You totally won up to me by having a presentation. So that's a little unfair. But it's like in Mean Girls where she shows up to the Halloween party and she doesn't know that just was to dress slutty and she dresses scary. That's kind of how I feel right now. But that's okay. I'm incredibly excited to see what you have to do. |
| 0:39.3 | Business number one, I tried to create the Chipotle of sushi. |
| 0:43.3 | So this was my first big, hairbrained idea. |
| 0:46.3 | It was called Sabi Sushi. |
| 0:48.3 | And we, even though I didn't know anything about sushi, I had just tried sushi for the first time a month prior. |
| 0:53.3 | I just thought, this is it. This is the big idea. I can create the Chipotle of sushi. We partner with a Food Network chef. We launched the thing. I learned how to make spicy tuna and like all kinds of stuff. And that was the guy who, what was your buddy's name, who bought the bag company? Dan. Yeah. So if you've seen the episode with Dan, Dan the Bagman, where he bought a paper bag company now and is thriving, he was right next to me in the sushi trenches. Okay, so, you know, just kind of the summary of that whole venture, restaurants suck as a business. You know, 10% operating margins. You're working morning, afternoon and night. You're open on weekends. There's no let up. My hand smelled like to in all the time. It was just a brutal business to be in. And we literally did every dumb thing you could possibly think of. I sort of took a buffet tour of all the possible mistakes you could make in doing a business. And then, oh, my grade for this, by the way, A for effort, but this business was an F. And I think in the end, we made something like $20,000 a profit before we voluntarily shut down the business because it was so brutal. But if you look at that in terms of the one year of full-time effort that it took us, I was making $1.82 an hour. So that was my big profit out of that business. How much did it cost to start? We got lucky. It was going to cost half a million dollars to build out the restaurant. That was a combination of signing the lease with a personal guarantee, by the way, which is bad because restaurants fail. And you had nothing to guarantee. And I had nothing to back it up. So it was like, you'll be on the hook for this for 10 years unless you declare personal |
| 2:19.4 | bankruptcy. |
| 2:20.3 | And then you have to buy all the equipment. You've got to do the buildout, all this shit. We hired the fancy. We hired this architect who built the Vodara. He was the architect of the Vodara in Vegas. And again, every dumb mistake you could, but we thought, oh, wow, he's the best. |
| 2:33.7 | So he should design our restaurant. |
| 2:35.4 | And he came up with this plan that was going to cost us half a million dollars to build out. I mean, that's pretty ridiculous. That's like having like the guy who like developed the World Trade Center to like make your kids background play set. Legos. Leah, like my play structure. Exactly. But we were like, you know, it's so sick. We're really just changing the game out here. Did you tell him that? |
| 2:54.0 | Was that your bitch? my play structure. Exactly. But we were like, you know, it's so sick. We're really, we're really just |
| 2:51.6 | changing the game out here. Did you tell them that? Was that your bitch? We were crossing our eyes and dotting our T's, but that's not what you're supposed to do. That's not how those letters look. So yeah, we were doing everything wrong with maximal effort. So how much did it cost? We ended up, luckily, this beautiful, beautiful man with a beautiful |
| 3:08.9 | set of hair named John Prendergrass met us and was like, hey, guys, maybe test your concept |
| 3:14.4 | before you commit 10 years and a personal guarantee to this thing. And we were like, how do you |
| 3:18.6 | test a restaurant? And so he convinced us to basically do a delivery only restaurant out of a |
| 3:23.6 | commissary kitchen. What today is called a cloud |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 2 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hubspot, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Hubspot and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.