Poor people stay poor because they want a fast way to get rich.

And instead, the richest people that I know pick one of these four paths, play it for a decade, and then end up with more money than everyone else that is just chasing shortcuts. And just a fun reminder for you, no president, no economy is going to make you rich. You have to do that for yourself. So in this video, I'm going to show you the four paths to mega money. and I'll show you how to pick the right path

or the right time for you.

Let's get into them.

You've got your money and your business. You've got other people's money and other people's businesses and then permutations of those. And so your money, your business, right, is a bootstrapped business. If you have other people's money and your business, now you're raising capital. If you have your money

and other people's businesses, now you're investing. Finally, you have other people's money and

other people's businesses, which is fund management. Now, to give you some proof points around this,

I actually looked up the top 11 richest people currently on the Forbes list, and I'm going to tell you where they are. So you've got Elon Musk. He's a raised capital guy. Almost every single company he's had. He's raised outside capital. And then he's continued to fund it and grow it. Larry Elson, who's number two, raised capital. Mark Zuckerberg, raised capital. Jeff Bezos, raised capital. Larry Page, raised capital. Sergei Brin, raisedrap. Microsoft's Bootstrap. A lot of people don't know that. Underneath of that, you got Jensen Wang, raised capital. Warren Buffett, investing. Michael Dell, bootstrapped. The Waltons, as in Walmart, bootstrapped. And so that's the top 11 wealthiest people in the world. Now, you might have noticed that fund management wasn't there. If I go like six deeper, you'll find people who did fund management. Now, one of the interesting things about each of these constructs is there's a little bit of risk and there's a little bit of trade off with each of them. And I personally have done one, two, three, and four. Believe it or not. And so I'll actually walk you through my own examples and which one's right for you. So let's start with number one, bootstrapped. Bootstrapped just means that you fund the business from your own savings and cash flow. You have no outside investors and you grow through reinvesting your own profits. You have a website and you've got a cell phone and you've got skills and you start treating one for the other get

a little excess money take that excess money and then continue to build now typical examples for

this are usually low cost businesses to start a lot of times that's services so agencies home service

businesses b2b services professional services things like that sometimes nowadays you actually do this

with software it didn't used to be that way but now it it kind of is. Education businesses, e-com brands, if you do drop-shipping, if you don't do drop shipping, you'll have to front some capital in order to get the first inventory started. Local businesses, most normal companies. Now to be fair, that scope has continued to broaden because the cost of entering business is going to continue to drop. Now, for me personally, my first brick and mortar business was a gym, and so that was bootstrapped. I used the profits from that to start Prestige Labs, which was a supplement company, which was bootstrapped. I started Allen, which is a software company, which is bootstrapped. And so all those companies were bootstrapped. Today, Acquisition.com is taking some of that capital, investing it into other people's businesses, while also having some companies that we start de novo from our hold cap, which is kind of semi-bootstrapped and also kind of reinvesting our own capital. So you can see how some of these boxes merge. Now who is this right for? So if this is your first business, I recommend starting

with bootstrapping. And the main reason is just that you want to pay off ignorance that. The last thing you want to do is take your friends and family's money and then lose it because you don't know what you're doing. That's my opinion. Everyone, you know, your results may vary. You can stick your of the names on that list that I mentioned, Jeff Bezos, the people that he knew invested, Bill Gates, the people, I think he had rich parents.

I'm sure they helped him out in the beginning.

I don't know the actual public documentation of that. Jeff Bezos, the people that he knew invested, Bill Gates, the people, I think he had rich parents.

I'm sure they helped him out in the beginning.

I don't know the actual public documentation of that, but I think he had a little bit of help in the beginning there. But the thing here is that like, I don't think you're going to want to go raise the ton of capital from everyone you know, maybe even VCs, if it's your first shot. you know, your results will vary, your life is unique.

But the main thing is that bootstrapped will typically be the slowest of the four-pay. If it's your first shot, again, you know, your results will vary. Your life is unique.

But the main thing is that bootstrapped will typically be the slowest of the four paths.

And that is usually because it takes money to grow. And if you have to make the money to grow,

it's almost like having a car factory built inside of the car. It's very difficult to do.

Humans do it. We have human factories inside of our humans, weird stuff, right?

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