My next guest is someone I've had the pleasure of meeting in real life, IRL, and he's a fellow introvert.

And a person who you will probably already know, so once he starts talking, you'll know who he is in a second because he's an OG.

He's an OG in the space.

And the reason why we're having this conversation, among many of the reasons, are shared perspective on the world.

But mostly because he came out with a large

kind of attention-grabbing headline to say, I'm retiring. I'm not doing this thing anymore. Now,

he's not retiring from everything, just something very specific. I'm Ryan Dice, and you are listening

to the future. Ryan, for people who don't know who you are, can you please introduce yourself?

So I'm Ryan Dice. I founded a company called Digital Marketer about 20-ish years ago.

That's probably what I'm best known for, but in reality, I'm a serial entrepreneur.

I started my first company back in 1999 from my college dorm room so I could buy an engagement ring for my then girlfriend, now wife. And today, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my first company back in 1999 from my college dorm room so I could

buy an engagement ring for my then girlfriend, now wife. And today run a portfolio of companies

that collectively do about $200 million a year in revenue. So get to run businesses, scale businesses,

buy businesses, sell businesses, and tell people how we do it. It's a lot of fun. That's a lot of

business in the

businesses here and $200 million for most people. It's like a starting amount of money. It really is.

So before we get into the big announcement, can you take me back to 1999 in the dorm and you're like,

let me start a business? What conditions were present in that moment where you thought to yourself, Hey, in school, I need to make some money. A business is the way to go. So I was in college. I had a job. The job paid rent and food, but nothing else. So I knew if I was going to make any extra money, it was going to have to be on this, through some kind of a side hustle. And, you know, look, I'm going to the University of Texas. At that time, there was all this talk about how Michael Dell had started Dell computer from the dorm across the street from where I lived. It was the dot com era back when we called internet startups.coms. And I thought, hey, I'll try to start a dot com.

Well, I didn't know how to do that, but I thought maybe I'll try to get some work doing web

design. Now, keep in mind, I didn't know how to do web design, but I figured if I could get some

clients, I could teach myself how to do web design over the weekend. So I marketed myself as a web

designer, and I managed to get a client.

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