How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital Read online

  PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Nathan Latka

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  ISBN 9780525534440 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525534457 (ebook)

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  My Story and Why You Need This Book

  Wealthy People Sold You These Four Lies

  FAQ: Who This Book Is For, and Not For

  PART 1

  RULES TO BREAK, RULES TO EMBRACE

  1 RULE 1: DON’T FOCUS ON ONE THING

  How a College Side Project Made Me $6,400

  The $180K “Pop-Up” Accident

  My Calendar Patterns: Three Projects at Once Doesn’t = Three Times the Work

  2 RULE 2: COPY YOUR COMPETITORS

  “We Just Copied Dropbox”

  How to Decode a Winning Pattern to Copy

  Secrets to Copying Using Freelance Sites

  3 RULE 3: QUIT SETTING GOALS—THEY’RE KEEPING YOU BROKE

  The First $700 I Made

  Outsourcing: My “Starbucks Process for System Testing”

  How I Pay $29 to Get Back Nine Hours of My Time

  The Seven-Figure Podcast System

  4 RULE 4: SELL PICKAXES TO GOLD MINERS

  Why Do Thousands of Private CEOs Tell Me Their Revenue?

  Look in These Seven Places to Find Your Next $5K

  Rockefeller and His Sulfur Problem: Work a Liability into Your Growth Plan

  5 THE NEW RICH ARSENAL

  Should You Use Fear to Sell?

  Negotiate When You Don’t Have To

  How the New Rich Get More Done in Less Time

  PART 2

  MONEY: GET IT, KEEP IT, GROW IT

  6 YOUR HIDDEN MONEY

  Airbnb Tricks You Haven’t Thought Of

  Three Websites That’ll Pay for Your Car While You’re Busy

  Automatic Income: Patreon and Other Ways to Sell Your Digital Product

  7 LIVE LIKE A KING WITHOUT OWNING A THING

  How I Traveled Asia for Forty-Five Days Spending Almost No Money

  You Have to Read This Email

  The Email That Got Me a $350K White Rolls-Royce Ghost for $0

  8 HOW TO INVEST IN REAL ESTATE

  Income Report from My First Real Estate Deal

  My Real-Life Bank Negotiation

  Putting $0 Down (0 Percent) to Buy a $200K House

  9 SPOTTING BUSINESSES TO BUY FOR VERY LITTLE MONEY

  The No Money, No Lawyers Way I Buy Companies

  How to Buy a Tech Company If You Have No Tech Experience

  Negotiating the Best Deal: Ask This One Question

  PART 3

  HOW THE NEW RICH BUILD BUSINESSES

  10 UNCONVENTIONAL INVESTING

  1.2M Watched Me Do This Food Truck Deal Live on Facebook

  Riches in Hostels

  What My Dividend Checks Look Like

  11 HOW TO GET RICH BY COPYING YOUR COMPETITORS

  From Affiliate to Competitor ($18M Bizness Apps vs. $2.4M BuildFire)

  Reverse Engineer: The Easy Way to See Your Competitors’ Systems

  Attack Their Distribution Channels: How I Got #1 Spot on Popular Industry Blog Post

  12 MULTIPLYING YOUR BUSINESS

  One Question I Ask Customers That Gets Them to Pay 2x More

  Growing Revenue: How to Get to $1M

  No-Cost Sales: From Spreadsheet to $2K Each Month in My Pocket

  13 SELLING A BUSINESS

  One Sentence I Use to Get Offers Without Sounding Desperate

  Sell Pickles to the Lettuce Guy

  My Pay Stub: I Was Twenty-Six, CEO

  CONCLUSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX 1

  TOP 100 FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS

  APPENDIX 2

  TOP ORGANIZATIONS FOR ENTREPRENEURS

  APPENDIX 3

  TOP SCHOOL CLUBS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To my mom who taught me the value of money, the power of a decision, and the upside of hard work; and to my dad who helped me build my competitive muscle and a truly remarkable hunger for winning big.

  INTRODUCTION

  “Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

  —Unknown

  “Many folks think they aren’t good at earning money, when what they don’t know is how to use it.”

  —Frank A. Clark

  As I began writing this book, my mom called. “You’re making so much money,” she said. “It’s going to cause havoc if you happen to die, God forbid, and you don’t have a plan for your assets.” It’s funny. Three years ago she was skeptical when I chose to drop out of school. Her message changed from “Stay in school!” to “Get a will!” More on me later. . . . Let’s talk about you first.

  You know those people whose lives you just can’t figure out? They travel the world whenever they want. They barely work. They’re always with their family, or conquering the kind of grand life adventure you’ve reserved for . . . someday. Somehow, they’re happy with their life as it is—not just hiding behind a “perfect life” façade on social media.

  There’s the kid from your college dorm who dropped out and has since raised $1M in start-up funding. The dad you see at your son’s soccer games, or at your gym, who drives a Range Rover and is always around in the middle of the week when most parents are working. Your neighbor who quit her corporate job and now has her own business that you hear is making her $10K or $20K a month.

  You know these people are average at best. They’re not supertalented or smart, but they’re living like kings and queens and you’re dumbfounded.

  What they know that you don’t is how to be a capitalist without any capital. There are four golden rules that the business world has sold us to keep us from being successful. Those rules must be broken. And the people you’re thinking about have mastered breaking those rules.

  It’s easy to dismiss the superrich as trust-fund babies, or to assume their spouse is the breadwinner. Or we think maybe they’re not rich at all and just racking up credit card debt. These scenarios will be true for some people, but I’m not talking about them.

  I’m talking about the people who are wealthy by their own doing. Their families have nothing to do with their fat bank accounts. You can’t stand their weekday Instagram posts from their sailboat, or the sight of them on another overseas vacation, but as much as they annoy you, you’re also dying to know how they do it. How are these people so successful—and free—while you’re withering away underneath flu
orescent lights at your desk job 50+ hours a week?

  It’s because they’re part of the “New Rich,” as Tim Ferriss calls the segment of the population who have figured out how to maximize everything in their life—even if it’s not much—so it becomes an asset that works for them. The New Rich are resourceful with their time, their money, and their energy. They get what they want when they want it. They travel however much they want. They have blank calendars. And they have very, very few expenses.

  Tim Ferriss introduced us to the New Rich over a decade ago in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, but a lot has changed since then. Today, my peers and I are getting rich not just by starting companies from scratch, but by leveraging gold mines like Instagram and Airbnb that didn’t exist in the early 2000s. We drive wealth by taking advantage of new tools quickly and figuring out how to get those tools to work for us so we can work less.

  When an average person sees a New Rich person, they assume that new rich person has some magical quality. It’s not magic. The average person just doesn’t understand how the rich person got so rich, so they explain it away as “magical.” A magician practices a series of “moves” or “tactics” behind a curtain so that when the trick is put together, the average viewer misses the sleight of hand. If you saw the magician practicing behind the curtain, you’d think, “I can pull that trick off, too!” Building wealth is the same.

  These magicians practice behind the curtain, but I’m holding back nothing in this book. I’ve been a wealth magician for the past decade, and despite my lawyer’s recommendations, I’m sharing everything in this book so you can pull off your own “wealth magic.” You’ll see my tax returns, my profit and loss statements, my email negotiations when buying and selling companies. I’m sharing it all so you can study and get a very real sense of how I’ve built my empire. I’ll take you behind the curtain of the New Rich so you can become part of the inner sanctum.

  The lifestyle you want is not out of your reach—you just don’t know the moves yet. This book will lead you through those moves, starting with some I began making at the age of nineteen. You’ll learn how to replicate the inner workings of more than twenty revenue streams I now have at twenty-eight years old.

  If you’re ready to join the New Rich, read on, my new wealth magicians!

  MY STORY AND WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK

  There are a few things you should know about me:

  I’m a college dropout.

  I started my first company in my Virginia Tech dorm room when I was twenty. Within four years I hired forty people and grew the company to $5M in sales and a $10.5M valuation.

  I walked away from a $6.5M acquisition offer for that company when I was twenty-two.

  I don’t have a résumé.

  I bought my first piece of real estate on my own when I was twenty-four.

  I bought my first company when I was twenty-six.

  Today, at twenty-nine years old, I run my own private equity firm, buying and selling companies.

  I use patterns and data to drive my decisions.

  That last detail is probably the reason I’ve gotten this far, and it’s how I’m going to help you get here, too. I’m not going to waste your time with small talk and rah-rah positivity. If you’re familiar with my podcast, The Top Entrepreneurs, you already know this about me. I have interviewed more than five hundred of the world’s top thinkers, disrupters, and CEOs in search of patterns that anyone can apply to gain wealth, work less, and get what they want out of life. I get to the data and I get to the numbers so you and I can learn from the real stuff. In fact, I pressure these CEOs so hard, they share secret strategies they wish they didn’t share, and threaten to sue after their episode goes live. Their fault! (Your gain!) An unfortunate side effect is that I’m the most sued podcaster—you should see my wall of cease and desist letters (a beautiful thing! I always win these contests!).

  This book is a natural extension of my podcast. I will present the secrets of the New Rich and feature real stories from twenty-year-old dorm-room CEOs, Airbnb millionaires, filthy rich software founders, and financial technology billionaires—all of whom are building their wealth every day, right now. We’ll get their stories, but just as important, we’ll look at the real numbers behind their businesses so we can understand how they make it work.

  Then there are the patterns. In all my time talking to top entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that their execution plans follow similar patterns that counter conventional business wisdom. These patterns directly correlate to wealth, freedom, and a lot of winning—and they’ll surprise the hell out of you. Once you learn about them in the chapters ahead, you’ll realize building wealth is so easy it’s unbelievable, and you’ll join those rich friends whose success baffled you just a few months earlier.

  My obsession with numbers is so fierce that it’s the reason I dropped out of college. That, and the money-smart mindset my mom has instilled in me since before my memories kicked in. She swears that during a car ride when I was five years old I asked her why we never went out to dinner anymore. She explained that she and my dad had to make choices. They’d recently decided to move our family into a new, big house in the country. Since making that choice, they had to choose not to spend money on other things, like eating out.

  I sat quietly in the back seat for a long time. Then I said, “So, Mom, can I choose to get into my piggy bank and take us out to Pizza Hut tonight?” She didn’t take me up on it. Instead, she and Dad chose to take us out to dinner that evening, but the lesson was clear.

  I have no memory of this conversation, but when I hear the story it says so much about how my parents raised me to think like an entrepreneur. Mom wasn’t talking about the family budget that day—not exactly. Her bigger point was that you have to make choices based on the life you want to live now—and the life you want to live in the future. It’s all about opportunity cost. Sometimes that means less pizza in exchange for the big country house (except when your five-year-old breaks your resolve in a two-minute conversation). Other times it means following your gut when you see a big opportunity in front of you, even if it goes against everything you’re told you’re “supposed to be doing” with your life.

  That’s where I found myself when I decided to drop out of college. I stayed until my junior year, but I’ll never forget the moment I realized school wasn’t for me. It was during a statistics course very early on in my time at Virginia Tech. I should have loved this class, but the teacher was so boring and I had other things on my mind.

  The midterm that semester was my wake-up call. I’d stayed up the night before preselling a Facebook fan page product I’d just launched. I was very tired, but I’d sent out $1,400 in sales proposals that night, so I had no regrets. I had set up a ping on my phone so it would make a sound every time a new PayPal sale came in. My phone was across the room during the test, but I heard it ping twice in the two-hour exam period. I was selling my product at $700 a pop, so I made $1,400 before the exam was done. I failed it, but that failure turned into unstoppable momentum to keep growing my business.

  I realized I was a capitalist the moment I got those failed test scores. I thought, If I can fail this exam and make $1,400 while doing it, school is just not my thing. I stuck with it a couple more years but I knew I had to get out and build my company. If you’re a student reading this, keep going. It gets even better . . .

  When I finally did decide to leave school, one of the first things I did was call Mom. I thought she’d be livid with me for wanting to quit—especially after she’d worked three jobs to pay her own way through college. Now my parents were paying my tuition, and there I was, throwing it away. But she wasn’t angry at all. She just told me it was my choice, but I should think about my options. It was the only time in my life when my parents would pay for me to go to college (I was fortunate and thankful), so she suggested I finish my
degree in case one of my business ventures failed down the line.

  She had a point, but I knew I’d never push myself to be successful if I had that safety net under me. I told her I just had to go. Mom said she knew she’d raised three stubborn, ambitious kids, so she wasn’t going to stand in the way of what we wanted to do. She just pushed me to consider my choices before jumping.

  All I could think about were the numbers. I knew I could go way bigger than $1,400 in an afternoon if I put more time and energy into my business. Forget the rules, or what anyone said I should be doing with my life at twenty years old (thanks, Mom, for not being one of those people). I saw my opportunity and I was going for it.

  MY INCOME STATEMENT AND WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME

  When I was twenty-three, in 2013, that company I started in my dorm room (called Lujure, later renamed Heyo) passed $939K in annual sales. Politicians love tax returns so I figured I’d share mine:

  Two years later, in 2015, my company passed $5M in total sales, and I’ve now bought four companies over two years to drive more revenue, faster and cheaper. I now make $100K in passive income every month, and I work about fifteen hours a week.