The Next Billion

I Spent a Day Trying to Buy Spirit Airlines. Here's What I Found.

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:25:27 GMT

When I saw Spirit Airlines had shut down, I called my investment banker.

Then I sent this slack to my partners Alex and Leila.

My team and I spent the better part of a day building the model, walking the repayment waterfall, and asking the one question that matters in any distressed deal: is the business broken, or is just the balance sheet broken? Two very different problems. Also, two very different price tags.

I made a full video on this. Before you watch it, here is the one number that reframed everything for me.

44 million people flew Spirit in 2024.

That’s insane.

Spirit was an airline that everyone publicly hated.

The airline had already filed for bankruptcy twice
An airline that had the worst fee optics

And 44 million people still flew it.

That told me that it just needed an updated business model.

But the big question is… how do you value a deal like this?

The Deal Anatomy Framework

I run every deal I analyze through 6 buckets of my deal anatomy framework.

Here is how Spirit looks through each one.

1. Thesis Conceptually…you are not buying an airline.

You are buying infrastructure: gates, routes, FAA certifications, reservation systems, and 34 years of operational knowledge. That takes a decade to build from scratch.

2. Catalyst The window was 30 days.

After that:

Gates get reassigned to other carriers
Pilots accept jobs at Delta, United, and Southwest and are gone for years
The FAA operating certificate has to be reapplied for if planes stop flying long enough

The asset was depreciating in real time.

3. Price and Terms The opening bid is $533 million.

That gets you the assets. It does not get you an airline that is actually operational. Restarting operations, rehiring staff, rebuilding fleet leases, and renegotiating gate access is a completely separate budget on top of the purchase price.

Meaning: “Winning the auction gets what’s left of the business. The restart budget actually gets the planes in the air.”

4. Capital Stack The repayment waterfall flows like this:

Aircraft lessors get paid first
Senior bondholders come next
Other creditors follow
Equity shareholders are wiped out completely

Hunter Peterson’s crowdfunding campaign raised $130 million in pledges. His Reg A structure caps at $75 million in actual capital. Against a $533 million opening bid, that is still a $450 million gap, before the restart budget.

5. Risk The risk nobody is talking about enough: even if the auction closes, getting a new FAA operating certificate and putting planes back in the air takes 12 to 24 months. Every day in that window costs money without generating a dollar of revenue.

6. X-Factor Every airline in history has treated passengers as customers.

Spirit 2.0, if structured right, could treat them as owners.

Passengers who own the airline tend to approach things differently. They tell their friends, and tolerate things they would otherwise complain about online. Think of it as a marketing budget built into the cap table.

I kept thinking:

“If 44 million people flew an airline nobody loved, what happens when people actually have a reason to root for it?”

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5 Rules For Meetings

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:50:48 GMT

I sit on the board of a publicly traded company.

We run a tight board process, and as I reflect on it alongside what I see inside most organizations, I want to share 5 things that will make every meeting you run more effective.

Rule 1: Treat every meeting like a board meeting.

Send pre-reads, run a tight agenda, require prepared remarks from speakers, and leave with clear decisions and clear actions. Do this for every meeting, not just the ones that feel important.

Rule 2: Meetings without an agenda are disrespectful, and that includes your 1:1s.

If you show up without one, you are saying that you did not think the other person’s time was worth preparing for.

Do better.

Rule 3: If you have a slot on the agenda, prepare to deliver it like you are being graded.

That means clear framing, tight talking points, and a document or slide ready to share and discuss. If you would not show up to a board meeting unprepared, you should not show up to any meeting unprepared.

Rule 4: Here is how you know your presentation missed the mark.

People start asking you basic questions about what you just covered, or questions come from every direction with no throughline. When that happens, stop and say: “Let me rewrite this memo and we can discuss tomorrow.”

It happens to the best of us, so do not let it drag on, because private Slack conversations about what just happened are already forming while you are bombing your portion of the meeting.

Rule 5: Pulling up a document during a meeting that nobody has seen before is bad form.

If you could have sent it beforehand, you should have.

Send pre-reads.

Here is a simple way to think about this:

How you prepare shows just how much you care.

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How To Raise Millionaire Kids

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:36:49 GMT

Most of our kids are not going to be rich.

Why?

3 Reasons:

School does a fine job preparing kids for employment and a poor job teaching them how to build wealth
Most parents were never taught about money either, so they end up winging it just like their own parents did.
The financial rules our parents followed like save consistently, stay loyal to one company, or count on a pension, do not apply anymore.

Just to be clear, being rich is not the goal of life.

Come on.

I recognize the importance of being a good person and cultivating qualities like work ethic, kindness, respect, and generosity.

In fact, I am not even a “money motivated” person.

But that does not mean we completely avoid helping our children have a financial advantage.

And I am not talking about making so much money yourself, that you can make them a trust fund baby.

Come onnnnnn.

I am talking about implementing a plan for yourself and for them that:

Teaches them good money skills
Gives them a legit head start
Makes them a contributing member of society

This is actually less about raising rich kids and more about raising decent kids.

I made this video to break down what I am doing for my children, and I break down the Millionaire Kids Flywheel for you.

Check it out. Watch it on 2x speed.

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The Progress Loop: The One Email That Helps Founders Work With Advisors

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:29:57 GMT

When I became an advisor for the first time, I told the founder to call me whenever he needed anything.

He took me literally.

For the first 6 months I heard nothing. Then one Sunday night my phone rang at 10pm. He was in a cash crisis and needed a connection to a lender by morning. I helped him, but I kept thinking: I could have seen this coming 3 weeks ago if I had known what was actually happening.

That is when I understood how most founders think about their advisors. They only reach out when they need something. And the rest of the time they do not want anyone to see how stressed they actually are. Projecting calm is part of the job, but it means your advisors are flying blind, and the moments they could have helped you avoid become the Sunday night phone calls instead.

The fix is something I now call the Progress Loop.

It is a short update email you send every 2 weeks to your advisors, your investors, or anyone who is genuinely in your corner. Write it weekly for yourself. Send it every other week to them.

Write it weekly because the business moves fast and the reflection keeps you sharp. Send it every other week because unless your advisors have a meaningful equity stake, weekly starts to feel like a chore for everyone.

The Progress Loop does 3 things a quarterly Zoom call never will:

It creates a paper trail of your own thinking over time.
It shows your advisors you are doing the work, not just reporting on it.
It forces you to get honest with yourself before you have to get honest with anyone else.

The Structure of the Progress Loop

I have worked and reworked this format for 10+ years. Here is exactly how it works. (You can feed this into Ai and it will just do it for you)

1. Activities

Write down what you actually did, not what was on your roadmap.

If you spent 3 weeks in enterprise sales conversations and your stated strategy is product-led growth, a good advisor will spot that gap. You probably will not, because you are living inside it.

2. Wins

Show your progress.

Wins give advisors something to reference in future conversations and build an archive you will want when you are fundraising and someone asks what you have built.

3. Learnings

Your job as a CEO is to systematically reduce risk in your business.

The format that works:

We used to think X was true.
By doing Y, we found out X was wrong.
What is actually true for our business is Z.

For example: We used to think that getting a meeting with the VP of Sales meant we were close to a deal. By running 12 of those calls, we found out the VP almost never owns budget in companies under $50M. The actual decision maker is the CFO, and we had never spoken to one.

4. Stuck

Stuck does not mean things are hard.

Most founders skip this section because writing it feels like admitting they are failing. As an advisor, this is the first section I read, because helping remove 1 real blocker is worth more than 10 strategy conversations.

Write it as questions you are trying to answer:

How do we hire the VP of Sales we actually want when we cannot afford his base comp?
How do we produce quality content without building a full media team?
How do we find out if the new product roadmap is something clients will actually pay for?

Specific questions get specific help.

5. Focus for the Next 2 Weeks

Write down what needs to be true for you to have a good 2 weeks. Meaning, what are you going to get done before the next update?

When people you respect know what you have committed to, you organize your week differently. You do not want to show up to the next Progress Loop and explain why you did not do what you said you would.

6. Help Us With

Every Progress Loop is a small sales pitch.

Your ask has to connect directly to something already in the update. If what you are asking for has nothing to do with what you have been working on, what you learned, or what you are stuck on, it is probably not your real priority right now.

The full Progress Loop format:

Activities: what you actually worked on
Wins: proof of progress
Learnings: what changed about how you see the business
Stuck: the constraint
Focus: what needs to be true in the next 2 weeks
Help us with: a specific ask that connects to the above 5

Here is how to start:

Write the Progress Loop this week.
Send it every other week.
State the facts. Tell the truth.

If you know a founder, business owner, or entrepreneur send this to them. They will thank you for it.

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Why I told my friend not to take $67 million in cash.

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:05:49 GMT

A friend of mine is selling his company to a public company right now, and he almost handed the government $25 million of his $67 million payout without realizing it.

The investment bankers gave him two choices:

Cash + Earn out
Stock (of the fancy public company that’s buying him)

Of course he wanted to the cash.

He just had a dream of seeing 8 figures in his bank account.

When he called me about it, I explained to him why he should consider the stock choice as well.

First, there are taxes

When you take cash from a sale like this, the IRS treats it as a taxable event on the spot. My friend lives in California, which makes this particularly painful. Here is what the tax stack looks like on a $67 million cash payout in California:

Federal long-term capital gains tax: 20%
Net Investment Income Tax: 3.8%
California state tax (California taxes capital gains as ordinary income): 13.3%
Total effective rate: roughly 37.1%
Dollar amount lost on day one: approximately $24.8 million

He walks away from the closing table with about $42 million instead of $67 million, before he spends a single dollar.

But wait, there’s more:

Every time that $42 million earns interest or gets reinvested, California and the IRS tax those earnings again.
And when he eventually passes that money to his kids, anything above the $15 million federal estate tax exemption gets hit with another 40% federal estate tax rate.

Let’s be real for a second… its $42 million and it is life changing money as long as your last name is not Musk, Gates, Rockefeller, or Bezos. But it is also important to know that the the cash option is not always a clean win. In fact, it is a long series of tax events, one after another, for the rest of his life.

Let’s consider the all-stock choice

I am not a CPA or a tax attorney, I just read the tax code a lot. A section of the tax code called Section 368 may just give my friend the unfair advantage here.

Here is how it works:

Under this rule, when you trade your shares in your company for shares in the company buying you, the IRS does not count it as a sale.
You are exchanging, not selling. No tax is due at closing. Your original cost basis, meaning what you originally paid for your shares, carries over into the new stock.
The gain from all those years of building sits there waiting, but it does not get taxed until you actually sell the new shares.

My friend now has $67 million in stock in a (fancy) publicly traded company and a $0 tax bill on closing day.

That feels like a win… now what?

The Three-Part Architecture I asked him to consider

Once you have this stock, you gotta get it to work for you.

Part 1: Take 100% stock at closing. If the deal is 100% stock, 100% of the gain defers. If you take any cash alongside the stock, the IRS taxes that cash portion immediately. That cash component is called “boot.” You could negotiate for all stock and avoid the boot entirely if you can.

Part 2: Borrow against the stock instead of selling it. Most stock deals have restrictions on the shares or lockup periods. Once the lock-up period ends, you pledge your stock as collateral at a private bank or brokerage and pull out a line of credit against it.

On $67 million of public company stock, most private banks will lend 50 to 70% of the position’s value, which works out to roughly $33 to $47 million in accessible cash.
You pay interest on what you borrow, but you never sell a share.
The IRS only taxes sales. A loan against stock you still own is not a sale, so no tax is triggered. You live off the borrowed money while the stock keeps growing in the background.
Oh, and based on a few minor technicalities the interest you owe on borrowing against your stock is an expense, and therefore tax deductible.

Part 3: Collar the position to protect against a big drop. This is just a fancy way of saying… you do some financial engineering to protect your stock from going down.

A collar means you buy a put option and sell a call option at the same time.
A put option is a contract that pays you if the stock price falls sharply below a set level.
A call option is a contract where you agree to cap your upside above a certain price, and selling it generates income that offsets the cost of the put.
Together they create a price floor and a price ceiling around your stock position, which lets you hold the stock without worrying that it could collapse in value.

Just to be super clear… this is a very common thing in situations like this and a simple chat with your favorite LLM will draw out how you should do this.

The Technicality

Someone is going to hate on me, so here is the technicality.

The IRS watches collars carefully under a rule called the constructive sale rule, Section 1259.
If the collar is too tight, meaning the floor and ceiling are too close to the current stock price, the IRS decides you have essentially sold the stock without actually selling it and taxes you immediately as if you did.
To stay outside that ruling, the floor typically needs to be set at least 20 to 30 percent below the current stock price.
When this is done correctly, you hold the stock, maintain your borrowing capacity, and have real protection if the market turns against you.

There haters, feel better?

What Happens to the Tax Bill When You Die?

This is kinda the entire flex in all of this…

If my friend holds this stock and passes it to his kids, the IRS resets the cost basis to whatever the stock is worth on the day he dies.
His kids inherit the shares at current market value. The decades of deferred gain simply disappear. They can sell the shares right after inheriting them and owe almost nothing in capital gains tax.
The estate uses the borrowed money to repay the loans, and the kids keep everything else.

Compare that to the cash path:

Day one: $24.8 million in taxes
Every year after: ordinary income tax on all earnings
At death: 40% federal estate tax on everything above $15 million
What the kids actually receive: a fraction of what the stock path would have left them

The 4 Things That Can Go Wrong

Of course there are risks, and I am sure many that I am not seeing here but lets start with these…

1. The lock-up period. Most public company acquisitions require founders to hold their new shares for 6-12 months before selling, pledging, or hedging them. During that window, you cannot borrow against the stock or set up the collar. If the stock drops 40% while you are locked up, the plan starts from a much weaker position. You need to believe in the quality of the stock you are receiving before committing to this path.

2. The collar width. If the put and call strikes are too close together, you trigger the constructive sale rule and owe the tax you were trying to defer. If they are too far apart, the protection is weaker than you need. Finding the right range requires a derivatives specialist and a tax attorney working on this for you.

3. The interest carry. Carrying $35 to $45 million in loans at current rates costs roughly $1.75 to $2.25 million per year in interest. That is real money. You need to model that cost honestly against the tax savings over your expected hold period before deciding the math works for your situation.

4. Advisors who do not talk to each other. This strategy requires a tax attorney, a derivatives desk at a private bank, and an estate planning attorney. Most business owners do not have that team coordinated before the deal closes, and that crushes them.

So what did my friend end up doing afterall?

He spent a week thinking about it
He pulled a small team of experts together
And realized that he would be leaving too much on the table if he took all the cash

So he negotiated 1m off the purchase price and got the board to give him permission to pledge his stock. Meaning, he took $66m of stock instead of $67m, agreed not to sell it and only pledge it so that he could borrow against it.

Remember, it’s not what you make its what you keep.

This is not legal or financial advice. If any part of this applies to your situation, talk to a tax attorney and a private wealth advisor before doing anything. The strategy is real and used regularly by sophisticated founders. The execution details are everything.

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Understanding Negative CAC

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:31:05 GMT

Every dollar you spend on ads is a penalty for being unknown.

Let me explain:

I was looking at the numbers for one of our portfolio companies a few years ago.

They were running paid ads to cold traffic. It cost them $85 per lead and they were closing at 7%. Most businesses don’t even know these numbers.

Let’s do the math:

14.3 (100/7) leads needed to close one customer
14.3 × $85 = $1,214 to acquire one customer

Not bad, if the math works.

Then they tried something different.

They started running 2-day, in-person workshops 4-times a year for a $2,000 ticket.

Here is what the economics looked like per attendee:

Ticket price: $2,000
Ads to fill the room: $250
Sales commission on ticket: $200
Venue, food, AV, materials: $300
Staff and delivery: $150
Total cost per attendee: $900
Net per attendee: $1,100

Before anyone became a customer, the business made $1,100 per person just for showing up.

Bruh.

So they went from spending $1,214 to acquire a customer on cold ads…to making $1,100 on every single person who walked through the door, whether they bought anything or not.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

About 30% of attendees became paying customers afterward. So for every customer acquired:

1 divided by 30% = 3.3 attendees needed to produce one customer
3.3 attendees × $1,100 net per attendee = $3,630 made before anyone signed up

They made $3,630 before a single customer bought anything.

They went from spending $1,214 to acquire a customer… to making $3,630 before that customer signed up. A $4,844 swing per customer acquired.
That is negative CAC.

And its a beautiful thing. And most business owners don’t believe it is real until they see the numbers.

Now, why does that matter to you?

Here are 5 learnings that could help you:

Learning #1: The math flips completely. This is not a small improvement. It is a completely different business model. One charges you to find customers. The other pays you before they become one.
Learning #2: The customer who pays to find you is a different customer. Cold traffic closes at 7% and needs a bunch of sales ninja convincing. But someone who paid $2,000 to spend two days with you closes at 30% and arrives pre-interested and pre-motivated to doing business with you.
Learning #3: The event pays for itself. Every dollar of ad spend, commission, venue and logistics is covered by the ticket price and then some. The business is not gambling on conversion. It already won before the sales conversation started.
Learning #4: You own the relationship. Cold traffic disappears the moment you stop paying for it. The 200 people who came through your workshop last year still remember you. That does not go away when Meta changes its algorithm next Tuesday.
Learning #5: The quality of the pipeline changes everything. A calendar full of workshop conversations is a completely different energy than grinding through cold leads at 7%. The team performs better, the customers stick around longer, and the whole business operates differently.

Ok, so why do most business owners not think about negative CAC as a real option?

Because we are taught to minimize CAC and as a cost to get it as close to zero as possible.

But negative CAC is a different game entirely. You are not minimizing a cost. You are turning acquisition into a profit center.

As I see it, we have two choices:

Keep optimizing paid channels and accept that the cost goes up every year. (I agree that paid works btw, the workshop attendees came from paid ads. It’s not about paid ads, its about how you utilize them)
Build a model where finding customers generates revenue before they buy anything. (This is just a choice)

Option 2 takes longer. It took this company about 18 months before the workshop model was running smoothly and the cash flow made sense.

But once that happened, it changed the P&L completely.

So what’s the takeaway?

Pick one channel… A workshop, a newsletter, a podcast, a community. One thing, built consistently, and resist the urge to pivot. The obsession is the way!

Best case: your acquisition cost goes negative and customers pay you to find them. Beautiful.
Worst case: you build an audience that makes every future offer cheaper to sell. Beautiful.

So I say again: Every dollar you spend on ads is a penalty for being unknown.

BTW - I break down exactly how Acquisition.com’s business model work on the negative CAC model.

The Weekly Offer System

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:30:55 GMT

Within the first 90 days, I received documented proof that this idea generated over $100 million in sales.

I just stopped keeping track after that.

While I came up with this idea about 10 years ago when I was in real estate, it has since then been used in various industries.
This is a weekly offer system that every single business should consider putting in place and I am going to explain to you how to do it.

It is called the Deal of the Week.

A pizza store would call it the pizza of the week
My friend is a watch broker - he called it the watch of the week
A friend who is a coach - called it the client of the week

In essence, it’s [something] of the week.

Here are the 4 reasons why:

Permission: When its a weekly thing, you have given yourself permission to make an offer and sell… without it being sleazy. For example, the pizza store could hammer you with specials every day or could just make sure the pizza of the week was awesome… and nobody would unsubscribe from that text message.
Sales: Instead of worrying about what marketing strategy to run next, you always know that you can do this 50+ times a year and it will continuously bring in customers.
Positive Associations: When you are constantly sharing special offers with someone, they have a positive association with your brand.
Brand: Talking about brand, it’s free brand recognition every single week.

In fact, Crumbl Cookies did exactly this and blew up their brand.
Crumbl was just another neighborhood cookie store franchise. Most franchise owners made no money, unless a soccer team or birthday party ordered 100+ cookies that month. All this changed when Crumbl put the weekly offer in place.

Every Friday, Crumbl corporate would do a mass push of its flavors of the week. It was the only 6 flavors they would be selling during the upcoming week.
All the franchisees organized themselves to bake and deliver on the demand of just those 6 cookie flavors. This made production easy, as they knew exactly what they needed from raw materials to ingredients.
Crumbl went hard on this campaign. While it started with text message and email, it soon evolved to video and social media pushes. Today, each of their weekly videos get millions of views and tens of thousands of shares.

The weekly offer built Crumbl’s entire business.

While not all of us have a neighborhood cookie store, there is still a way to clearly use this strategy and have this be the foundational piece of communication that to send to your database on a weekly basis.

I break down this strategy step-by-step, along with live sample messages in this video:

Here are the 3 big lessons that I learned deploying this across industries:

Name your thing: Deal of the Week or Smoothie of the Week
Send it at the same day/time every week
Force a click or reply. Meaning, have them click to redeem a coupon or reply to get more information.

Bonus: If you offer a professional service like real estate, mortgage, interior design, law, chiropractic, agency etc. then always hold something back in the email and force the reply.

For example:

In real estate, I recommend never putting the price of the “deal” of the week.
In mortgage, you could offer to cover closing costs if the refinance was done by x date, but I don’t add all the details
In chiropractic, you could offer a free “Computer Sitting Spine Alignment” worth $400 for just booking a consultation that week.

The magic words I use at the end of the email are:
If you are interested, just reply and I will get you all the details.

If you did nothing else in the next 90 days, put this strategy in place and you will see it bring a steady stream of revenue while also building your brand.

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10 Truths About Failure Nobody Taught You

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:15:42 GMT

Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned. If the same thing keeps happening, that means there is a lesson in there you have not learned yet. I often ask myself, “What would need to be true for this to not happen again”.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes. The goal is to walk away from every mistake with a heuristic (a thinking shortcut) like a rule, a framework, or a checklist.
Confidence is the memory of success. One bad outcome can mess with you more than ten good ones if you let it.
The best math you can learn is how to calculate the future cost of your current decisions. I try and play out 3 chess moves. Meaning, I ask myself “If I did this, what would be a reasonable outcome.” Then I do it two more times and see if I like where it lands.
Risk is often better than regret. The things I did not do haunt me more than the things I tried and failed. All your failures are the greatest stories you live to tell.
People only see the decisions you make, not the choices you had. Most people cheer for you until they start seeing you as more successful than them. Kinda messed up, but generally true.
Figure out how to guarantee defeat. Then do the opposite. This is the classic AAR (After Action Report) I learned from the Navy. I ask myself four questions after anything goes wrong: what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why was there a gap, and what will I change.
The degree to which you can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth you can accept about yourself without running away. My biggest wins and best relationships have come from me taking massive responsibility for my actions, sometimes even when taking said responsibility was the irresponsible thing to do.
Your worst battle is between what you know and what you feel. As my business partner and bestie Leila Hormozi says: “Fugg your mood, follow the plan”
A winner is a loser who tried one more time. Never give up. Never quit.

I made this video that breaks down the three types of fear that cause people to fail and the tools I use to beat each one. If this list helped, you will like the video too.

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We hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube in 63 days.

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:15:40 GMT

We posted 5 videos in 63 days and hit 100K YouTube subs.

That was one video about every 2 to 3 weeks.

Here’s what the portfolio looks like:

Video 1: Everything I learned from being around the Top 0.01% (442K views)
Video 2: Everything I learned at Goldman Sachs in 17 mins (236K views)
Video 3: Once you understand investing, you understand money (300K views)
Video 4: 7 Rules of Money (1.3M views)
Video 5: How to create generational wealth (200K views)

And here are 5 lessons I learned during the process.

1. Make 1/0 Content

1/0 content means content only you can make.

This is about your unique experiences, accomplishments, stories, and circumstances. You are not trying to have crazy stories. You are trying to make clear points and use your stories as proof.

Example: If I wanted to explain the importance of consistency, I would talk about how I have run the 5am Club for 15+ years, waking up at 5am every single day. That is proof I can point to. Nobody else can tell that story.

2. Keep Your Videos Connected

YouTube is a labyrinth of videos. It is a portfolio of your work.

Making videos on random topics makes everything harder on the algorithm. It makes it harder on viewers because after they finish one video, there is no natural next step.

You want your videos to be non-sequential chapters in the same book. That way, people know you better, stay with your content, and go deeper in the rabbit hole.

3. Respond to Comments

I could probably do a better job at this, but every time I had a minute, I would respond to comments.

I tried to respond to the thoughtful comments first, the ones where someone clearly put in effort. Then I would come back for the others. It gets hard when there are hundreds, but it should never be hard when there are just a few.

People do not even stop to like a video anymore. If they take the time to write a comment, the least you can do is respond.

4. Build a Visual Identity

If every video is edited differently, shot in a different location, and has a different visual identity, it confuses the audience.

You want it to feel like you the moment someone presses play. The edit, the visuals, the approach, the cuts, the fonts and colors should all be consistent.

I am getting better at this as we do more videos. We set up a new studio and locked in a consistent approach to shooting, editing, graphics, and overall feel.

The easiest way to do this when you are starting out: tell your team to follow a key creator’s approach that you like. That gives you a baseline of consistency before you develop your own.

5. Team

It would have been impossible to do this without a team.

There is concept research, packaging, scripting the framework, thinking about visuals, iterating with me on stories and viewpoints. That process takes time.

I am just one piece of it. I am the talent. Maybe 10% of the work. The rest of the team produces the media asset.

For every hour we shoot, we probably spend 15 to 20 hours in prep.

If you want to see all of this in action, check out the YouTube channel.

And if you like what you see, share it.

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The RN35: The Simplest Way to Beat Procrastination

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:31:09 GMT

Procrastination is normal and everyone does it.

Some of us procrastinate more than others, and I was one of the worst. Tasks would sit on my to-do list for weeks, and I just kept moving them from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday until I would start researching a new to-do list app.

Back in the days of Trello, I would just move the card from column to column.

I was terrible.

I read the fancy books and tried eating the frog, but I could never get inspired by that advice because who wants to eat a frog? I tried time blocking, priority matrices, and color-coded calendars, but none of it stuck. I am also color-blind, lol.

Then I had a random thought. If beating procrastination is easy for some people and hard for others, maybe those people know something I don’t. That means it can be learned, and if it can be learned, it can be taught, which makes it a skill.

That gives me hope!!!

In fact, this hit me when I was dealing with my taxes.

Just to be totally honest: I don’t even do my taxes anymore because I just collect my documents and ship them off to my family office, so I have it pretty good. But I still couldn’t bring myself to start, and the task sat in my Asana for 3 weeks straight.

I knew something was broken, so I sat down and wrote out every project I had been elegantly avoiding. There were eleven, and I forced myself to answer one question for each: Why am I actually avoiding this?

As you might imagine… the answer was the same for almost all of them.

I didn’t have a game plan, therefore I didn’t know where to start… so, clearly, I did nothing.

Our smart friends who do research about this stuff at Harvard’s Academic Resource Center found that not knowing where to start is one of the strongest predictors of procrastination. A lack of clear next steps causes more procrastination than laziness ever did.

When you say it that way… of course that makes sense.

So instead of trying to come up with a game plan for every project, I came up with a system that creates the game plan for me. I call it the RN35.

RN35 stands for Right Next 3 things that take 5 minutes each.

When you face a project you keep avoiding, ask yourself one question: What are the next 3 things I can do, where none of them takes more than 5 minutes?

Here’s how I used it on my taxes.

Instead of looking at “prepare taxes” as one task, I wrote down 3 small steps:

Open last year’s return folder and skim the first page (3 minutes)
Text my CPA to ask when he needs everything by (1 minute)
Create a new folder on my desktop called “2025 Taxes” (1 minute)

I did all 3 in under 5 minutes… and even kept going.

I pulled up my bank statements, then my brokerage statements, then my donation receipts. About 15mins later, I had everything packaged and ready to send.

A project that had been on my list for 3 weeks took under 15 mins once I had a game plan.

A few things that have helped me that may also help you:

Keep each task under 5 minutes, and if it takes longer, you picked the wrong task and need to break it down further.
Make each task something you can physically do. “Think about the trip” is not a task, but “open the Google Doc and write the first bullet point” is one that you will get done!
Write the 3 tasks down instead of trying to remember them.
Do all 3 in one sitting because if you do one and walk away, you lose the progress.

When I feel stuck now, I ask one question: What’s my RN35?

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The Single Most Powerful Habit That Helped Me Build 2 Billion Dollar Companies

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:30:20 GMT

The Single Most Powerful Habit That Helped Me Build 2 Billion Dollar Companies… is waking up at 4:45am.

Over the last 14 years, I’ve woken up at 4:45am every single day. I’ve tested every alarm clock, sleep tracker, and productivity hack I could find. I’ve helped over 100 entrepreneurs build their own morning routines.

I always come back to these 5 steps.

1. Your evening routine matters more than your morning routine.

I’ll be honest. I don’t go to bed at the same time every night. My schedule changes. Life happens.

But the best advice I ever got was the 3-2-1 rule:

Stop eating 3 hours before bed
Stop working 2 hours before bed
Turn off screens 1 hour before bed

I do this sometimes. Other times I don’t. But the nights I follow it, I have a good morning the next day. The nights I skip it, I can feel the difference.

2. Wake up to something you actually like.

It’s hard enough to wake up early when you’re building a new habit.

But think about a time when you were excited to wake up. I think about my kids. On school days, they drag themselves out of bed. But when we’re going to Disneyland, they’re up at 4:45am with no problem.

That made me wonder: what if I woke up to something I actually liked? What if the first thing I did in the morning was easy and enjoyable?

Maybe it’s a warm shower. Maybe it’s sitting by the fireplace with a book and dozing off a little. I figured out that if I made 5am feel like a treat instead of a chore, it got a lot easier.

So I made a list of things I would be excited to do when I woke up. Then I started doing them.

Most people load up their mornings with stuff they hate. Cold plunges, breathing exercises, 300 pushups, hot water with cayenne pepper. That’s a lot of pain before sunrise.

The best thing you can do is think about what you actually love and do that first. You don’t have to wake up and do 100 pushups. Just wake up to something you enjoy.

3. Remove every obstacle the night before.

This one I do every single night without fail.

Before I go to sleep, I set out everything I need for the morning. Water bottle, clothes, headphones, wallet. Everything is ready and waiting.

Then I close my eyes for about 10 seconds and picture tomorrow morning. I see myself wake up, turn off the alarm, put on my clothes, and walk downstairs. I run the whole thing in my head like a short movie.

When the alarm goes off the next morning, I just do what I already pictured. The morning feels easier because I already kinda rehearsed it.

4. Wake your body up fast.

For a while, I struggled with that groggy feeling where you’re awake but your body hasn’t caught up yet. I would hit snooze or sit on the edge of the bed for ten minutes.

So I tried something small. For one year, I did one pushup the moment I got out of bed. Just one. It sounds silly, but it was enough to get my blood moving.

Now I drink a full bottle of water as soon as my feet hit the floor. That works for me.

The idea is to find something that wakes your body up quickly. It doesn’t have to be intense. It just has to get you from groggy to awake. A glass of cold water, a quick stretch, a walk to the kitchen. Find what works for you and do it right away.

5. Find something bigger than yourself.

This is the one that changed everything for me.

14 years ago, I was not feeling well. I was working hard, our business was growing fast, and my body was starting to give out. My doctor ran tests for a week and noticed my numbers got better. He asked me what I did differently. The only thing I changed was waking up earlier to get to his office.

He told me to keep doing it.

So I texted three friends. I asked them to wake up with me at 5am for two weeks. I set up a phone call. I would log in, share something quick, and we would all start our day together.

The first morning, I heard three dings on the line. (The dings = like when someone joins a call it chimes, that’s what I am referring to here).

My 3 friends showed up.

The second morning, I heard four dings. They had invited someone else. Huh.

The third morning, seven dings. More weird people.

That phone call became the 5am Club. Today, over 10,000+ people have joined. We have CEOs, founders, a billionaire, a head of state, and members of Congress who call in. I have missed only 3 calls in 14 years.

Every morning, thousands of people count on me to show up on time. That’s way more powerful than an alarm clock.

When other people are waiting for you, you get out of bed.

If you want to join, go to 5amclub.net.

However you slice it, greatness is a choice.

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Three Partners, Three Roles, One Multi-Billion Dollar Bet

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:10:29 GMT

We are rebuilding the leadership structure of Acquisition.com to build a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

This is a managing partner-led model where Alex, Leila, and I are each going deeper on specialized areas to create a bigger and better future.

Here is what that looks like:

I am stepping in as CEO to execute on our plan to build the private equity business model of the future.
Leila is stepping into Executive Chair with her focus on building a world-class media machine and deploying capital into strategic investments.
Alex is leading the charge on our “money machine” by building the operating money models across our entire portfolio.

These strategic changes will allow Alex, Leila, and me to do more, work harder, and pull the future forward.

Here are 5 things we are working on that might be interesting to you:

1. Real estate: We are building a billion dollar real estate portfolio in 3 years. We are already at over $300 million of assets and actively growing. Take a look at the ACQ Real Estate website as we are thinking about inviting our network to co-invest with us.

2. AI first: Instead of focusing on getting more people to use AI, we are going hard to level up every single person in our business (and operating function) to become AI first. If you have experience doing this for companies, hit me up.

3. Leila’s book: Leila is writing a brilliant book on all the leadership lessons learned building the business. The whole point of the book is to train leaders inside Acquisition.com and our portfolio companies. Of course, you will have it in your hands to build and lead your teams. It is going to blow your mind.

4. House of brands: We brought on a new Chief Media Officer (you’ll hear about him soon, he’s badass) to help us build the media company of the future. You are going to see some insane approaches to content and show formats from Alex, Leila, and me, plus some new surprises. We can all agree that the world needs more than carousels and reels.

5. Category Kings: We made a big commitment to building the next batch of category kings. We are going to buy, build, or partner to create the dominant company in each market that we enter. We obviously can’t do a hundred of these, but we have our eyes on a few and we are going to point the entire media and operational infrastructure of Acquisition.com at them. If you want to become one, watch for our next announcement on how to apply.

I am sharing all of this because I told you I’m going to build in public.

I built two billion-dollar companies and missed documenting the journey as I went along. All the lessons are just in my head. That was my biggest regret. It’s why I started this Substack and called the “The Next Billion”.

When you get to watch the day-to-day decisions and see the leadership transitions, you can start to understand why we make them. It gives you a window into implementing something like that for your life and your business.

Remember this: The bigger the vision, the more you need focused people in their zone of genius to make it come to life.

I hope seeing this unfold in real time is helpful to you.

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The Loss That Almost Took Me Out of the Game

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:19:39 GMT

A few years ago, I lost a million dollars to a guy I trusted.

I had spent years as a professional investor at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, made over a hundred investments, and built two billion dollar businesses. I thought I knew how to evaluate a business and, heck, at least how to read people. This operator seemed fairly sharp, the numbers were clean, and the margins made sense. I did my homework over a 6 month period and I pulled the trigger.

Then I found out he was running two sets of books.

One for investors and one for himself. By the time I figured out what was happening, he was gone, and so was the money.

Oof.

I want to tell you about what happened next, because the money was not the expensive part.

For months after that loss, something changed in me. I started hesitating on everything. Deals that looked solid made me nervous, and I found reasons to wait on opportunities I would have jumped on a year earlier. I kept telling myself I was being more careful.

If I was being honest with myself, that was not what was happening. I had stopped trusting my own judgment, and that fear was keeping me on the sidelines while entire market cycles (and massive opportunities) passed me by.

It felt like getting into a car accident and then being afraid to drive. The accident was over, but I kept reliving it every time I sat behind the wheel. And the longer I avoided driving, the scarier driving became.

The million dollars I lost in that deal was painful, but it was a fixed cost. I lost it once and it was gone. The hesitation that followed was a recurring cost. Every month I sat on the sidelines waiting for conditions to feel safe, I was paying a price I could not see on any statement. The truth was that markets were moving, opportunities were compounding for other people, and I was standing still (nice way of saying stuck, scared, and jammed up) because I did not trust myself to make a decision.

That hesitation cost me more than the original loss ever did.

I had to make a choice: I could let that one bad experience turn me into someone who watches from the bench forever, or I could figure out what went wrong and build something that would let me get back in the game.

Let’s be real… it did not happen in one afternoon.

For a few weeks I just sat with the loss and let myself be angry about it. But eventually I made myself answer a hard question: what did I miss? Not what did the operator do wrong, but what did I fail to see? I realized I had evaluated the business but I had not evaluated what would happen to the people and the structure when things got messy. I had looked at the deal in good conditions and assumed those conditions would hold.

So I built a framework to protect myself for the future. I call it the Four Goods, and I run every investment through it now before I write a check or get involved in anyway:

Good people. Referrals are not enough. I need to know someone through a working relationship or shared history before I trust them with my money. The only way to really know people is to watch how they operate over time, especially when things get hard. This sometimes takes a hot minute.
Good intentions. Is this person friendly, helpful, and collaborative? There are two kinds of people in deals: those who want everyone to win and those who only want themselves to win. The person in the middle, the one who says the right things but acts differently, is the most dangerous person of all.
Good rationale. The deal has to work on a simple spreadsheet. If someone cannot show me the math in a way I can understand in fifteen minutes, I do not proceed. No spreadsheet, no deal.
Good contracts. I do not move forward on a contract unless I already have good people, good intentions, and good rationale in place. A contract without those three things is just expensive (as in drafted by an attorney) paper. It will not always protect you when things go sideways.

This framework did not guarantee I would never lose money again. I am a professional investor: I have lost some money since, and I will probably lose money in the future. But it gave me a way to make decisions I could defend to myself even when they turned out wrong, and that was what I needed to stay in the game long enough for compounding to work.

In fact, I broke down my core investing framework in this video… you can watch it on 2x speed.

Now I want to tell you why I am sharing this.

I guarantee this: You are going to go through something like this too. And if you have been an investor for some time, maybe you already have. At some point, you are going to make an investment or a business decision that goes badly, and it is going to shake you. You are going to feel like you should have seen it coming, like you were dumb or careless or too trusting. And when that happens, there are three things I want you to know.

First, you are going to want to stop playing. This is the most natural response in the world. You got burned and your brain is trying to protect you from getting burned again. But protecting yourself by refusing to make decisions is not safety. It is more like slow decay. Inflation eats your money, opportunities pass you by, and you lose more to inaction over 10 years than you lost in the original error.

Second, the real damage is not the money. In fact, the real damage is what happens to your confidence. When you stop trusting your own judgment, you hesitate on everything, not just investments. You start second-guessing yourself in business, in relationships, in decisions that have nothing to do with money. One bad loss can leak into your whole life if you let it.

Third, the way out is to build a system you can believe in. Not a system that prevents all losses, because, newsflash, that system does not exist. A system that lets you make decisions you can stand behind, so that when something goes wrong, you can look at your process and say, “I made the best call I could with what I knew, and I would make it again.” That is how you rebuild trust in yourself. Not really by avoiding decisions, but by making them in a way you can respect yourself for making them.

I built the Four Goods for myself because I needed something to hold onto after I got knocked down. Maybe it works for you exactly as I have described it. Maybe you take pieces of it and build your own version. Either way, the point is not the specific framework. The point is that you need something that lets you stay and play the infinite game, because the ability to keep acting under uncertainty is the most valuable skill an investor can have.

When that loss happened to me, I felt like I was the only person dumb enough to get taken advantage of like that. I was super freaking embarrassed. I did not want to tell anyone. But the more I talked to other investors (and my therapist), the more I realized that everyone has a story like this.

You are not alone when this happens to you. And you do not have to let it take you out of the game.

I hope this helps.

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10 Lessons I Learned This Week

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:30:29 GMT

Quitting your worst habit will change your life faster than starting your best new habit. Meaning, stop the leak before you fill the bucket.
Speaking of buckets, if yours is leaking… painting it won’t help. Ask the hard question on what is on your to-do list.
In a world where AI is coming for our jobs and our lunch, your communication skills determine your compensation more than your technical skills ever will.
The fastest way to change your life: change what you do in the first hour after you wake up. If you do nothing else except engineer the “Perfect First Hour,” you will win.
Successful people love boring habits. They wake up the same time, work out consistently, and read daily. Excitement is overrated.
The fastest way to spot a successful person: watch how quickly they turn ideas into finished results. Speed plus completion is king.
Uncomfortable truth: Most of your friends won’t support you until strangers start to celebrate you.
Hot take: Every successful person is someone who got tired of their own bullshit before anyone else did. They became their own worst enemy first. Then their own best friend. Most people skip step one.
The older I get, the more I realize that poor people overthink small decisions and rush big ones. Rich people do the opposite.
The people who win long-term are the ones who can hold two truths at once: be proud of how far you’ve come and be honest about how far you still have to go.

If you had to add a #11 to this list, what would it be? Drop a comment or shoot me a reply to this email.

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The Lifestyle Tax

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:26:00 GMT

When I left Wall Street to build Teles Properties, my wife Neeti was the only one working. We had just had our first child, and I made almost nothing for the first couple of years.

So we made one decision: live on her income only, forever. Whatever I made later would go toward saving and investing, and we would keep our spending exactly where it was.

We grew Teles 10x in five years and sold it. The work paid off, but we kept the same budget after the sale. For 14 years now, we spend what we spent back then, even though our net-worth is exponentially higher.

Here are some lessons that I learned:

1. This is not about saving on lattes.

No one ever got rich by skipping their morning coffee or putting an extra $3,000 in their 401k. I’m a capitalist, and I want you to make more money.

But you don’t keep every dollar you make.

If you made more this year and bought a new car to celebrate, you’re happy with the car, but you kinda gave back what you earned.

There are two levers: what you make and what you keep. Most people only pull the first one.

2. Making more money usually just moves the goal post.

When people start making more money, they start spending more money.

They believe that if they earn more, they have earned the right to spend more. And that is totally true. But you end up right back where you started, just with bigger numbers. No bueno.

3. Your income can disappear, but your spending habits won’t.

Most people bet that they will just keep making more and more and it will all work out.

But your income is probably not guaranteed.

If you lose your job or your business has a bad year, you still have the same mortgage, the same car payments, the same tuition bills.

The easier path is to keep your spending the same, even when you start making more.

4. The real benefit is not the money.

Once you keep your lifestyle fixed, you make better decisions because you are not stressed about keeping up. You can take risks, say no to bad deals, and wait for the right opportunity, because you don’t need the money right now.

5. It’s not what you make. It’s what you keep.

If your income grows and your lifestyle grows with it, you are doing a little better each year, but the gap between what you make and what you spend stays the same. That is optimizing.

If your lifestyle is fixed, your income grows while your spending stays flat. The (good) gap gets wider every year. That is maximizing.

Most people are trying to optimize. Keeping your lifestyle fixed is how you maximize.

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The American Dream Is Now a Rental

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:28:10 GMT

I used to think people who rented long term were making a mistake.

It turns out that they were just being honest about what they could afford.

Here’s the math: Nowadays, buying a home costs about 50% more per month than renting the same home. Affordability is at its worst level since the early 1980s. When buying costs 50% more per month than renting, owning a home stops being a goal and starts being a choice.

Let’s breakdown the math

In 2022, mortgage rates jumped from 3% to 7%.

Home prices did not drop because inventory stayed tight. At the same time, wages barely moved. The gap between what people earn and what homes cost kept getting wider.

Here is a little house math:

A home that rents for $2,500 per month might cost $3,750 per month to buy at current rates.
The real cost of owning that home is $4,500 per month. Here’s how: $3,750 mortgage, plus $400 in property taxes, $150 in insurance, and $200 in maintenance.
That is $2,000 more per month than renting. Over five years, that difference adds up to $120,000 in extra cash going out.

From 2019 to 2024, wages went up 20% but home prices went up 50%. Mortgage rates more than doubled but wages didn’t move as fast.

Meaning, housing costs skyrocketed and the math kinda stopped math-ing.

Think about it… if you want to buy your first home and you see that math gap, you naturally choose to wait. Also, if you already own with a 3% mortgage, you stay put.

The net result:

The resale market freezes.
The rental market takes all the pressure.

The important question is… why?

What is keeping the real estate market stuck?

Unfortunately, there are three things that are stopping the market from getting better.

1. Mortgage rate handcuffs

In 2020 and 2021, millions of homeowners locked in mortgages below 3%. Selling today means borrowing at 6% or 7%. Meaning, their monthly payment would double or triple for the same size loan.

When homeowners can’t afford to sell, inventory stays low and prices stay high.

2. Inventory gap

Since 2008, the U.S. built 4 million fewer homes than it needed. At current construction rates, it will take about 10+ years to catch up. When supply is scarce and rates are high, prices stay elevated.

3. Persistent demand

More than 6 million people are entering prime home-buying age before 2030. People still get married, have kids, and form new households even when they can’t afford to buy. That demand shifts from ownership to rental, keeping rental demand strong while the buying market freezes.

The history of renting in one paragraph

Renting used to be temporary.

First time buyers wait longer.
People who want bigger homes stay put.
Older people delay downsizing.
Mobility declines.
Rental tenure extends.

Meaning, You rented until you bought. Now renting probably turns into the normal way middle class families live for years.

We confused the vehicle with the destination

This is my hypothesis, which I will probably get a lot of flak for…

The American Dream was always about stability and moving up. If you dig deep, you may see that owning a home was just one way to get there. For 70 years, from 1950 to 2020, homeownership happened to be the best vehicle for both. You bought a home. You paid down the loan. The home appreciated. You built wealth.

Sounds simple.

But that path only existed because of specific conditions.

Interest rates declined for 40 years.
Government policy subsidized ownership through tax deductions and cheap mortgages.
Suburban land was abundant and cheap to develop.

As those conditions started to reverse: Rates went up. Land became scarce. Credit got expensive.

In essence, the vehicle stopped working.

The confusion is thinking the vehicle was the dream itself.

The dream was always stability and mobility. Homeownership was just how Americans achieved it from 1950 to 2020. Before that, most people rented.

This is not unique to ‘merica!

This already happened in most of Europe.

Germany has a 50% homeownership rate.
Switzerland has 42%.
France sits around 65%.

These countries have stable middle classes and strong economies with long-term rental markets. They never built their wealth model around homeownership.

I would argue that this continues for years if rates come down slowly.

Affordability is at 1980s levels.
Supply is constrained.
Mortgage lock prevents any quick reset.

The longer this lasts, the more the change starts to become permanent. Owning becomes something fewer people do. Renting becomes normal and long term.

When the vehicle that carried the American Dream for 70 years becomes inaccessible, the dream does not disappear. The vehicle changes. The new middle class stability might come from long-term rentals with secure tenure and wealth built through other assets instead of home equity.

For 70 years, we mistook the vehicle for the destination. The American Dream was never the house. It was the stability and wealth the house made possible.

Now we need to find another way to get there as we probably have to rent our white picket fence.

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What Goldman Sachs Taught Me About Practice.

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:30:27 GMT

Last week I posted a video about 10 lessons from Goldman Sachs.

The video is cooking.

When I watched it again, I realized I left out the most important lesson.

The lesson is this: I used to think I was good at pitching when I really just showed up and winged it.

Most salespeople operate the same way.

They believe being good with people means they can walk into a room and figure it out in real time. That works until the deal matters, and then they lose to someone who practiced.

Here’s why winging it fails: when something unexpected happens (and it always does), you have no mental space left to handle it. Your brain is too busy trying to remember what comes next, how to transition smoothly, or what your opening was supposed to be. So when the client randomly interrupts you and asks about fees, it’s easy to fumble.

What rehearsal actually looked like at Goldman

My first pitch at Goldman started multiple days before the client showed up.

My managing partner and I rehearsed the entire meeting three times over several days. We did not practice the morning of the meeting or two hours before the client walked in. We practiced for multiple days.

In fact, we worked on these specific parts:

We decided who would speak first and what exact words we would use to position ourselves
We scripted the exact sentence that would transition us from conversation to presentation
We divided the content so he would explain market context and I would explain deal structure
We wrote the exact sentence bridges we would use to connect each page to the next

Then we walked into the room.

As you can imagine, just 4 minutes in, the CFO stopped us with a question about our fees. This happened way earlier than we expected. However, since everything else was practiced to the point of automation, I could stop, answer his concern without fumbling, and bring us back to the agenda we had planned.

The meeting went almost exactly as we practiced. This happened not because clients are predictable, but because we had rehearsed the highest probability path to winning.

If you’re reading this and thinking “I can’t rehearse every meeting, I have too many,” you’re right.

You can’t rehearse every meeting. You rehearse the ones that matter, like the big deal, the quarterly review with your board, or the pitch to a partner who could change your business.

But then the right question to ask is: what exactly do you practice?

The three things I practice before anything important

I have done over 100 investments, had 5 exits, built 2 billion dollar companies, and bought more than 3,500 units of real estate. Today we manage a portfolio of businesses that bring in over $250M in revenue.

When we meet with top executives or pitch potential partners, we role play every single time.

Here’s the process:

1. Act like you have zero natural ability

You need to practice like this is a completely foreign skill and you cannot trust your instincts.

For example: Write out your first 90 seconds word for word. Say it out loud three times before the meeting. Say it out loud, not in your head. If you skip this step, you will start the meeting searching for the right words instead of listening to what the other person actually cares about.

Also, rehearse your transitions. Know the exact sentence that shifts you from small talk to the pitch. Know the exact sentence that takes you from slide 3 to slide 4. If you don’t script these transitions, you will fill them with filler words and feel sloppy.

2. Write down every question they might ask, then answer the scariest ones before they bring them up

Before every meeting, write 8 to 10 questions the other person might ask. Do not try to answer all of them in your presentation.

For example: Turn 2 or 3 of the most likely questions into rhetorical questions you pose and answer during your pitch. “Can we actually handle the workload if you sign today? We can, and here’s why.” When you answer before they ask, you look prepared instead of defensive.

Keep the rest of the questions in your head so you are ready when they come up.

If someone asks about pricing and you have already thought through three different ways to answer depending on their tone, you will sound confident, which in essence gives them safety. If you haven’t thought it through, you will sound like you are making it up (because you probably are).

3. What are the three biggest objections, and what proof are you bringing?

If you had to bet money, what are the three biggest objections or questions? For those three, do not just prepare answers. Bring proof.

For example:

If you know they will ask about your track record with companies their size, bring a one page case study.
If you know they will ask whether your team can handle the workload, bring a capacity chart.
If you know they will question your pricing, bring a comparison model that shows where you land relative to alternatives.

The proof matters more than the answer.

When you show up with a document that proves you saw their concern coming and did the work, it tells them something about how you operate. It separates you from everyone else who just talks.

The single biggest lessons I learned through this process

There is no such thing as natural ability in high stakes conversations.

Every conversation that looks natural was practiced until it became automatic. The person across from you cannot tell the difference between someone who is naturally smooth and someone who rehearsed 47 times because they only see the outcome.

Wild, right?

That’s why practice is the entire game.
Everyone else is winging it and hoping their charisma carries them, which means you can win by just showing up a little bit more prepared.
Because how you prepare shows just how much you care.

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The Uncomfortable Truth About Growth

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:37:16 GMT

When everything in your business feels smooth and chill, most leaders think that’s a good sign.

It means the systems are working.
The team knows what to do.
Everything is running without friction.

Newsflash: That’s not a good sign.
That’s actually the beginning of the end.

Not because smooth operations are bad, but because growth and smooth operations don’t go together. We’ve been taught to think friction is bad, so we try to remove it. But if nothing feels broken, you’re not actually growing.

Growth requires breaking things.

You have to break old systems.
You have to break comfortable working relationships.
You have to break routines that felt safe.

And just because you’re better at your job now doesn’t mean the things that worked before will work for what comes next.

Why Breaking Things Is Part of Building Things

Growth is like being in a gym.

You have to learn new movements that feel awkward at first. You have to use muscles you forgot you had. You have to rebuild strength in parts of your body that haven’t worked hard in a while.

It’s uncomfortable.

It reminds you of how much it hurt the first time. And even though you think you’re stronger now, the process of getting even stronger still hurts.

Here’s how it works in a business:
When you grow, you need new systems. That means building new infrastructure, which feels slow and frustrating. It means building new technology, which everyone thinks can happen overnight but actually takes months to build something useful.

Plus, new systems require new relationships.

You have to work with people you don’t know yet. Sometimes you don’t even know who those people are. Sometimes you’re too polite and you don’t want to bother them, so you try to figure it out alone when you should just ask.

Also, new relationships require uncomfortable reaching out.

You have to build trust from scratch. You have to explain the full story again. You have to figure out who does what, who owns what, and who to talk to when something breaks.

Let’s not forget that different seasons mean different priorities.

When you’re growing fast, one team might be critical. When you’re stabilizing, a different team becomes the focus. What felt urgent last quarter might not matter this quarter. That means you have to reset expectations over and over.

That takes a lot of emotional strength.

My Top 3 Recommendations During Messy Growth Times

To have a breakthrough, break something. You can’t optimize your way into a new capability. You have to build it, and building it will mess up things that already work. That’s normal. That’s what growth is all about.
Invest in relationships. When things are breaking, the people who trust you will help you rebuild faster than people who barely know you. Collaboration makes hard things easier, but collaboration only works when you’ve already built the relationship.
Over-communicate. When things feel uncertain, when you’re growing fast, or when nobody’s sure what’s happening next, tell everyone what you know. Then tell them again. Then tell them you’re going to keep telling them. If you feel like it’s too much, it’s probably the right amount. People can handle change when they know what’s changing and why.

Growth isn’t supposed to feel smooth. It’s supposed to feel like lifting something heavier than you lifted last time.

To have a breakthrough, you must break something.

If you liked this post, then you’ll like this one too:

Is Passive Income a Lie?

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:34:31 GMT

When I was a banker at Goldman Sachs, I saw the portfolios of some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Here’s what shocked me: they weren’t chasing exotic investments or secret strategies. They owned boring things like bonds, dividend-paying stocks, REITS and apartment buildings.

Just to be clear, this was not because they lacked access to complex deal flow but more because they understood something most people miss…

Passive income is just pre-funded income.

What the heck is pre-funded income?

You have to fund passive income before it pays you.

You fund it with effort or you fund it with capital. There’s no third option that I know of (yet).

Here is a real story:

My friend was an early engineer at Broadcom. He got stock options and cashed them out when the company went public. That stock has gone up 10,000% since the IPO. He has over $35 million now, but he still lives in his same house and drives his same car.

All he has is a simple dividend portfolio at Vanguard. Meaning, he owns stocks in companies that pay him a portion of their profits every three months. That income funds his lifestyle, and he hasn’t worked a day for the last 8 years.

He doesn’t have complicated tax strategies, vacation rental properties, oil investments, private equity funds, hedge funds, or currency trading accounts. Just boring stocks that pay him every quarter.

That’s what I mean by pre-funded income. He put money in once, and it pays him repeatedly.

The gurus sell you a different story. They tell you passive income is about finding the secret strategy, the hidden loophole, the exotic investment nobody else knows about.

That’s not how it works for people with real money.

Five Principles My Clients Actually Followed

After advising clients for years, these patterns showed up over and over again. Call me a nerd, but I tracked this stuff obsessively.

1. If it’s passive for you, it’s active for someone else

Dividend stocks pay you because companies are actively running businesses. Real estate investment trusts pay you because property managers are actively managing buildings. Bonds pay you because borrowers are actively making payments.

Passive income doesn’t mean nobody’s working. It means you’re not the one doing the work.

2. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is

My clients avoided anything that promised huge returns with no clear explanation of where the money comes from.

No crypto schemes promising 40% yearly gains. No currency trading systems. No obscure energy partnerships sold as insider deals. They optimized for safety on their “safe portfolio”… what a concept.

3. Start building it long before you need it

Pre-funding takes a hot minute.

You can’t manufacture passive income the month you decide you want it. The clients I advised didn’t wait until they were retired to build income streams. They built them while they were working so the pre-funded passive income would be there when their active income started slowing down

4. Pick reliable and boring sources

This is what actually every single one of the portfolios I worked on: bonds that pay interest, stocks from mature companies that pay dividends, REITs that distribute income, and apartment buildings that collect rent checks.

It is not exciting because its meant to not be exciting.

5. Stack sources instead of chasing one big win

My clients didn’t put everything into one investment.

They layered income streams: Like bonds for steady interest, dividend stocks for growth and income, and REITs for steady real estate income. Each source solved a different problem, and together they created a system that worked when (sometimes the) individual pieces didn’t.

I don’t have some kind of fancy closing paragraph for you, but there are 3 things you should remember:

Passive income = pre-funded income
You can pre-fund it with effort (where you get paid later) or capital (where you also get paid later).
And if it’s passive for you, it must be active for someone else.

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The $100K Question

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:25:27 GMT

Mike Tyson made over $300 million as a boxer.

He bought mansions, luxury cars, jewelry, and freaking bengal tigers. He also filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and owed $23 million to the IRS.

He never figured out what the money was supposed to do for him beyond buying the next thing. He had money. He didn’t have an outcome.

This is not an isolated incident.

Research shows 70% of lottery winners file for bankruptcy within a few years. The NFL says 78% of retired players are in financial distress within two years of retiring.

Insane, right?

So what’s the real problem?

You don’t want the money.

You want the outcome.

Meaning, you want the thing that money can buy… hopefully to improve the quality of your life in some way.

Money doesn’t create outcomes. It often accelerates them.

You’re not struggling because you don’t earn enough. You’re probably struggling because you may have forgotten exactly what you want your money to buy for you.

Let me show you how to fix it.

How do you figure out what you actually want?

Imagine someone hands you $100,000 today. You have to spend it to make your life better.

What do you actually do with it?

When people answer honestly, the truth comes out.

“You’d hire someone to handle your schedule and emails.”

Translation: You’re spending 10 hours a week on work that drains you.

“You’d pay $40K so you never have to do sales calls again.”

Translation: You’ve been forcing yourself to do work you hate instead of hiring someone good at it.

“You’d take two months off.”

Translation: You’re burned out and more hours aren’t producing better results.

“You’d hire a team to build your brand.”

Translation: You know this matters but you keep putting it off.

Every answer reveals a problem that money didn’t create.

But you don’t have $100K right now

You don’t want the $100K. I mean, of course you do.

You want what it can buy.

Once you name what you want, you can start moving toward it today.

You don’t need $100K to improve your health.

Change what you eat.
Block 30 minutes to move.
Go to bed an hour earlier.

You don’t need $100K to get help.

Hire a part time assistant for 10 hours a week.
Delegate one task that drains you.

You don’t need $100K to build your brand.

Write one post this week.
Reach out to one person in your industry.

The full version costs money. The first version costs a quick decision.

Does this only apply to individuals?

Of course not.

Companies make this mistake too.

CEOs may say “Once we’re profitable, we’ll fix the culture.” They mean: “We’re avoiding hard conversations.”
Founders may say “Once we raise the next round, we’ll hire the team.” They mean: “We don’t trust anyone else.”

Money isn’t the problem. Not knowing what to buy with the money is the problem.

If your business had all the revenue it needed tomorrow, what would you change right away?

That answer tells you what’s actually broken now.

What should you do right now?

Name the specific outcome you want.

Not “more freedom.” What does that look like? Three day weekends? No meetings before 10am?
Not “better health.” What does that mean? Running without getting tired? Sleeping through the night?
Not “less stress.” Where is it coming from? Your inbox? Cash flow? Work you should have delegated?

Once you name it, ask: If you had $100K right now, what’s the smallest version of this you could buy today?
Then go do that.

If you can’t name what you’d spend $100K or even $1 million on to improve your life right now, you have a bigger problem than money. Spending the next 5-10 years earning it won’t fix what’s actually broken.

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