The Next Billion

The art of building billion-dollar businesses

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:00:41 GMT

I’ve built 2 billion-dollar businesses and now I’m building my third at Acquisition(.)com.

And so today I’m going to show you how I’d build a billion-dollar business if I were starting again tomorrow.

There are four steps that I discovered, and they each go in order.

Starting with…

Step 1/ Sales

Most people wait to sell until they know they have product-market fit.

They think launching an unfinished product will alienate the market.

And they’re right. It will.

So don’t launch a shitty product.

Launch the best version you can build right now and test it fast.

Because you have to sell before you know if you have product-market fit.

And then you have to iterate on the product constantly until you do.

Now you may be wondering: “Sharran, how do I sell a product without any proof?”

Early sales have to be sales-led.

This means you’re making promises the product hasn’t earned just yet.

And the only way to find out if those promises hold is to sell and watch what happens.

This is why I said don’t launch a shitty product.

Let me tell you a story about how important getting sales right is.

Jon McNeil was the President of Global Sales, Marketing, Policy, and Services at Tesla.

Before he joined Tesla, Elon Musk told him the company had promised Wall Street 12,000 car sales.

They had sold 3 cars in six weeks…

Jon wasn’t even on payroll yet. He didn’t even have a title.

He asked Elon for a week to turn things around.

And so he mystery-shopped eight Tesla stores himself.

He went through the entire buying process to figure out what was going on.

He test-drove those cars using fake emails, but he never got a callback.

He called sales ops and asked how many people had test-driven in the last 30 days and never got called back.

The answer was 9,000…

These were people who had:

Already booked a drive
Sat in the car
And then heard nothing back

Tesla was sitting on thousands of warm leads while wondering why their sales were a disaster.

Jon McNeil immediately ordered sales teams in Asia and Europe to start calling every single lead back.

He grew Tesla from $2B in sales to $20B in 30 months.

This is why sales and marketing are the first two things a CEO should actually learn, not delegate.

They’re needed at every stage that comes after this one if you actually want to grow.

But without step 2, the growth of the business from sales and marketing could end up breaking it…

Step 2/ Operations

Only once you know the offer and sales process are working do you build:

Systems
Processes
And technology around them

If you build operations before proving the offer and sales process work, you’re just making a broken process more efficient.

You still need these systems eventually, and waiting too long to build them is its own trap.

I call this the curse of capability.

The better you are at something, the more the business relies on you being there to run.

Until eventually you’re not valuable… you’re the bottleneck.

And so this is my rule for building systems to avoid the curse of capability:

If it works and it’s worth doing more than once, build a system for it.

Think about your recurring tasks like:

Creating content
Service delivery for a client
Training a sales team

If you do it over and over again and you don’t have a system for it, you become the single point of failure your own business can’t survive without.

When I get in the cockpit as a pilot, I don’t wing it.

I follow the same checklist every single time.

That’s what a system does.

It captures what you know so you and your team can repeat it without thinking and without you.

Here’s what it looks like:

Solve the problem → prove the solution works → build the system → create time → solve bigger problems → build systems for those → repeat.

Every time you capture what you know and turn it into something reusable, you’re not just completing a task.

You’re building an asset… an insanely valuable asset.

But remember:

A weak offer doesn’t need a better sales process or system, it needs to be killed.

Before you add systems, people, or money to anything, ask if it’s actually a winning offer.

If yes?

Build real infrastructure around it.

If no?

Stop funding it because good operations only make a bad offer fail more efficiently.

But without step 3, the systems have nobody to run them.

And this is also the step that businesses struggle with the most…

3/ People

Hiring is hard.

And it’s because almost nobody has actually learned how to hire well.

The truth is, you’ll get it wrong before you get it right.

Now when you do get it wrong, your instinct may be to assume you’re better off doing everything yourself.

Your instinct is wrong. Do not do this if you’re serious about building any business.

(Let alone a billion dollar business).

It just means you hired the wrong person, and that’s a skill problem on your end.

It’s not a sign to stop delegating.

This goes wrong at scale too, and not just at small companies.

One founder lost a top candidate to a competitor who simply offered one day of remote work for childcare.

Nobody on the hiring team had thought to ask.

The solution became a standing question in every hiring conversation:

Is there anything logistical, like childcare or commute, that would make this job easier to take?

And so just like you have a funnel for your product, you also need a hiring funnel.

This includes:

Writing your job descriptions around actual pain points instead of generic bullet points.

Writing your job benefits around the things employees actually want

Preparing for the interview call so you actually know the person you’re speaking to

But this final step of building a billion dollar business is where you stop looking inside your business to grow.

You need to look outside of it for opportunities…

Step 4/ Partnerships

Partnerships are where you do deals to get asymmetric growth.

Asymmetric growth is growth where what you gain is much bigger than what you put in or risk

It’s where 1 plus 1 equals 3.

This is when you start looking at:

Mergers with other companies in your market
Buying smaller competitors
Joint ventures
Affiliate relationships
Taking on outside investment capital

These are all ways to take what you’ve built and combine it with what someone else has already built.

And so both sides come out ahead of where they started alone and where they would stay alone.

But here’s the thing:

Partnerships only work if you bring something valuable to the table.

It could be money, brand, expertise, or distribution.

This is exactly why the first three steps matter so much.

They force you to build one thing extremely well before you try to combine it with anyone else’s.

Let me give you an example.

This is exactly what we did to build Real (NASDAQ: REAX) to a $1.2B valuation.

When I joined Real, it had 6,800 real estate agents.

But we never built a recruiting department or ran a traditional PR campaign.

Our entire growth engine was three steps:

An Instagram post from my brand
A ManyChat automation to capture and qualify the response
Then a phone call

We didn’t use any paid ads or billboards.

In 30 months, Real went from 6,800 agents to 28,000.

It became the fastest-growing real estate brokerage in the world at the time.

The quick growth was built on brand and sales alone.

This is what gave Real something to bring to a negotiating table.

Three months later, Real signed a deal to acquire RE/MAX.

RE/MAX was a company many times its size.

And it created the largest real estate company in the world by agent count.

But the partnership only happened because the first two steps, sales and operational scale, had already been proven.

Because here’s the truth:

Nobody partners with you for your potential.

They partner with you for what you’ve already shown you can do.

Now here’s the final lesson I will leave you with…

The constraint changes as you grow.

Meaning, at $0 to $100K, you don’t have an offer people actually want.

At $100K to $500K, you can’t generate enough leads.

At $500K to $1M, you can’t close the leads you have.

At $1M to $3M, you can’t deliver without doing everything yourself.

At $3M to $10M, you don’t have the right people in the key roles.

At $10M to $30M, your systems can’t handle the volume you’re pushing through them.

At $30M and beyond, you need entrepreneurial leaders running each division with real incentives attached.

None of these are guaranteed to be your constraint at each stage.

But most businesses are working hard on a problem that isn’t actually the one holding them back.

So find your real constraint first.

Then focus on the four steps, in order, until it isn’t a constraint anymore.

And who knows, you may build a billion dollar business yourself…

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about everything I learned from 30 years of business in 7 lessons in this next one:

You don’t need more money. You need to buy happiness.

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:01:42 GMT

People say money can’t buy happiness. I don’t think that’s completely true.

Because money can solve money problems. And money problems can make you deeply unhappy.

You see, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about money.

Making it
Losing it
Saving it
Investing it

And worrying about it.

But at some point I realized the goal isn’t to have more money.

It’s to ask what you can do with it that actually makes your life better.

And this is what most people with money get wrong.

Now let me be clear:

If you’re struggling to pay your bills, money has a different job entirely.

You need your active income to be greater than your monthly expenses.

This means what you’re making from your job needs to be more than what you’re spending.

And this isn’t just a “nice-to-have”. It’s the first step you need to take toward financial freedom.

Only once you take that first step are there four ways to intentionally use money to create more happiness:

1. Buy experiences.

Spend money on memories, adventures, meals, trips, and moments with people you love.

You’ll forget most of what you bought this year.

But you won’t forget the trip, the dinner, or the weekend you took off to be somewhere that mattered with people who matter.

For 14 years, I have been taking my family to Anaheim Ducks games.

I live 20 minutes from the Honda Center and 20 minutes from Disneyland.

I’ve lived inside this world with my 2 children.

This is us at the game the other week.

(It’s my dream to buy the Anaheim Ducks and position them as America’s hockey team).

We’ve walked through the Disney parks, watched the games on ice, and made memories as a family that will last a lifetime.

2. Buy back your time.

Pay to remove the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the people and work you do want.

Now money can’t buy more time, but it can buy back how you spend the time you have.

Let me give you an example.

This could be:

1/ Hiring a bookkeeper so you stop spending Friday nights punching numbers into spreadsheets

2/ Hiring a cleaner so your weekend isn’t spent scrubbing bathrooms

3/ Paying for meal prep or delivery so you can spend that hour with your kids instead of at the grocery store

4/ Hiring an assistant to manage your calendar, inbox, and travel (this changed my life)

3. Buy financial peace.

Save and invest for your future.

There’s a specific kind of calm that comes from knowing one bad month, one unexpected bill, or one sudden change in your life doesn’t turn into a financial crisis.

This peace is worth more than most of what money buys.

It’s this peace most people do not have today.

And one of the best ways I know to create financial peace today is a transition fund.

A transition fund is when you save 6 to 12 months of expenses.

And it helps you answer these questions:

Can you replace your income for 6 to 12 months?
Can you give yourself time to reinvent yourself or even get a new job?

But instead of leaving your transition fund in a bank account, you can do two things:

Put it in a high-yield savings account because it pays more interest, so your money still grows
Invest in stocks so compounding works in your favor, and you still have access

And when you eventually want to retire, your transition fund will become your freedom fund.

So the sooner you start building, the better.

4. Buy someone a better future.

Now this might be my favorite of all four.

Here’s what buying someone a better future could look like:

Help your parents by paying off their bills
Give someone an opportunity they couldn’t get on their own, like buying them a course
Fund a cause you actually believe in

And give without expecting anything back.

Because after 46 years, this is the secret to happiness I’ve learned:

Feeling happy for other people’s success is the fastest way to find happiness and fulfillment.

And buying someone a better future is one of the best ways to help them become successful.

This is why money itself doesn’t make you happy… but what you choose to do with it can.

This is the rule to write down on paper or save in your phone notes:

Spend your money on things money can buy. Spend your time on things money can’t buy.

If you enjoyed this post, I show you why you need to stop trying to get rich if you want to become financially free in this next one:

How I Built a $1B+ Business in My 30s

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:15:39 GMT

In 2011, I left Goldman Sachs and took my biggest risk ever.

I reverse mortgaged my house to invest in a struggling business called Teles Properties.

But five years later, Teles had grown from $300 million to $3.4 billion in sales and was bought by Douglas Elliman.

And I built it with a small brand. Not 1 million or 10 million followers.

So here are the 3 pillars I used to build a big business with a small brand:

Get your value prop right

I asked all 28 real estate agents why they chose to work with us.

Every single one said the Teles platform saved them one day a week.

This became our value prop that we built the entire business on.

Let your brand reduce your customer acquisition cost

Now, building a brand doesn’t give you free leads…

But it does make every ad cheaper.

Let me explain:

You could run the exact same ad as Oprah Winfrey, but hers will cost less because the familiarity drives trust.

So give away your best stuff to build that trust.

Keep the funnel simple and repeat it

A daily podcast I made public took us from 28 agents to 700 in five years with no ad spend.

I break down exactly how all three pillars work in my latest video:

Watch it on 2x speed.

But one of the most important skills I learned that helped me build Teles wasn’t just brand or marketing…

It was learning how to become an investor.

People think investing means buying the S&P 500 or Bitcoin.

But I think that definition is completely wrong.

Investing is the intentional allocation of resources, and there are 5 forms of capital you’re already investing, whether you mean to or not:

Money

Skill

Time

Relationships

Brand

I break down how to invest each of the five forms of capital in this video:

Your main man,

Sharran

Stop trying to get rich if you want financial freedom

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:02:42 GMT

Rich, wealthy, and financially free are not the same thing.

But most people still believe they are.

And mixing all 3 up is exactly why so many people try to get rich… but can’t.

So let me tell you how I define each of them because this will help you actually become rich.

There are 3 levels you need to understand.

Starting with…

Level 1: Rich Is About Income

There’s a common misconception that getting rich starts with finding the right investment.

But if you’re starting with little money, your earning power is the biggest lever you can pull… not looking for investment returns.

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say you have $10,000 invested.

And you improve your return from 8% to 9% in a year.

That’s about another $100 in year one.

But here’s the thing:

If you focus on increasing your income enough to invest another $10,000… you’ve just doubled the money that’s compounding.

This is why how much you can invest matters more than squeezing another percentage point out of your current investments.

This is why level 1, getting rich, is about creating more money.

You’re focusing on Make.

And Make is creating enough income to generate investable money.

At this level, your career, skills, and ability to negotiate are all a part of the wealth conversation.

Now, you might be wondering: “Okay Sharran, does this mean I need a higher income to get rich?”

Not exactly.

A higher-income job is just to create more money, which makes it easier to invest.

Someone can make $500,000 and spend $500,000 a year for 10 years.

They will still have $0 at the end of those 10 years.

Someone else can make $200,000, invest $50,000 a year and it compounds at 10% for 10 years.

And they will have $796,871 at the end of those 10 years. At this point, you might be considered rich.

But here’s the thing:

Staying rich is a different question.

Without understanding this next level, the money you make can disappear just as fast as you made it.

Because to stay rich, you need to understand level 2…

Level 2: Wealthy Is About Net Worth

At level 2, we shift from earning to owning.

You see, your life is paid for in purchasing power.

Purchasing power is just how much stuff your money can actually buy.

Here is an example:

In 2020, my Starbucks order cost me $2.75.

Today that exact same order costs me over $5.

This is the power of inflation, which just means prices go up over time, so each dollar buys less than it used to.

And the money you earn starts shrinking the moment it hits your bank account.

But it’s not something earning more can fix… only owning can.

This is why you’re focusing on Build at level 2.

And Build is when you take your money and invest it into assets that give you ownership and compound into net worth.

This lets your money grow faster than rising prices.

And to Build properly comes down to understanding this wealth formula:

Wealth = money x return x time.

Here’s what this means.

You need money to invest, an asset you own that beats inflation, and years for it to compound.

But most people obsess over the return.

What hot stock should I buy?
Should I buy Bitcoin?
Should I get this new ETF everyone is talking about?

Imagine you have $10,000.

You invest that $10,000 in the hot stock for one year and make a 30% return.

Amazing, you have made $3,000.

Now leave that same $10,000 in an asset earning 8% for 30 years, and it becomes about $100,000.

It’s the same money, but the lower return wins because it had 30 years.

But owning still isn’t financially free.

You can make 100s of investments in assets and still be working to pay your bills.

And this is where level 3 really comes into play…

Level 3: Financially Free Is About Independence

Someone can have a huge net worth of $10M, be working 12 hours a day, and spend almost everything they earn.

On the other hand, someone else can have a $1M net worth, work 2 hours a day, and have almost no dependence on earned income at all.

Why?

Because their $1M sits in assets paying them $5,000 a month, and their life costs $4,000 a month.

And financial freedom is when your passive income is greater than your monthly expenses.

Now to create passive income at level 3, you are focused on Replace.

Replace means you are creating enough passive asset income that working becomes optional.

This could be rent, dividends, or income from something you built, like a masterclass or course.

And this is why rich, wealthy, and financially free are three very different things.

If you’re rich and wealthy, you’re still not financially free… yet.

But at least now you know how to get to financial freedom:

Rich = MAKE.

Focus on making more money to invest, like getting a higher-paying job or starting a side hustle.

Wealthy = BUILD.

Take your money and turn it into ownership by buying assets.

Financially free = REPLACE.

Own enough passive income-producing assets that they cover your lifestyle expenses.

This is when you can wake up in the morning and say, “What do I want to do today?”

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about everything I learned from 30 years of business in 7 lessons in this next one:

Speak Like The Quietly Wealthy With This Method

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:15:52 GMT

When I first came to the US, I was told I’d never get hired because of my thick Indian accent.

But I had no money for a speaking coach.

So a librarian handed me a box of audiobook CDs instead, because the library didn’t have English accent tapes.

Those audiobook CDs were Tony Robbins and I started listening to them while scrubbing floors on the graveyard shift as a janitor.

This is how I learned to speak English.

Twenty years later, I paid $50,000 to hire that same Tony Robbins’ speaking coach for three hours.

That one session taught me three things about communication that changed my entire career forever:

The 1-2-3 too many rule

People can’t hold more than three ideas in their head at once. So package anything you want remembered into three parts in any conversation.

Put ideas into geometric shapes

It could be a triangle, a circle, a quadrant. Any shape that sticks in someone’s memory.

Use the 4-Mat structure: why, what, how, now

Open with why it matters, give the big picture with what, then the steps with how, and the action with now.

I believe your communication skills will determine your compensation more than your technical skills ever will.

And I break down exactly how to use all three techniques, plus a pro tip for getting AI to do it for you, in my latest video:

But knowing how to communicate an idea isn’t what will make you financially free…

However, understanding how to make passive income might.

Because almost every dollar sitting in your bank account is losing you money right now.

So here are 3 ways to turn that cash into passive income:

Build a dividend portfolio

Create affiliate income

Invest in a group

I explain exactly how to use these 3 passive income methods in this video:

Your main man,

Sharran

30 Years of Business Knowledge In Just 7 Lessons

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:01:25 GMT

I’ve exited 5 businesses and built 2 billion-dollar businesses.

I scaled Teles properties from $300M to $3.4B in just 5 years by accidentally adding an extra zero on a spreadsheet.

But I’ve also watched 100s of businesses fail. In fact, I’ve had a business that failed too.

So here are the 7 biggest lessons I’ve learned from building businesses for 30 years:

1. Focus is more important than intelligence.

I believe that to do great things, we must do fewer things.

At acquisition(.)com, we use a formula to create singularity of focus:

More
Better
New

Do more of what’s working, then better, then new.

Most people just start at new, which is why they struggle to focus.

2. Your business moves at the speed of decisions.

I learned this decision-making framework from Richard Branson on Necker Island:

Understand the context

Before engaging with any problem, ask at least one question to get situational awareness.

What is going on here?

Skipping this step causes you to hallucinate the constraint and solve the wrong problem.

Isolate the issue

What is the single constraint that needs to be solved?

Accept the risks

What are the risks of making this decision?

Map where things can go wrong, understand the trade-offs, and then accept the risk.

Map the decision

Two questions must be answered before the decision is complete:

1/ What did we actually decide?

2/ What are the next steps?

If you cannot answer both clearly, you have not finished making the decision.

Because a decision without action is just an opinion.

3. It’s not about the result. It’s about the options.

My dad told me: “If you don’t know your options, you don’t have any.”

This is why it’s not about the exit, it’s about the options. Building your business for an exit isn’t about the exit itself.

It’s the options it gives you, should you ever want to sell.

And remember, not selling is also an option.

4. You only have to get rich once.

I’ve watched the smartest people get rich, lose everything, and spend years rebuilding from zero again. But the skill that gets you rich doesn’t disappear even if the money does.

Because if you can learn it, it’s a skill. If it’s a skill, you can teach it.

5. Package the value into a value proposition.

Let me give you some examples:

Geico’s is: “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.”

Alpha School’s: “We’ll make you two times smarter in two hours a day.”

Our value proposition at Teles that helped us scale to $3.4B in sales was:

“If you can save one day a week, what would you do with another 52 days a year?”

If you can’t explain your value proposition in one sentence, you don’t understand it.

And if you don’t understand it, your customer won’t understand it either.

6. Finding A-players is a skill.

You only have to pay roughly 20% more to get an A-player, but they deliver 20 times that value.

Now you might be wondering how you can actually find A-players.

Well, there are three things I do in interviews:

I ask: “Can you teach me something?”

I want to see how they think and communicate.

“How did you prepare for this interview?”

The hardest trait to find in people is the give-a-damn factor. It’s the hardest thing to teach and the easiest thing to spot in an interview.

This question helps me see if they have the trait.

And I watch whether they ask about contribution instead of compensation.

Because A-players will always ask questions about how much they can contribute to the organization.

7. A good leader defines what good looks like.

When someone on your team isn’t delivering… take responsibility for them failing, and they will succeed faster.

Show them 3 memos you consider gold standard instead of writing them up.

Show them how to write the email with 3 examples.

Because here’s the thing:

It’s our job as a leader to define what good looks like.

This applies to your team, and even when you’re talking to AI.

If you don’t define good, they’ll only do what they could.

And my biggest lesson of all:

The businesses that win are the losers that tried one more time.

Just keep going. Not giving up is the most heroic thing you can do.

If you enjoyed this post, I talk about how to build a big business with a small brand in this next one:

After 31 Years of Investing, This Is My Exact System

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:15:53 GMT

Most people are investing completely wrong.

But it’s not because they’re picking the wrong stocks or ETFs… It’s because they don’t have a system for how to actually invest.

I learned my investing system from the wealthiest clients I ever worked with at Goldman Sachs.

And it’s the exact same system I still use for my own money today with 3 parts:

Keep 20% in opportunistic cash

Always have dry powder for the moment everyone else is scared and prices are low. This is exactly what Warren Buffett did during the 2008 crash.

While the entire market was terrified, he was making some of his best deals ever.

Size every bet on purpose

No single position should ever have over 5% of your portfolio. And no single theme should ever have over 10%.

This stops one bad bet or one bad sector from wiping out your entire portfolio. Never bet the empire for a pot of gold.

Give every investment two jobs

Instead of just buying one stock you like, also make a bet against a similar one you think will do worse.

This doesn’t mean you buy the other stock, it just means you’re making a prediction.

That way you’re betting on which company wins, not on the market going up.

I walk through my full investing system and how to use it yourself in this video:

Watch it on 2x speed.

But having an investment system is only effective if you actually have money to invest…

And these 4 brutal truths are what keep most people from making the money they need to invest.

Maxing out your 401(k) won’t make you rich

Cutting up your credit card

Chasing the hot stock or the hot tip

A financial advisor won’t make you rich

I explain the 4 brutal truths about getting rich in my latest video here:

Your main man,

Sharran

How to Build a Big Business With a Small Brand in 2026

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:01:07 GMT

It’s going to get harder and harder to get social impressions. But it’s not because people will stop using social media…

It’s because social media has a supply-and-demand problem.

Here’s what I mean:

Demand is human attention: Human Attention = People x Time
Supply is competitive content trying to capture that attention

So this means demand is constrained, but supply is not. And now with AI, the gap between supply and demand is becoming much bigger.

The cost of creating the next decent piece of content is collapsing on every platform.

Because anyone can now use AI to:

Research ideas
Find outliers
Write scripts
Edit videos

And much more.

This means it’s never been easier for AI to create another billion terrible videos nobody wants to watch.

So the metric to focus on for you isn’t how many pieces of content you produce…

The important number is competitive content.

This is content that actually has the quality to compete for the same person’s attention.

And this is why the real equation to win the game of content is:

Relevant Human Attention / Competitive Content = Attention Available Per Piece

Imagine a niche has 1,000,000 available impressions with 100 competitive pieces.

In theory, this is 10,000 units of attention per piece. Let’s say the platform grows and now available impressions increase by 10%:

1,000,000 → 1,100,000

But competitive supply increases 5x:

100 → 500

Now it becomes:

1,100,000 / 500 = 2,200

So total attention grew by 10%, but the available attention per competitive piece fell from 10,000 to 2,200. This is a 78% decline.

In short, this means:

The platform grew
Total impressions grew
But the attention the competitive content got still declined

That is what I call The Great Impression Deflation.

The scarce resource is no longer content… it’s human attention.

Which means…

The bar for attention goes up.

Impression Deflation means distribution gets more extreme.

Which means these two statements can be true at the exact same time:

“It is getting harder to get views.”

And:

“That video just got 50 million views.”

In short, the average creator can lose more often while the biggest winners get bigger.

And then something predictable happens that is already going on today…

Everyone can see and swipe the winners.

Creators have always copied winners, but now AI compresses the cycle between identifying an outlier and posting it.

So the rule becomes:

The easier winning content becomes to find, the faster the advantage of finding it disappears.

But the good news is there is something you can do to make sure you find winning content without relying on finding these outliers…

Qualume is the solution.

Qualume = Quality x Volume

This is a concept my team uses internally.

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say Creator A produces 1 excellent piece per week.

On the other hand, Creator B produces 10 equally excellent pieces per week.

And so over ten weeks:

Creator A gets 10 shots at finding a winner.
Creator B gets 100 shots.

But there’s just one problem:

If Creator B increases volume 10x and quality collapses, the quality of those shots goes with it.

This is why Qualume isn’t to “post as much as possible.”

It’s simply: your maximum volume at your quality threshold.

It’s how you combine competitive content with Qualume.

But there’s another element that you need to add to your qualume if you want to build a big business with a small brand…

The rise of street cred.

This is where I think the next major creator advantage comes from.

Some reputations have an achievement that caused them:

Elon Musk has SpaceX.
Ray Dalio has Bridgewater.
Lionel Messi has eight Ballon d’Ors.
MrBeast has one of the most successful YouTube operations ever built.

But what actually makes these achievements credible?

Here’s the test I use:

If you take away the reputation, can the achievement recreate it?

Meaning:

If you take away Elon’s reputation, the achievement of SpaceX survives.

If you take away MrBeast’s reputation for understanding YouTube, his channel will still perform.

Now take someone with 3 million followers and 2,000 entrepreneurship videos.

If you take away the reputation…

What achievement remains that could recreate their reputation as an exceptional entrepreneur?

Is it an exit?

Is it building businesses?

Or maybe it’s their 2,000 videos that prove they’re very good at creating entrepreneurship content.

(Which is not the same thing as being very good at entrepreneurship.)

But here’s the thing:

Street cred is domain-specific.

SpaceX doesn’t establish Elon’s credibility on nutrition.

And Mr Beast’s channel doesn’t establish his credibility on investing.

And so this is why the achievement has to be capable of recreating the specific reputation being claimed.

Once you have your achievement that could recreate your reputation, it becomes your competitive advantage when creating content.

But how do you take this competitive advantage and turn it into Qualume for attention and leads?

Now “Document, don’t create” changes meaning.

Gary Vaynerchuk popularized “Document, Don’t Create.”

It means you don’t need to sit in a room trying to invent content.

If you own a pizza shop, you don’t need to start doing TikTok dances.

Instead you:

Make the pizza.
Show the dough.
Explain why you changed the sauce.
Show what happened when a pizza batch went wrong

You are simply documenting what you are already doing.

And this lowers the burden of creation. But I think Impression Deflation gives “Document, Don’t Create” a second purpose…

Because today the question stops being:

“What can I document so I don’t have to create new content from scratch?”

And instead it becomes:

“What am I intentionally documenting?”

Because documented content doesn’t automatically make it credible.

I’ll give you an example:

Two entrepreneurs are making content around the same topic:

“What I Learned Scaling a Company From $10M to $100M.”

Entrepreneur A is documenting everything they did to scale.

Entrepreneur B is creating content about what Entrepreneur A did to scale.

And with AI, the finished videos are equally good.

But Entrepreneur B will never be able to compete on credibility.

This is why Document, Don’t Create is a credibility strategy today.

Your experience creates the content.

And so this is why the only content test I care about now is:

If the camera disappeared tomorrow, would you still be doing the thing you are making content about?

If the answer is yes, the content has a credible source outside the content pipeline.

If the answer is no, your credibility depends on continuing to win the attention game with outliers and swiping…

It used to be much more difficult for the entrepreneur to compete in the content game before AI because creators had something they didn’t:

Distribution skill.

A creator knew hooks, thumbnails, trends, formats, algorithms, outlier research, and production.

They could create brand familiarity much faster than an accomplished person could distribute what they knew with volume and tactics.

But now AI gives the entrepreneur with credibility access to many of those same advantages.

In other words:

AI can increase the Qualume of your intentional documentation.

It can help you create competitive content at scale.

It can give accomplished people creator capabilities much faster than it can give creators accomplishment.

This is the competitive advantage you have to build a big business with a small brand.

Because now you’re optimizing for:

“What did I do today that is worth documenting?”

Not:

“What hooks, thumbnails, trends, and formats do I need to use to create my content for today?

This is why the formula for content today is:

Competitive content = Qualume x intentional documentation x credibility

So how can you apply this to your own business to help you build a big business with a small brand?

List all the street cred and achievements you have

Create two columns:

What have you accomplished? What are you accomplishing?

Fill them in because this is your street credibility to add into your content.

Create a “Daily Documentation Bank”

Whisprflow or write everything you did in your business that day with the date.

Use AI to speed up your content creation process

Use Claude to help you write a first draft, GPT to give you a thumbnail, or Higgsfield to edit a short.

The bottom line is that AI can help everyone make more content. But it can’t give them credibility.

And when anyone can look credible, the value of actually being credible becomes the new currency of attention.

If you enjoyed this post, I talk about my 4 tips for how to actually sell a business in this next one:

Pokémon’s $140B Deal Can Make You Rich (Here’s How)

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:01:59 GMT

In 2007, I joined Goldman Sachs as an investment Banker. I went through 39 interviews to get what I thought was my dream job.

But just 3 years later, I left.

And it was one of the most stressful periods of my life.

But I also realized something that is the reason I was able to build 2 billion-dollar businesses and exit from 5.

So here are 3 things I learned at Goldman that pushed me out the door and into entrepreneurship:

Wall Street's hidden cost is fees that compound

A 1% advisory fee on $1 million invested over 20 years can cost you more than your entire starting investment.

The best fee still isn’t enough

Goldman made a $1 million fee advising a client’s $100 million exit. The client told me I’d have to close that same deal 100 times just to match what he made in one…

Skin in the game teaches you more about business than anything else

I reverse mortgaged my own house and took zero salary for two years to buy and run a business I’d never operated before.

That same business grew from $300 million to $3.4 billion in five years, before being sold to Douglas Elliman.

I tell the full story of why I actually left Goldman, and the business I built because of it, in this video:

Watch it on 2x speed.

But while I walked away from Goldman… there was a founder who showed exactly why staying in the game is one of the most important things you can do in business.

That founder went on to build an empire worth $140 billion called Pokémon.

But Pokémon nearly collapsed without a rescue deal to save them.

And it was because of three specific things that had to happen for the rescue deal to work:

Proof

The founder had already shipped three successful games before Pokémon, so when he needed help, people already knew he could deliver.

Relationships

The rescue deal came from someone he already knew personally, years before he ever needed it.

Commitment

He stopped paying himself and kept working for six years.

I broke down the full story beyond the deal that saved Pokémon, the Pokémon Proof Stack and how you can use it to get rich in the finale of my series Billion Dollar Deals…

Your main man,

Sharran

How to Actually Sell a Business

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:01:04 GMT

I’ve exited 5 businesses and built 2 billion-dollar businesses.

I’ve learned what investors are looking for when they want to buy your business and how to actually sell it to them.

But I’ve also learned the selling mistakes the hard way that have cost me millions…

And so this is why I’ve put together 4 tips I wish I’d known about sooner when selling a business.

Starting with…

1. Get skin in the game before you build any infrastructure

Don’t hire an operator or create an acquisition strategy until you’ve closed one business deal yourself, even if it’s a small one.

Why?

A real deal shows you what you don’t know yet that you won’t find on paper.

This means you go through the deal process as a buyer. And then take note of any problems you experienced to make sure they don’t happen during your business sale.

Because until your own money is on the line, you don’t actually know what problems matter to investors.

And once you know what those problems are, they become part of your business plan.

2. Start the sale process years before you want to sell

I put my company up for sale 5 times, but I didn’t want to sell it… yet.

When my partners and I took over Teles, we were doing $300 million in sales.

We were:

Building features
Improving the product
Trying to grow organically

But here is the thing:

We were guessing.

We didn’t know what would actually make potential buyers want us.

So I put the company up for sale, and I asked the buyers a simple question:

“I’m not looking for a number. I just want to understand how you think about valuation. What would need to happen for this to be worth $75 million instead of $50 million?”

And so the buyers told me there were six specific things they wanted. I walked out of that meeting and went straight to my COO.

I handed my COO the list and said:

“This is our entire business plan for the next twelve months. Nothing else.”

When years 3, 4, and 5 came around, it was the exact same process.

So by the time we were done, Teles had been built almost entirely to the buyer’s specification.

Eventually, we sold to Douglas Elliman.

So start three years early and ask this one question:

“What would need to be true for me to make this business even more valuable to a buyer?”

And then build exactly that over the next year, while asking yourself that same question annually.

This means by the time you’re really negotiating a sale, you’ve already overcome every objection a buyer has before they step in the room…

3. Use one clear, public ask to generate deal flow

You don’t need to hire a banker or spend a year cold-emailing people to find buyers.

Just make one clear, honest public post describing exactly what you’re looking for to the right audience.

This will bring you more qualified leads in a week than most people get from a year of blasting cold emails.

I’ll give you an example:

Last year me and Alex Hormozi posted one Instagram story and sent one email about a fintech thesis we were exploring.

Just 4 pieces of content between us.

And within 48 hours, we had 500 completed inbound forms from operators interested in the opportunity and scheduled 20 meetings in a single week.

4. Judge the deal by return on hassle, not just return on capital

The truth is, money isn’t always your limiting resource… it can be your mental energy and attention.

This is why a deal structure that reduces your stress and workload can be worth more than the extra profit or equity you’d get from more complex deal structures.

And the reality is, you don’t always need to own the whole deal.

Because owning a third of a deal can sometimes be the smarter, less-stressful move.

So share deals with good people to take the extra load off, and they’ll also share more good deals with you in the future.

Now if there’s one thing to take away from these 4 selling tips, make it this:

Build your company as if you plan to sell it. Because even if you never do, thinking like a future buyer forces you to build a stronger business today.

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about how to create generational wealth in this next one:

How I Would Invest $1000 If I Were Starting Over

Sharran Srivatsaa — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:15:35 GMT

Most people have no idea what to do with their first $1,000.

What stock should I invest it in?
Do I save it?
Do I buy this course with it?

But your first $1,000 is more than money. It’s legit proof that you can create more.

So here are the three investments I would make with my first $1,000:

The one hour question: ask yourself, “What would I build if it had to make $500 a month, but I could only work on it one hour a day?”
The learning dividend: spend it on the one skill that could pay you for life.

You are your best investment: Never stop investing in yourself.

I walk through the full framework and how to apply it to your first $1,000 in this video:

Watch it on 2x speed.

But knowing what to do with your first $1,000 isn’t going to make you rich… knowing how to build a business might though.

So here are 7 more lessons I learned from 30 years of building two billion dollar companies:

Finding A players is a skill, not luck
Your business moves at the speed of your decisions
It is not about the exit, it’s about the options
It’s not about value, it’s about your value proposition
Focus is more important than intelligence
You only have to get rich once
A good leader defines what good looks like

I broke down each of these lessons in my latest video here:

Your main man,

Sharran

How to Create Generational Wealth

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:00:48 GMT

Two families can make the exact same amount of money over their lifetimes.

Yet only one of those families actually creates generational wealth.

Why?

The difference is never how much they made… It was the system they used to keep it and pass it down.

So today I want to show you one of the most powerful systems I know for creating generational wealth that you can use for your own family.

I call it the Family Wealth Tree, and it has four branches.

Starting with…

Branch 1: Rules

The rules are written agreements that define what family members can and cannot do with shared assets.

This could be writing a family constitution before there’s anything to fight over.

So you write it while everyone is still calm because you may not be able to write it later.

Now you might be wondering, “But Sharran, what if I want to take money out of the shared assets?”

You write a family memo.

This is a written proposal to all the family members that explains 5 things:

Amount: How much money is requested?
Purpose: Why is the money needed?
Action: Which account will be used, and what happens next?
Risk and timeline: What could happen, and how long will the funds be invested?
Approval: Who must approve the request?

Let me give you an example:

Amount: I want to take out $10,000 from the family fund
Purpose: I’m going to invest it in 4 ETFs to protect the money from inflation and help it grow
Action: I’m going to withdraw from X account
Risk and timeline: The funds will be invested for 5 years with a target of 10% growth annually. But returns are not guaranteed, and the investment may lose value
Approval: I need Mom and Dad’s approval before making the withdrawal

If they can’t answer those 5 questions, they don’t get to take money out.

Because if they can’t explain how they want to use the money in a few sentences, they don’t have a money plan for it.

No family memo, no withdrawal.

But there may be no wealth to withdraw from without this second branch in the Family Wealth Tree…

This is what keeps the wealth together and allows it to be passed on from generation to generation without losing value…

Branch 2: Structure

Structure is how your wealth is held and transferred without losing it.

This is the legal structure, which is the part that protects and transfers wealth without losing a chunk of it to taxes at every single generation transfer.

Let me tell you a story about how important structure is:

Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with a fortune worth somewhere between $95 and $105 million (about $3.34 billion today).

This was bigger than the entire US Treasury at the time.

And he left roughly 95% of this fortune to his son with explicit instructions to not waste it.

But Cornelius Vanderbilt had made one crucial mistake…

He had not created a structure to protect any of his wealth.

So the Vanderbilt heirs split the money, built mansions, and lived off dividends while the underlying railroad business the family fortune was built on collapsed underneath them.

And so in 1973, 120 Vanderbilt heirs gathered at a family reunion… how many of them do you think were still millionaires?

50?

25?

Not one of them was a millionaire.

Because with every handoff of wealth to the next generation, two things happened:

Estate tax
Transfer tax

Then whatever’s left gets split between multiple heirs who were wasting it.

In short, with every transfer to the next generation, the Vanderbilt fortune was being destroyed by both taxes and bad investments.

But if they had built a structure, the Vanderbilts may still have a fortune today.

For example, a dynasty trust could have broken this cycle.

A dynasty trust means the family fortune goes into the trust once, pays transfer tax once, and then never leaves.

So the assets aren’t re-owned and re-taxed every generation and the heirs get income they can borrow against.

And the most important part is that the wealth stays inside the trust and keeps compounding untouched.

But those assets may not be able to be borrowed against or compound without this third branch of the Family Wealth Tree…

This decides if cash actually reaches each family member…

Branch 3: Liquidity

Liquidity is simply how the cash reaches family members without disturbing the core assets.

Now the goal here is to build access to cash so you never have to sell a long-term asset to solve a short-term problem.

And this is something the Rockefeller family solved decades ago…

To make sure their family bank always had liquid cash, they used the infinite banking concept.

The infinite banking concept is when the family trust buys a life insurance policy for every family member.

And as their policies mature, two things happen:

They pay dividends back into the family bank
They build cash value inside it

This creates liquid money inside the family bank.

So now family members can borrow from the bank for investments, a business, real estate, whatever they need.

Once they pay it back, it goes back into the pot for the next family member who needs it.

And when someone in the family passes away… the policy pays out, which adds even more liquidity to the bank.

And so the liquidity in the family bank just keeps growing.

Every new baby gets a new policy and every death adds a payout.

Which means you’ll never have to worry about being asset-rich but cash-poor as a family.

But your bloodline could still end up being both asset-poor and cash-poor without the most important branch in the Family Wealth Tree…

This is the branch that decides whether the money actually survives and grows with every generation…

And it has nothing to do with the money itself…

Branch 4: People

This is the human part of the wealth tree.

Because here’s the thing:

The rules, structure, and liquidity will only be as effective as the people who are using them.

This is why the knowledge and training you give the next generation is the most valuable asset in this entire generational wealth system.

And this is exactly what I’m doing with my own kids.

When my daughter was seven, I partnered with another dad and we bought a small e-commerce site together.

The site was called 100unicorns.com, but this was not some fake store.

This was a real business with real orders and real people on the other end expecting a product that they paid for.

She could log into the back end of the website and see every single transaction. She was the CEO and she had clear responsibilities.

Now the business never made any meaningful money, but that was never the point.

You see, when kids just get handed money, they almost never connect it to the value that they created.

They have a distorted perspective of how money works: “I just get handed money”.

But when your kids solve a problem for someone, like when they fulfill an order for a unicorn blanket, they start to understand that there was a trade.

Someone paid money in exchange for something they did and that something was not an allowance that they got every week.

And so this is what 100Unicorns did for my daughter.

It was changing her beliefs around money and value creation.

This is why you need to teach the next generation before you hand them the keys.

This is the Family Wealth Tree…

This is what the Vanderbilts never created that may have protected their fortune.

I talk more about how I’m raising my kids to be millionaires with the Millionaire Kids Flywheel in this next post:

The Next Billion

How To Raise Millionaire Kids

Most of our kids are not going to be rich…

5 months ago · 59 likes · 3 comments · Sharran Srivatsaa

This is the knowledge we need to pass down to our kids that schools won’t teach them…

The Louisiana Purchase Tactic to Buy a Business for $0

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:03:07 GMT

It was 1803…

Two men were sent to Paris on a mission to buy America a city.

But they didn’t come back with a city… they came home with half a continent.

This deal only happened because of a secret strategy these two men used.

But without this strategy, America as you know it… would not exist…

And this strategy is something the history books and headlines have never published before that could help you buy a business for no money today.

To discover all the secrets behind the Louisiana deal, I break them all down in episode 4 of my show, Billion Dollar Deals.

So here are the secrets behind the Louisiana Purchase that you can use to buy a business for $0.

Now to understand this deal we need to go back to America in 1803.

At the time, America was far from the empire you see today.

It was just 17 states all arguing about what the government was allowed to do. And it had only been independent for 27 years.

President Thomas Jefferson and his government were brand new… every rule made was a first… and there was a power struggle over who made the decisions:

Jefferson or the individual states.

But towards the west of America, something was happening that the government couldn’t control…

A growing population of people was moving further into America.

And they didn’t care what the politicians in Washington were debating.

But this growing population was producing food and goods with no easy way to sell them. They were completely disconnected from the rest of America.

This became a serious problem for the Jefferson government because of 3 reasons:

If the West couldn’t trade with the rest of the country… it had no reason to stay as part of America.

The West would follow whoever controlled the trade routes.

America would lose a massive part of its new and vulnerable country.

And so the people in the West started to follow the rivers…

They were heading for one city that was at the center of everything… New Orleans.

Because of its strategic position New Orleans was the future of American trade and the invisible trigger for this entire deal.

But there was just one problem…

America didn’t control New Orleans… France did.

Every grain. Every barrel. And every single dollar moved through New Orleans.

But France controlling New Orleans wasn’t just a political problem… it threatened the entire future of America.

Because France was a rising empire under Napoleon’s reign… he wanted to rebuild the French Empire in America.

This started to worry the new American government.

But Thomas Jefferson’s response to this new situation would make you think he was the coolest dude in America.

He didn’t panic or make a public scene. Instead, he sent two men to Paris with one mission:

To negotiate with Napoleon for the port of New Orleans.

These two men were Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe.

And Jefferson gave them a $10M budget to get New Orleans.

But Livingston and Monroe didn’t just come back with New Orleans…

They came home with something that would change history as we know it today… Louisiana.

You see, Napoleon was asset-rich but cash-poor. Meaning his land was worth millions, but he couldn’t spend land.

He couldn’t pay soldiers with miles and rivers. And he couldn’t fund wars with land he couldn’t even defend.

So he decided to sell New Orleans to America for an easy payday.

But he didn’t just sell New Orleans…

He sold America the whole of Louisiana.

Napoleon’s French Treasury Minister, who controlled the money, sat down with Livingston and offered him all of Louisiana for $15 million.

But behind this signed deal, the politics, and the $15 million price tag is a secret deal strategy…

This strategy explains exactly how the deal that changed America forever was actually closed.

But for over 200 years, nobody has broken it down… until today.

And to understand exactly how it works, we need to use the third part of my Deal DNA: price and terms.

History still talks about the famous $15 million price tag that closed the deal.

But this $15 million price tag isn’t what America actually paid…

This price tag had a 4-part price chain that isn’t talked about in your history lessons.

Part 1: The agreed price of $15 million.

Part 2: $11.2 million of this $15 million wasn’t paid in cash… it was paid in government bonds.

This means America had basically made a pinky promise to buy the land that would double the size of the continent.

Part 3: Assumed liabilities from France.

France also had trade debts with the American government.

They already owed American merchants millions for ships and cargo seized at sea.

So America absorbed France’s debt and paid its merchants as part of the deal structure.

This is called assumed liabilities.

Part 4: The land.

When America asked France exactly what rivers, boundaries, and land they were buying… France didn’t tell them.

And this was deliberate.

Why?

Because it would waste more time when they wanted to close this deal as fast as possible.

But rather than let this border confusion block the deal, Monroe and Livingston accepted it…

They agreed to the deal that was in front of them.

But there was one factor in this deal that made sure it was finally closed.

And to find out exactly what this factor is… We need to use the final part of my Deal DNA: The X factor.

And the X-factor in this deal is what I call…

The Founders Fund.

It uses the same financing principles that businesses use in acquisitions today.

These are the same principles that you can use to buy a business without all the cash up front.

Here is how it works:

As you now know, America didn’t have enough cash to buy Louisiana outright.

So they borrowed the money from France to do it… this is called seller financing.

So how does this work?

If you, as the buyer, didn’t have all the money to buy the company… you would generally go to a bank and get a loan.

And in this case, the seller becomes the bank. So instead of making payments to the bank, you just make payments to the seller from the operating cash flow of the business.

So let’s say you wanted to buy a business. But you don’t have the money to buy it.

You could take out an SBA loan or a commercial bank loan.

This means the bank gives you the cash and you can use it to pay the seller.

Now, the banks will still underwrite the business to make the loan.

But this is actually a good thing for a few reasons:

The banks are in the business of lending money to do deals like this.

You still don’t pay any money out of pocket for the business.

And you can ideally just use the operating profits of the business you bought to cash flow the entire deal.

But this still leaves us with a few problems…

There will be situations where a seller won’t always want to seller finance.

And you, as the buyer, may not have the cash needed in order to buy the business.

So what do you do?

You don’t pay the seller.

Instead, you do 3 things:

You borrow from the bank
You repay the bank over the next 10-15 years
And this is often using the cash flow generated by the business you just bought.

So now you have multiple ways to buy a business for zero dollars out of pocket…

And so, this is why you don’t always need cash up front because you could combine different financing strategies to get the seller paid and buy the business that you want.

And this is exactly how the world’s biggest land deal ever was closed.

The same Founders Fund that built America… can be used by you… to buy and build a business for zero dollars up front.

How to Fix Your Focus in One Day

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:01:54 GMT

I believe that to do great things, you must do fewer things. That mastery comes from singularity of focus.

But today, we live in a world that’s full of distractions.

With short-form content ruining people’s attention spans, dopamine hits from social media, and shiny object opportunities everywhere.

And so focus has become one of the most valuable assets very few people have.

That’s why, to help you create singularity of focus in your business and life I’ve put together my 3 focus frameworks.

I’ve used these exact same focus frameworks to help me build two billion-dollar businesses and now build a third with my best friends Alex and Leila Hormozi.

Starting with…

Focus Framework 1: Creating tomorrow, today

My dad taught me this habit that changed how I plan my day forever.

Every night after dinner, he’d open a leather journal and do two things:

Write tomorrow’s date
And list everything he’d do the next day

He called it: “Creating tomorrow, today.”

He never missed a night.

In fact, his ritual taught me more about focus than any self-help book.

Now before I end each day, I design the next one. I don’t close my laptop until every last task is crossed off my list.

So how can you apply this?

Map out exactly what you’re going to do before the day begins and write it down somewhere. Every task, no matter how small it may seem.

Otherwise, distractions and other people’s priorities will fill your day for you if you don’t.

But here’s the thing:

Without this next framework, you won’t know what your priorities are that you need to be focusing on…

Focus Framework 2: Zones & Bones

Think of your calendar as an investment plan.

You are the investor, time is your capital. Now in your investment plan, you have 2 things:

Zones: this is where you invest your time.

Think of zones as different ETFs or stocks you would invest your money in.

Bones: this is how many hours each zone gets.

Bones is like deciding how much money goes in each asset. And so now you measure the return each zone gives you back.

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say your Work zone got 60 hours last week.

The return is what those hours actually produced for you. It might have been new deals being closed, funnels being built, or relationships created.

Your Family zone got 15 hours. And your return there is trust, connection, and being present.

Your Personal zone got 10 hours. And it pays you back in energy, health, and overall happiness.

This is exactly how I split my time into 3 different zones: Work, Family, and Personal.

And my rule is that these zones all stay separate.

When I’m in the work zone, I only do work. When I’m in the family zone, I’m with only my family.

And when I’m in the personal zone, I’m only doing personal tasks.

Then I will allocate how many hours (my bones) I will invest in each category (my zones) every week.

So work might get 60 hours a week, family gets 2 to 3 hours a day, and maybe personal gets 2 to 3 hours a day.

And so you start every week with clear focus on where you’re investing your time every day.

Now you might be thinking:

“Okay Sharran, this all sounds great… but how do I keep track of all the tasks I need to do?”

Well, this is where the final focus framework comes in…

Focus Framework 3: The Pull System: Capture, Triage, Execute

Let me tell you a story.

I used to have two to-do lists without realizing it.

Every day I had open loops in my mind that were constantly stealing my focus. It was like having 20 different tabs open on your computer.

And these two to-do lists were:

My actual to-do list
My email inbox

My email inbox had become a to-do list itself.

It had messages sitting from clients and tasks I needed to do, while my actual to-do list was in a separate place.

This meant all my tasks for the day lived in two separate places instead of one. And it was splitting my focus and energy in half.

And so this is when I created my 3-stage pull system.

Stage one is to capture everything into ONE inbox.

All your daily tasks get emailed to yourself in one inbox, creating just one to-do list. So they are there as a reminder when other tasks start piling in.

Stage two is triage.

This means you sort each item in your inbox into when you’ll deal with it, and do it a few times a day so the inbox never piles up.

And I sort them into 4 categories:

Today
This Week
Scheduled / Waiting
Someday

I triage my inbox 2-3 times a day. So by the end of the day it should nearly be empty.

And finally, stage three is execute.

Execute means you take the tasks marked Today and invest your time into them on your zones and bones calendar.

And so now you’re back to working from your calendar, not a to-do list.

Here’s what the pull system actually looks like:

So how can you apply these focus frameworks today?

Just pick one of the frameworks from the list and use it tomorrow to protect your focus.

It might be starting with creating tomorrow today to get clear on every task you need to do.

Then 1 or 2 weeks later, you start to run the zones and bones framework to see where your time needs to be invested the most.

But if there’s one thing you take away, make it this:

Singularity of focus is one of the greatest predictors of your success.

Because to do great things, we must do fewer things.

And this is exactly what these 3 focus frameworks help me to do every day.

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about how to explain anything to anyone in this next one:

ChatGPT’s Deal Formula Can Make You a Millionaire (Here’s How)

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:15:29 GMT

In 2026, OpenAI closed a deal that could end the race for who controls the future of AI.

This deal was for a man who shaped the future of AI as we know it…

But this same deal could have been closed by any of their competitors…

And the reason it wasn’t is because of a hidden formula they all missed that could make you a millionaire.

And to discover all the secrets behind OpenAI’s deal, I break them all down in episode 3 of my new show, Billion Dollar Deals.

So here are the secrets behind OpenAI’s deal that you can use to become rich…

In January of 2026, a single person changed the AI world forever.

From his home in Vienna, Peter Steinberger made a prototype of an AI assistant called Clawdbot.

But we all know it today as OpenClaw.

The project was:

Attracting millions of visitors on GitHub.
People were suddenly rushing to buy Mac Minis
And the success of OpenClaw got the attention of the biggest AI firms on the planet

This was the Star Trek moment.

Which meant that the future of technology was here… The world would never be the same again.

But to understand why this deal happened, we need to go back to when ChatGPT hit the market.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022 and 100 million people signed up in two months…

But OpenAI wasn’t the only tech giant doing AI research…

In fact, there were 3 other big companies working on AI:

Google
Anthropic
And xAI

Every single one of these four AI giants was building the exact same thing:

An AI-powered chatbot.

At first, ChatGPT was the clear leader in the AI race. They had nearly 87% of the market.

But the gap started to close…

Claude, Gemini, and Grok all continued to get more powerful as time passed.

So OpenAI’s head start from eighteen months ago was becoming an all-out sprint to figure out who had the best model.

But while the headlines were busy talking about who was winning the war for the best chatbot, they missed something critical…

In Europe, Peter Steinberger had been following the AI race closely from his home in Vienna.

And he saw an opportunity to introduce the next stage of AI.

The era of Agentic AI.

In November of 2025, Steinberger released the world’s first AI agent.

But here’s the thing:

OpenClaw also threatened every AI company’s entire business model.

And this made OpenClaw the AI agent breakthrough they all wanted, and it was all thanks to a single person.

But while all of this unfolded, OpenAI was plotting their next move. Because AI agents would give them a product nobody else had.

Which means they wouldn’t be competing on who could make the better chatbot…

Rather, who could reach Agentic AI the fastest.

But here’s the thing:

Steinberger never wanted to sell OpenClaw.

He had made it an open-source product that anyone could use.

And so now OpenAI had 2 choices:

They could either let this opportunity slip through their fingers
Or find a better way to make this deal happen

In February of 2026, OpenAI closed a deal with Steinberger.

OpenAI was able to put together a deal that would allow OpenClaw to operate as an open-source project on its own with OpenAI’s support.

This means OpenClaw would stay public…

But the person behind it was now working for them.

And for Peter Steinberger, this deal would get him closer to his goal of bringing AI agents to everyone.

But for this deal to work, price was not going to be the only factor.

And to understand why, we need to use the 3rd part of my Deal DNA: Price and Terms.

The price is what the headlines talk about. But the terms are the hidden layers of the deal they don’t talk about.

And in this deal, we have 3 layers.

Layer 1 is the acqui-hire of Peter Steinberger.

This is when a bigger company buys a small company or startup to get the main person who runs it.

But the Aqui-hire of Peter Steinberger was far from your typical deal because OpenAI didn’t actually buy OpenClaw.

This is because Steinberger made OpenClaw staying open-source a non-negotiable for his hiring.

Layer 2 is that Steinberger would work for OpenAI on a salary and lead the development of their AI agent program.

And finally, layer 3 is the overall valuation of this deal, which is an estimated

$2-$15 million.

And so most of the value from this deal comes from Peter Steinberger’s knowledge and ability to build AI agents.

But if Steinberger leaves, OpenAI loses one of its biggest advantages in the AI race.

This is why the deal only works if OpenAI can keep Steinberger long enough to transfer his knowledge and help build the next generation of agents.

And to understand how they created a deal that could make him want to stay, we need to use the final part of my Deal DNA: the X-factor.

Because here’s the truth:

Any major AI company could have executed an acqui-hire for Steinberger.

In fact, he could be working for Meta right now.

But the reason he’s not is that OpenAI saw and closed this opportunity before anyone else could…

So how did they do this?

It’s a 4-step formula that I’ve reverse-engineered from this deal, and have personally seen it create millionaires…

I call it the Speed Formula.

And once you understand it, you can apply it to anything in life.

Here’s how it works:

You need to identify an opportunity in your market.

This could be a gap in your market:

A new technology like AI
A business problem that nobody is solving
Or a combination of skills that not many people have like Peter Steinberger has

Your plan is how you bring the opportunity to life.

You’re mapping out the series of steps you need to reach the goal.

So start by asking yourself two things:

What would need to be true for this opportunity to work for me?

What are the steps that will get me there?

And only when you have your answers to these questions… can you move to step three…

Action is executing on your plan with speed.

This is how you bring the opportunity to life.

Action is doing all of the things that you’ve outlined in your plan.

But we know that not everything goes according to plan…

So when the situation changes, you don’t need to change the goal… you just need to change the plan.

But action is where nearly everyone goes wrong…

Because just like OpenAI’s competitors, they wait too long.

And this is where the final step comes into play…

Time.

A rough plan with speed will always get you much further than building the perfect plan for days or weeks.

Because the longer you wait, the more opportunity you give your competitors.

The people who actually build wealth know that speed is the shortest distance between seeing and acting on an opportunity.

This is why they compress the time between opportunity, plan, and action better than 99% of people.

This speed formula is exactly what gets you ahead.

And it’s one of the most common patterns I’ve seen that millionaires share.

So OpenAI’s deal shows you that the real value is in these two things:

Seeing something before everyone else catches on
And taking massive action

Because they:

Saw an opportunity.
Built a plan around it.
Took action.

And they compressed the time between seeing it and doing it.

This is how true wealth gets created…

Speed is king.

How to Actually Buy a Business

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:01:31 GMT

I’ve built two-billion-dollar businesses.

And during my time building both, I learned exactly what goes into buying a business.

But I also learned the mistakes most business owners make.

This is why I’ve put together 4 tips I wish I’d known about how to buy a business.

Starting with…

1. Always get the underlying documents, never trust a summary

The moment you’re the winning bidder, make sure you get full access to every contract. You should never let lawyers or the seller’s team hand you a summarized version.

Why?

Because you can’t properly weigh up a deal based on someone else’s summary of the paperwork.

They could hide behind confidentiality to keep a document tied to a check you’re about to write.

This is why you never underwrite what you haven’t personally read.

2. Walk every deal all the way to the end, including the ones that look absurd

Fully map out the deal before rejecting or accepting it:

What it costs to buy vs. what it actually costs to run
Who gets paid first if things go badly
What you’re actually inheriting (working assets) vs. what you’d have to rebuild from nothing

And for any distressed deal, ask yourself these 3 questions:

What would it cost to build this from scratch?
Is the business broken, or just the balance sheet?
Would fixing the brand actually fix the business?

If you can’t answer these, you prolly like the idea of the deal more than you understand it…

3. Follow the ladder: research, buy, build, syndicate.

You need to research all the costs to buy and build before you make an offer. And these costs could be:

Buying the asset
The cost to fix the business

Make sure you treat fixing the business up as its own separate cost/plan, and not something you add on after the purchase.

This makes sure you know the real cost of ownership, expected return, and what your negotiating position is in the deal.

And if you’re raising money from investors, pitch them on the improved version you’re going to build.

Because the reality is, investors want to put their money into solutions, not more problems.

4. Filter every deal through one question: can you build a platform on top of it?

Ask yourself if an asset can grow into something bigger, like:

Having content and audience: maybe it’s a YouTube channel, newsletter, or podcast built around the brand
A franchise or licensing model
Add-on acquisitions in the same niche
Or a software/tools layer that other operators would pay to use

Otherwise, it’s just an operating business. And operating businesses get operating multiples…

Small companies get small multiples. Big companies get big multiples.

And now for my business buying bonus tip I wish I knew sooner:

When you share deals with good people, they share good deals with you.

You don’t need to do any business deals alone. Sharing them with other people can take away the stress and make you more money in the long term.

Because now you’re not just doing a deal for a business… you’re investing in relationships.

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about why I love doing deals with lazy entrepreneurs in this next one:

The Next Billion

Why I Love Lazy Entrepreneurs

The founders who worry me the most aren’t the scrappy ones…

4 months ago · 57 likes · 3 comments · Sharran Srivatsaa

How Hollywood’s $110B Deal Will Get You Ahead of 99% of People

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:15:12 GMT

Paramount used a playbook to close a $110 billion deal that you could use to change your life.

It’s the same playbook that just handed one family control of Batman, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and almost every story you grew up watching.

And to discover all the secrets behind Paramount and Warner Bros.’ deal, I break them all down in episode 2 of my new show, Billion Dollar Deals.

I’m taking everything I’ve learned from my career at Goldman Sachs and building two billion dollar businesses to analyze exactly how the biggest deals on the planet are made.

In every episode, I’ll be breaking down the hidden strategies and risks behind deals that changed industries and built empires.

All while giving you the tactics to try them for yourself in your own life or business:

Here are the secrets behind this deal that you can use to get ahead of 99% of people…

Now back in 2018, Warner Bros. content was at its peak. They had Batman, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.

And HBO included TV shows like Game of Thrones.

But at the same time, Netflix was starting to prove two things:

Streaming movies was more convenient than going to theatres.

A subscription would cost much less than a cable package.

This meant that the entire Hollywood business model was going to change forever.

And so, despite decades of success Warner Bros. was left in a place that most businesses never survive…

They had $43 billion of debt, a dying cable business that had lost $9 billion, and a streaming platform that couldn’t compete.

So after years of trying to make it work, Warner Bros. only had one option left.

They had to sell…

Two buyers stepped forward…

The first buyer was Netflix. They were the top streaming platform in the world with 325 million subscribers and $18 billion in annual content spend.

They saw this as their chance to dominate the market. They wanted the IP, the studio, the streaming platform, and HBO.

The second buyer was Paramount. Unlike Netflix, Paramount had only 79 million paid subscribers and $4 billion in annual content spend.

And their streaming platform, Paramount+, was struggling to catch up with the other platforms like Netflix, Disney and Amazon.

For Paramount, buying Warner Bros. was the solution they were looking for.

Because if they wanted to have a chance in this streaming war, they needed to own your childhood heroes.

But Paramount was losing the war…

They had made 7 offers to Warner Bros. and every single one was rejected.

So in December of 2025, Warner signs a deal with Netflix for:

$27.75 per share.
$82.7 billion in cash.
And the cable networks get spun off into Discovery Global.

But even with the Netflix deal signed Paramount didn’t give up… they tried again.

In January of 2026, Paramount went directly to the shareholders with their 8th and final offer…

Except this time, the offer was completely different.

Because for the first time in eight bids, Warner Bros. couldn’t say no.

And in February 2026, Warner walked away from Netflix to accept Paramount’s deal.

But here’s the thing:

Paramount didn’t just win because of the money.

They won because of a playbook that was used 22 years ago by the same family who now controls Paramount…

This deal playbook is what let them secure the biggest media takeover in a generation.

And this playbook could also help you get ahead of 99% of people…

It’s called… The Ellison Squeeze.

The first part of the Ellison Squeeze is the initial offer, which was $19 per share.

This was to get Paramount a seat at the table so they could bid on Warner Bros.

The second part is the squeeze.

This is where Paramount changed their offer based on the data they were gathering.

Remember, Paramount was turned down 7 times during this process. So each new bid was data they could use to get closer to a final number.

And so, the $19 per share bid would increase dramatically with every bid that was made to secure this deal.

Until the final price per share was $31 or about $110 billion including debt.

Now the 3rd part of the Ellison Squeeze is called the board bypass. The board bypass uses a hostile tender tactic.

This is when a public offer is made directly to shareholders instead of the board to buy their shares.

But the interesting part about this is that the offer isn’t even designed to be accepted.

It’s designed to get rejected.

The hostile tender offer being rejected forces the shareholders to question why the board hadn’t brought this deal to them during the bidding process.

But the deal wasn’t closed just yet…

Paramount still had the legal wall to overcome in step 4. Which means you do whatever it takes to get around the contracts.

For Paramount, this was writing the $2.8B check to Netflix to absorb Warner’s breakup fee.

But even with the legal barrier gone, there was still another part they needed to remove…

The board could still claim, “You can’t actually fund this deal.”

This is where the Ellisons used step 5… the certainty weapon.

Paramount did this with the personal guarantee of $40 billion worth of Oracle stock from Larry Ellison.

And only now are they ready for the 6th and final step of the Ellison Squeeze… the internal collapse.

You squeeze the board with pressure until it breaks from the inside out.

Everything in the Ellison Squeeze leads up to this moment.

And Paramount executed it perfectly…

They were the underdog in this story.

But each time they got rejected, they used it as data to determine what they did next. They were resilient and never gave up.

Which proves to us that sometimes, you might only be 7 no’s away from the yes that gets you ahead of 99% of people.

You just have to keep going…

So let me give you an example of how you can use the “Ellison Squeeze” right now.

Maybe you’re trying to land your dream job, so you start by making your opening offer.

But they say they’re not hiring right now.

Now what if you proposed a start date that was three months out instead?

And with every rejection, you keep reducing the risk to make it look even better for them.

While this may be aggressive, you could bypass the hiring manager and cold email the CEO with your no-brainer offer.

And if the contract is the issue, you could offer to do a trial project first to remove the risk and create the certainty they want.

Because at this point:

You’ve removed almost all the risk
Given them certainty
And created a near-perfect offer for them

This is how you could use the “Ellison Squeeze” to get almost anything you want in life.

Just like the Ellison family and Paramount did…

You treat each of the 7 no’s as an opportunity and not a door being closed on you.

How to Speak so Clearly People Think You’re a Genius

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:01:21 GMT

When I first came to the US, I had a thick Indian accent and was told I’d never get employed anywhere if I couldn’t learn how to speak.

At the time, I was working as a janitor, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets to pay my way through school.

But here’s the thing:

I couldn’t afford a speaking coach. I was a janitor barely making ends meet.

So I taught myself how to speak properly, but it wasn’t from a speaking course…

I checked out Tony Robbins tapes from the public library and listened to them every night as I mopped floors.

For 6 months, I mopped floors with Tony’s voice in my ears.

The Sony Walkman became my English teacher…

(I still speak loudly today because Tony yelled throughout the programs I listened to.

My wife has been asking me to turn down the volume for 18 years…)

20 years later, I started doing keynote speeches. Everything was going great, but I started noticing something…

Everyone said they loved my talks, but they weren’t inviting me back to speak.

I was getting people to listen, but they weren’t remembering.

And so, in a full-circle moment, I paid $50,000 for Tony Robbins’ speaking coach.

What I learned from him helps me with all the presentations I give today, and I’ve even given a TEDx talk.

So here are my 3 favorite tips to help you explain anything to anyone that I learned:

Tip 1: The “1,2,3, too many” rule.

One, two, three, too many because as soon as you get to the fourth topic, item, or story you’re like:

”I forgot the first three!”

Here’s why:

If you give people more than 3 concepts, they remember nothing.

And so, anytime you’re explaining something to anyone, keep it to three things.

But here’s the thing:

I still couldn’t get people to remember what I had told them…

Especially when it was more complex topics.

This is why I always use tip number 2 in my presentations to brand what I’m teaching into people’s memories…

Tip 2: Put your ideas into “Geometric shapes.”

This could be triangles, circles, or squares.

Why do you use shapes?

Because it lets the brain take a snapshot of the information and you know
which goes in what box when you’re speaking.

So let me give you an example.

At Acquisition(.)com we have three values:

Unimpeachable character
Sincere Candor
Competitive greatness

Now if I just said those values to you once, you’re probably not going to remember them.

But if I put them in 3 circles…

Your brain’s going to have a much easier time remembering them.

But these visuals only work for the audience if you’re giving a presentation, not a speech.

So now I needed a way to make complex ideas simple without relying on visuals…

And I learned this final tip from a kindergarten teacher that lets me explain any concept to anyone.

Tip 3: The “4-Mat” Technique

4-Mat has four frames:

Why, what, how, now.

The why frame is, “why is this important right now?”

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say I’m talking about global warming and it’s important right now because all the rainforests are dying.

Now the second is the what frame.

The what frame is, “Well, there’s four pieces that affect global warming.”

And then I say, “Piece one, piece two, piece three.”

That’s the 10,000-foot view of everything.

So now it’s the how frame.

“Let me tell you how each of these pieces are affecting you.”

And the final one is the now or the next. What do I do with all this information?

“You don’t have to remember anything that I said. All I need you to do is to turn off your air conditioning at 6 pm.”

That is the one thing. What is the one domino that I kick to make them remember, like an action step.

By this point, they feel so much more engaged with you because they’re like,

“Oh yeah, he’s answering every inbuilt objection that I have.”

Why should I listen to him? Oh, because it’s important.

What is this all about? Oh, it’s got four pieces.

How do I actually do that? Oh, he just told me.

Man, there’s too much. What should I do? Oh, just do this.

Why, what, how, now.

Now you have my favorite 3 communication tips you can use in your next conversation with a friend, a business partner, or in a meeting.

1,2,3, too many
Put your ideas into geometric shapes
4-mat: why, what, how, now

So how can you apply this today?

Just pick one of the tips from the list and use it in all your conversations for the next week.

Then once you feel comfortable using that tip and you’ve developed the habit, do the same for the next tip.

But the biggest gift Tony gave me wasn’t just how to speak…

It was how to be remembered.

This is exactly what these 3 tips will help you do as well.

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about how to become your own bank in this next one:

The Next Billion

How to Become Your Own Bank

How do the wealthiest people in America buy things without ever touching their own cash…

3 months ago · 42 likes · 1 comment · Sharran Srivatsaa

How to Become Your Own Bank

Sharran Srivatsaa — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:03:14 GMT

How do the wealthiest people in America buy things without ever touching their own cash?

You see, I spent years at Goldman Sachs seeing the strategies and tactics behind how they do it…

And now I’m revealing them to you…

I call it the “Bank of One” and it has 4 steps you can use today.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Earn

Earning income gives you the building blocks to work with.

But income doesn’t build real wealth on its own.

And it was at Goldman Sachs that I learned this lesson…

I thought getting a $1M fee from Goldman Sachs as a young banker was a big win.

But my client completely shattered my belief…

At the closing dinner of a $100M deal, they turned to me and said:

“You would have to do 100 deals like this to make what I made with this one.”

But I made sure I wouldn’t have to do 100 deals to turn income into wealth…

And it was using step 2 that helped me to do it.

Step 2: Buy

Every dollar of earned income you invest in an asset becomes future borrowing power.

This means the more assets you own, the more you can borrow against.

Because banks and brokerages will lend against assets they consider stable and valuable.

And access to cash is one of the most important things you can have for both investing and financial security.

Now this is where the Bank of One really starts to take shape…

Let me tell you a story:

In 2018, I bought a duplex for $350,000 and I put $70,000 down as a deposit.

My $70,000 was now invested in an asset that could appreciate in value, generate rental income, and be borrowed against later.

But for the other $280,000, I didn’t pay it with cash… I used step 3.

Step 3: Borrow

Borrowing money can be hard to access, which is exactly why most people never get to this step.

Because the truth is, banks don’t just lend to anyone… they lend to people with collateral.

Collateral is a valuable item that a lender can seize from a borrower if they can’t repay their loan.

This could be assets like your house or your stock portfolio.

But here’s the thing:

The bank doesn’t want your house or your portfolio… they want interest.

Taking your collateral is the last thing they want because they’d much rather the steady cash flow from interest.

So as long as you own stable assets, you’re exactly the kind of borrower they want.

Just like the duplex I bought in 2018 for $350,000, which had now grown in value to $550,000.

Now I could have sold it and cashed in on the $200,000 it had appreciated by.

But that $200,000 would’ve also been taxed to death.

And so instead of selling, I did a cash-out refinance at 75% loan-to-value.

This means I borrowed $412,500 (75% of the value) from the bank, paid off the original mortgage, and walked away with roughly $132,500 in cash that was completely tax-free.

How?

Because a loan isn’t income.

So here’s how you could apply this:

You borrow against the asset’s growth instead of selling it
You get tax-free cash
You still own the asset while it keeps appreciating

Let me be clear: This is NOT financial advice.

Always speak to an expert because what works for me isn’t guaranteed to work for you.

Now even if you borrow against your assets to buy more, this final step is the one that decides if those new assets in your Bank of One grow or die…

Step 4: Compound

Albert Einstein once called compounding the eighth wonder of the world.

But now you’re not just compounding your income… you’re compounding:

Assets

This is your properties, stocks, and businesses.

Let’s go back to the house example.

If you own a $400,000 house and every year it appreciates by 5%, that’s $20,000 in year one.

And so, in year two it’s now growing from a $420,000 base. This is compounding in full effect.

Ability to borrow

This is your collateral that gives you access to bigger loans.

Now, as the house grows in value your borrowing power grows with it.

At $400,000, a bank might lend you $300,000 against it or at $500,000 maybe it’s $375,000.

Capacity to leverage capital

This is your ability to use borrowed money to acquire even more assets.

So now you use the $300,000 in borrowing power from the bank and buy a second property.

The second property starts appreciating and compounding too, which creates its own borrowing power.

And these assets become collateral for the next round of borrowing to buy more properties if you want.

This is the Bank of One strategy in full effect…

Use your income to buy assets.

Use your assets to create more borrowing power, which then gives you more capital to use.

Then you buy more assets, which creates even more borrowing power to buy bigger assets.

Meanwhile, every asset you own is growing through the magic of compounding.

Again, this is not financial advice.

It’s just to show you how the wealthiest people in America grow their wealth without ever touching their cash.

They spend their lives creating access to cash they can pull from 24/7, without selling anything.

And this access is only built through their assets.

This is exactly what the “Bank of One” strategy creates for them… and it’s exactly what it could give you too…

Now instead of only borrowing or relying on the bank for money… you become your own bank.

But most people today are still listening to misinformation from viral financial advice, not these proven strategies like the Bank of One.

That’s why I put together a guide to help you see what good financial advice actually looks like and the bad advice to run away from below:

The Next Billion

Why Finance Advice Goes Viral When It's Wrong (And Gets Ignored When It's Right)

Did you know that 50% of Gen Z learns about money primarily from TikTok…

3 months ago · 40 likes · 3 comments · Sharran Srivatsaa

How Messi’s Genius $1.5B Deal Could Make You Rich

Sharran Srivatsaa — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:21:06 GMT

Lionel Messi has just played in his 6th World Cup. And he holds the record for the most World Cup matches ever played.

But the world only talks about what he does on the field. So they missed this hidden deal when he signed with Inter Miami in 2023.

And to discover all the secrets behind Lionel Messi’s deal, I break them all down in episode 1 of my new show, Billion Dollar Deals.

I’m taking everything I’ve learned from my career at Goldman Sachs and building two billion dollar businesses to analyze exactly how the biggest deals on the planet are made.

In every episode, I’ll be breaking down the hidden strategies and risks behind deals that changed industries and built empires.

All while giving you the tactics to try them for yourself in your own life or business:

Here are the secrets behind his deal that you can use to build your own wealth…

It was the summer of 2022. The MLS was still a league where some of the best European players went to hang up their cleats.

But the MLS wanted to change that. So in June 2022, they made their biggest bet to date:

A ten-year, $2.5B broadcasting deal with Apple TV.

This meant all MLS games would finally be on one platform around the world. But this wasn’t a typical broadcast deal.

The MLS had committed to one platform in an all-or-nothing deal. And nobody else in soccer history had ever done this before.

But here’s the thing:

The deal only made sense if enough people paid for Apple TV in order to justify the $2.5B bet.

This is why the MLS needed the world’s attention to make the deal with Apple worth it. But Apple wasn’t the only one placing bets on the MLS…

Adidas had just renewed its $830 million MLS kit deal for the next 6 years. Adidas was now the league’s apparel partner until the end of the decade.

And this meant they’d get a percentage of every jersey and piece of merchandise sold.

But they’d also need a name big enough to sell millions of jerseys...

So now the MLS, Inter Miami, Apple, and Adidas needed someone big enough to make people want to watch American soccer.

A player with the kind of magnetic pull that would have people paying a monthly subscription just to watch him play.

The kind of player who would have soccer fans from around the world buying his jersey…

They needed Lionel Messi.

In June 2023, Messi became a free agent, and he was free to sign with any club without a transfer fee. This was only the second time in his career that he would be a free agent.

Now the entire soccer world was glued to their phones, waiting to see where he would go next...

In January 2023, Saudi club Al Nassr signed Cristiano Ronaldo on a reported $200M-per-year deal. And now two other Saudi clubs wanted Messi in the league as well.

Why?

Because they wanted to use Messi and Ronaldo to clean up their global image and make a World Cup bid. So two Saudi clubs made an offer to Messi:

$400M per year from Al Hilal
Or $1.5B in total from Al-Ittihad.

But Jorge Mas, the managing owner of MLS soccer team Inter Miami, had one of the only things that could make Messi turn down a $1.5B deal…

He could offer Messi equity.

Messi had spent twenty years as the most valuable “employee” in soccer. But he never had an ownership stake.

That’s why the only right choice for Messi was Inter Miami. So on July 15, 2023, Messi officially signed with Inter Miami.

And in just 3 years, Inter Miami’s valuation more than doubled to $1.4 billion. They had added over $800 million in value and proved that the Messi effect was real.

And this is where the real financial genius of Lionel Messi is shown. The price is what the headlines talk about.

But the terms are the hidden layers of the deal they don’t talk about. And in this deal, we have 3 layers:

Layer 1 is salary, which we know is $20.4M

Layer 2 is revenue share. This is the percentage of what you’re paid every time the business makes money.

And finally, layer 3 is equity.

This is what Jorge Mas used to beat the $1.5 billion Saudi offer. It was ownership in a growing, potential billion-dollar team.

And this is what completed Messi’s deal. It’s what I like to call…

The Founder’s Contract.

Messi was willing to take a 96% reduction in base salary and a 10-year horizon to build his ownership. You can do this with deals that can make you rich too, just like Lionel Messi.

But in order to do this, you should do these 3 things:

1. Get high-income skills that can get you a higher salary base.

This could be building AI systems and automations for companies today that save them money and make them more efficient.

2. Be willing to trade skills for performance-based comp.

Meaning lower guaranteed salary, but more bonus if you do well. This could be negotiating a share or a cut of the money you save the company.

Let me give you an example:

Let’s say you cut $500,000 in costs and 2% of that comes back to you… that’s already $10,000.

3. The biggest bet you can make is like what Messi did: You deeply discount your compensation of today and trade it for long-term value that you help create.

This might be taking a salary that, on paper, barely covers your living expenses.

Instead, you take 2% equity in a startup you believe in. A few years later, the company sells for $40 million… your 2% just became $800,000.

And this is why ownership in place of a guaranteed salary is the ultimate sign of betting on yourself.

It’s the same trade Messi is making with the founder’s contract to make him even wealthier in the long run.

His bet on himself to create value for the MLS, Apple, Adidas, and Inter Miami was a big risk and a lesson in what choosing ownership over salary really means.

And his deal proves the most valuable asset on Earth isn’t being paid for the work you do…

It’s being compensated for the value you help to create.

So when you create this value, becoming rich will be almost guaranteed.

Because the truth is…

If you do more than you’re paid for, you will get paid for more than you do.

The Next Billion

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Step 1/ Sales

Step 2/ Operations

3/ People

Step 4/ Partnerships

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