We discuss strategies for starting your own company, from high-risk VC-backed startups to acquiring existing small businesses. We cover different funding options like venture capital, SBA loans, and getting investments from people who believe in you. Advice is tailored based on intelligence level. We also warn about the risks of demanding a higher salary without increasing your value to the company.
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Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I'm thinking more about like, you know, bridge loans or whatever, like loans for growth once you do acquire. I don't
Malcolm Collins: have access to that. Yeah. I get that. Advice to normal people.
Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway. Yes. As being loans are, are great and they do provide a lot of opportunity.
Malcolm Collins: However. Let's. Let's go into what I would suggest is the number one way that, that I would look at creating a company.
If I was an average milling to above middling intelligence person living in the U S
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: So Malcolm, there's a person in our family who would really, really love, loves money. And definitely encourages us to make money. And whenever she's been unhappy with how much money we're making, her advice is always just tell them to pay you more.
Malcolm Collins: Which is my mom who's not with us anymore, but she would always do this.
Just be like, I'd be like, Oh, I'm making this much. And she goes, that's not enough for you. You just need to tell them to pay you more. And I was like, I'll get fired if I do that. You [00:01:00] know that, right? Yeah. She goes, you just need to be firm. And I think so many older generations are this way. This isn't like, just go and, and bang on doors at offices until you get hired.
But one of the things, you know, if you look at online influencers and stuff like that, sort of the place they always end up, whether you're talking about girl defined or Andrew Tate or even Trump is trying to teach people how to make money. And they'll create these little universities for me because it's true.
You know, if you're building your own little community, you know, one of the things that's easiest to promise them is financial independence and wealth. So you promise them that you get them to waste money on that. And, and it ends up, you know, some, I think some of it is pretty good. So you look at like hustle university and stuff like that, like what Andrew Tate is doing and some of the other ones it's reasonable.
He has to figure out how to tell idiots how, like, because, and I'm not saying that he disproportionately attracts idiots. I'm saying if your reach is wide enough, no matter who you are, a huge [00:02:00] chunk of that is going, the majority of that is going to be idiots. It has the same, because you know how dumb the average person is?
Well, half of them are dumber than that. Exactly. You've got to be selling them all sorts of stuff like... Dropshipping and stuff like that. Like ideas that anyone can focus on. But the
Simone Collins: great thing about what he's doing that I really respect is most people who I see online who are selling these kinds of programs, they're like sort of pyramid schemes and they're based around coaching.
Like I'm a coach, you be a coach, you make money like me, blah, blah, blah.
Malcolm Collins: And it doesn't really work.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, she's one of like a million. What I like about what Andrew Tate is doing is he's giving people very concrete, very practical, often like very unromantic, you know, they're, they're not sexy.
They're not about becoming a famous, beautiful coach that everyone wants to follow. You know, it's, it's about copywriting. It's about dropshipping. Like you said, it's about opening an online shop. It's about very like straightforward stuff that most people could do. And for which. With the exception of copywriting there is demand and, you know, I don't think AI was ballooning when he first [00:03:00] started this copywriting course.
So I do admire. what Andrew Tate is doing with that. But you're absolutely right. That, that is what you typically see when some influencer tries to start teaching their audience to make money.
Malcolm Collins: I mean, I want to start by being clear that I actually think that he is probably the most honest in terms of what he's promising people of all of the people I have seen do this.
Yeah. So good on him. But we're going to do something a little different because you know, I have my MBA from Stanford, right? Like I am in terms of making money probably one of the most educated types of people there, there are, you know, Simone got her degree from Cambridge and technology policy and we have done something that gave us a huge insight that normal people don't have, which is called a search fund.
So not only did we learn how to raise money from investors, like we've done venture capital, both of us have worked in venture capital, so we know that whole industry but we went out there and we had to find a company to buy. So we were emailing, you know, thousands of company CEOs every week interviewing.
I think [00:04:00] you got an average of 80 interviews a week, finding out how, and you did this for about two years, finding out how just hundreds if not thousands of companies worked inside and out, how they were built, everything like that, which gave you an, and these are normal companies. These are not like VC companies.
So the first thing I would say to people interested. is if you are uniquely intellectually gifted. So I'm going to like break this into categories. And if you're okay with high risk, high reward opportunities, go to Silicon Valley, go live in a hacker house meet the VCs, start, you know, get working on startups, uh, go that route.
You can even go the VC route. You just have to be very ambitious, very hardworking. And, and know that you are very intelligent and I mean, actually well
Simone Collins: networked. You have to be well networked to get the deal flow. You need to actually find. No, you don't need to be
Malcolm Collins: well networked. You become well networked.
You have to be able to become well networked. Oh, sure.
Simone Collins: Yeah. You have to have the potential for sure. Yeah. You don't have
Malcolm Collins: to start out that way. The network you go into Silicon Valley with is pretty irrelevant.
Yeah,
Simone Collins: that's totally true. As long as you're [00:05:00] able to build it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, you have to live in Silicon Valley, which is a shithole right now, but and there's a few other places you can do this out of.
You can do this out of Singapore. You can do this out of London, maybe. But that's really it. Maybe, maybe, there's some other places. No, I've looked at the ecosystems for doing VC in other countries. And it's just really bad. They almost never end up with economic successes. We can go deep into why this is.
Actually you are better off at having a big success in a country that is smaller than a country with a medium sized economy. So like if you're in Korea or Japan or Germany, you're much less likely to have a huge economic success starting like a startup style company than you would in a country like, norway or Finland or Sweden or Estonia. So keep that in mind or Singapore for that matter.
Simone Collins: And the reason why just to give a little bit of color there for Malcolm's hypothesis is that nations that are so small basically have to start out being global, which basically means that you'll discover if you can have global [00:06:00] Range and global market potential very quickly.
Whereas when you're in a medium market where you could sell a lot domestically like Germany, like, like South Korea, you could basically get stuck in the trap of selling and specializing for your local market, which ultimately has a very limited ceiling. And so people kind of get stuck in that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and, and, and then, you know, companies that do well like Kakao and South Korea, they begin to grow inwards on themselves with stuff like, you know, Kakao Uber basically, Kakao Talk, Kakao, you know, Kakao App Store.
Okay, so anyway, um, I'm going to take a quick moment here to describe the different types of capital because this is important to know about if you're thinking about starting a company. So we just talked about one core category, which is if you just have enormous faith in yourself and you're young and you have, educated yourself to some extent.
And I mean, you need to be like actually highly educated. I have talked to our fan base. I know a lot of them are of this smart category but the people in this ecosystem will ferret you out very quickly if you aren't highly educated. And I don't mean [00:07:00] in a university context, I just mean that you've taught yourself and hopefully when we build our school system and we release it like Q1 this next year or Q2 this next year, it would get you there if you completed it.
Simone Collins: But anyway. Well, and I do really want to emphasize that like Especially in Silicon Valley. Thank goodness. This is not one of those worlds where you really do need credentials and, and many VCs really, really just care about merit. So this is one of those few places where educated actually means what Malcolm is saying, like literally knowing your s**t, not having a piece of paper that doesn't matter.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and having social competence. We've seen a few people pitch to VCs and they like lack basic social competence and they come off as crazy. No, don't come off as crazy to VCs. That will not help you. I, I, If you have a problem with coming off as crazy to people, this is not the route for you. We will go over routes that could work for you.
This is not one of them. Coming off as crazy to people means that you are low Like emotional IQ, you just can't read people very well and that's going to cause problems. If you're autistic, and that's why you're, that's totally different. VCs love that. Yeah. But if you are on the schizoid side, which.[00:08:00]
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, because I mean, like a little bit on the schizoid side and you're really good at modeling people, but we know a lot of people who are both extremely smart, but too far. And then they don't know boundaries. You pass some kind of weird threshold where suddenly you stop being able to model
Malcolm Collins: people.
Great. Okay. So yes. So with venture capital on average, even if you're looking at the best firms, they make their money on one of every 13 deals, which means that they cannot invest in companies that will do middlingly well. Okay. Even if it's going to be like a 500 million company, that is still a failure in many VC eyes.
Right? So if you're coming to VCs, we never come to VCs was like a chain of, uh, companies that do like laundry. Right? That own physical locations, for example. Because a lot of the investment there is going to be in real estate and stuff like that.
Simone Collins: When the margins just are never going to be that insanely
Malcolm Collins: thick, right?
Well, it requires a lot of you know, what it's called CapEx, you know, ownership of property. So you would never with VCs do a construction [00:09:00] company. You would never with VCs do a real estate company. Basically they need to invest in something that is very low CapEx, which basically only software is, and a few other like weird business models where like the CapEx is owned by like a different model.
Yeah. And
Simone Collins: before, you know, our commenters were like, Oh, but we work, I mean, look at how that's played out for them. So,
Malcolm Collins: so that was a huge mistake because they ignored the core way to do VC. Right. All right. So, next the next source of capital is going to be the source of capital that I would recommend for most people.
Who wants to start something with a high probability of working a high probability of providing them independence and lower costs to get into, which is what I would call search Fundy type companies, right? And these are companies that you can get into with debt. So debt can be bank debt, right?
Which is actually pretty cheap for an individual to obtain. And by that, well,
Simone Collins: especially if, if you, if you get it through. So first a little bit of, of, of color search funds also known as entrepreneurship through [00:10:00] acquisition involves acquiring an existing company that is already performing well, typically from someone who's looking to retire and sell that company because they don't have a son or daughter to pass it onto for whatever reason.
So these are often companies that. Really small mom and pop businesses. Very practical. This is where you are going to see dry cleaning businesses and dental offices and mosquito remediation companies and all things like that. And why the debt can be uniquely low is because this is not just bank loans that you're getting.
You could be getting SBA loans and most people who do, yeah, so small business association in the United States. So this doesn't necessarily apply to every nation. The other nations may have similar loan programs to this. Are available to small business owners to do all sorts of things, but in indeed to also sort of put leverage on businesses that they acquire.
So what many individual searchers do to become entrepreneurs through acquisition by acquiring one of these small businesses is they use some of their money to acquire the business in the form of equity, SBA loan. To cover the rest of the acquisition cost. [00:11:00] And they may do some, what's called seller financing with the person basically saying, okay, well, I will pay you this much upfront with a combination of my money and debt, but then I will also pay you this other amount from the profit that I get from the business after I acquire
Malcolm Collins: it.
So let's talk about the two ways that you can go about doing this, right? Because you're talking about one way, what I actually probably wouldn't recommend to most people, because it's, it's a little bit more sophisticated to acquire an existing company. But if you want to, you know, and you're coming in with some, you know, maybe some money you inherited or something, let's say you've inherited like 200 K or 250 K.
And then on top of that, you're putting that down. You can talk to a bank, you know, if you don't have a criminal history or something, get some debt. And that can get you into a company for like 500k, right? If you buy a company at around that range, This can be a company that is earning let's say, you know, when you're buying these really small companies, you can buy them at like 1x EBITDA or like 2x EBITDA or like EBITDA is
Simone Collins: roughly the profit of the business.
Malcolm Collins: Basically, it means that if you own this company, you would be [00:12:00] bringing in about 250k a year yourself. Because other people don't want companies that small, like private equity funds don't want them, so they sell for really low multiples. And then you can do something called a roll up. You know, you take that money, you set it aside for a couple of years and you buy other companies in the same space.
And banks are going to be even more trusting of you then because they're like, Oh, you've run a company like this before. But let's talk about why SBA loans are so useful if you do not come from an economically advantaged position, defaulting on a bank loan. A lot of people are like, Oh, this is terrible.
Like what if I buy a company and it fails? Right? If you get an SBA loan and you buy a company and it fails, then you go into bankruptcy. That will hurt your ability to get credit for about like five or six years, but it eventually clears out of your, your record, especially if it wasn't your fault. And then you can do it again, basically.
Not necessarily with an SBA loan, with another type of loan or something like that, but as long as there wasn't criminal or anything like that, and what this means is that if you, Don't have a lot of money to you. You have access to a way to get money, or if you're willing to put down all of the money you have [00:13:00] on a deal, and then you can take an SBA loan on top of that to get capital, that's actually not available to people who have assets.
They have to worry about.
Simone Collins: Warn people that SBA loans are personally guaranteed. So one thing that we would say about this form of what a personal
Malcolm Collins: guarantee is
Simone Collins: a personal guarantee means that you are on the line when it comes to like basically collateral. Like, you know,
Malcolm Collins: your company can't go bankrupt.
You personally personally
Simone Collins: get out of it. This is on you. It's not on like the company now with normal like bank debt, like our, our, our travel business that we acquired through the entrepreneurship through acquisition model has debt. Okay. But we are not on the hook. Basically, like if, if somehow our, our company could no longer pay this debt then maybe our company
Malcolm Collins: would go bankrupt.
To get that, you basically need an MBA from Stanford or Harvard.
Simone Collins: Or you need to have basically a long history of audited financials for your company that sort of show that it has, you know, or, or you need to [00:14:00] have a company that has like a lot of real estate assets. So basically if, if a business. No,
Malcolm Collins: Simone, really, it is very hard to get that.
I think it is unrealistic in what you're telling people. And it's not a path I would go down.
Simone Collins: No. If you own real estate, that a bank feels sufficiently confident would cover their, their loan. Your
Malcolm Collins: real estate, not their real estate. They could sell their real estate separately. So that's not going to help you in the, the transaction.
Simone Collins: All I'm saying is when we applied for debt, Malcolm, as a company. No, that is
Malcolm Collins: true. But think logically about what you're saying. Okay. If I'm acquiring, for example, let's say a company that does like salting roads or something like that, and they have a bunch of real estate included in the price of the company is going to be all the real estate.
So I can take out debt. You know, against that asset, the real estate that's included with the company, but that debt won't exceed the real estate that's included with the company and will be less than it'll be like 80 percent of it. So then where am I getting the rest of the money to buy that company? I either need to be [00:15:00] independently wealthy, or I would need to get a personally backed loan on top of the loan that is covered by the real estate the company already has.
Point of clarification here. This isn't obvious to listeners. But a company's value is going to be its real estate and hard assets value. Plus the value of a multiple on its EBITDA. I E how much cash it's pulling in every year. So the value of the company is always going to be higher than the value of the real estate.
I mean, unless you're in some weird situation, uh, it's just worth noting in terms of how you value companies. If this video does well, we could go into this stuff in a lot more detail, like how to evaluate companies and. Where to find companies to buy
et cetera
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I'm thinking more about like, you know, bridge loans or whatever, like loans for growth once you do acquire. I don't
Malcolm Collins: have access to that. Yeah. I get that. Advice to normal people.
Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway. Yes. As being loans are, are great and they do provide a lot of opportunity.
Malcolm Collins: However. Let's. Let's go into what I would suggest is the [00:16:00] number one way that, that I would look at creating a company.
If I was an average milling to above middling intelligence person living in the U S right. Or really anywhere is I would first look at search fundy type companies. So look at sites like deal stream and stuff like that. See the time of companies that are selling talk with people who run these small companies.
Understand how they work, get a feel of the landscape that's out there right now. Then start a company that is like one of these companies that you have some understanding of. So this could be like road salt can be, maybe you have a dental degree yourself and you start your own digital practice
Simone Collins: or dental offices Food packaging some like light production, all sorts of weird things. or like also vending
Malcolm Collins: machines.
I would not suggest vending machines are almost an MLM. Oh, sorry. I should also mention, don't do an MLM. It's stupid. You will, you will lose. Any [00:17:00] company, I'll, I'll word this differently. Any company where somebody is getting a financial kickback for getting you involved with the company, don't do that company.
That's a bad idea.
Okay, up here. I would make one thing direct sales companies are okay. If you are below average intelligence, it is probably the best earning potential you're going to have. If you are high aggression, high sociability, below average intelligence or average to slightly above average intelligence, direct selling is a great opportunity for you.
And you really shouldn't be undersold. But direct selling is not MLM. Okay. That is very different. Okay. In direct selling. The person who recruits you is not getting a portion of your profits.
Simone Collins: Okay. So that's key. I guess that's, that's the key thing to look for is, is, is there some kind of like upstream pyramid going
Malcolm Collins: on?
So what I'm saying is the number one way that I would suggest making money is go out there. Understand the type of companies that are like these boring, simplistic companies. You really probably want to focus on one that's very low cap X. That means, you know, like you wouldn't want to get into construction because that requires a lot of construction equipment.
[00:18:00] It, one that we're actually experimenting with right now is landscaping. We're helping a friend of ours get into the industry. It's a low capex industry and we're, you know, giving them the money up front to do that. And, and with these sorts of Industries, you, you might be surprised the type of people who will invest in you to do this because it can be a very easy investment for, for fairly low amounts of money, you know, if you're looking for, let's say under 30 K for something like this and you're going to your friends like, okay, I need a certain type of truck.
I need a snowplow. I need an et cetera. One, you can give them ownership of those assets and to just say, okay, I'll pay you like. 10 percent for the rest of this business's life cycle. And if they know that you're a hard worker, who's like not flaky and has some experience in the industry, it's actually a fairly easy financial investment for them.
As this is, even if you can't get like an SBA loan because you have a criminal history or something, as long as you have people who believe in you often within your cultural group, you know, this is a strategy you can use. And if you're like, I have nobody who believes in me, then like, maybe you should think about like why that is.
beCause [00:19:00] before you do anything like this. Right. Any of these ideas that we're talking about, you do need to work the grind. You do need to go to an office or work for a landscaping company or work for a something like that to begin to understand how the world actually works and build up enough cash deposits so that you can try for the type of things that will make you a lot of money.
But I would focus on things that the environment around you actually need. Now, a final thing, if you're going to talk about hard mode, but they can make a lot of money is look at local RFPs.
Simone Collins: These are, those are requests for proposal. These are basically most local governments, at least in the United States are obligated to go through a formal procurement process whereby they publicly post an advertisement essentially for a service or products that they need.
This could be anything from lead remediation education for a certain neighborhood to landscaping services to computer supplies for
Malcolm Collins: a school. Yeah. So, you, you can see that understand in work your way towards these positions. So if you're starting one of these companies, you know, if it [00:20:00] can be a wounded veteran owned or a disadvantaged minority woman owned, you know, you can get advantages.
So here are places to go. If you have a I don't want to say unfair. I mean, obviously, whatever, however you want to see it, special treatment, special treatment. Yeah. That can be a strategy to go down, but it's, it's significantly more like advanced. I might even do like a, like look into specifically how you do this and how you get to that stage with one of these companies because you're going to want to be able to get customers outside of the RFPs before you get the RFPs.
Which can take a while to win. Sort of the
Simone Collins: secret to winning RFPs is before they ever even get posted. You are speaking with that government office, with that university, with that, whatever it may be.
Malcolm Collins: No, this is what people say. I think that's a lie.
Simone Collins: Business just won an RFP. You know why? Because we basically made sure that we were going to win it ahead of time.
No, I'm not kidding you. So like during the final bidding [00:21:00] process, came back to us and they're like, all you have to do is lower your price to this and you're going to win it. And then we did, and we just won it. So sorry. Are you
Malcolm Collins: allowed to say that? Do I need to cut part of this?
Simone Collins: I think it's okay.
I'm not naming the climate. Like, sorry, I'm not naming the client. Here's
Malcolm Collins: what I would say next. Because this is actually a final thing that's important to note. As a lot of people will be like, well, I have this skill, right? What I'm going to do is I'm going to start a business around this skill.
Like I'm good at consulting in this area, or I'm good at. Oh my god, like, don't do something like making jewelry or fashion, like, that will, I'm making jewelry now.
She's making jewelry now She's got her own website She crafts each piece by hand The dining room table is mine and
making jewelry. She got her life.
Simone Collins: Well, unless you have, like, 5 million followers, in which case, totally, start your tequila brand, start your jewelry. In which case, you're
Malcolm Collins: just milking followers.
But let's, let's, sorry, I gotta, I gotta be clear [00:22:00] here. The reason not to do this is because then your business isn't sellable. And it's something to keep in mind is that your, is your business sellable. So if your business is like non differentiated, like if you have a landscaping company and you have a bunch of people working for you, you can sell that, right?
Like, and you can sell that after only like building it out for like three years and then have like 10 million to your name or something, right. Pretty easily. But you know, if you've grown it to any extent and we can talk about how to do that, but. If you're doing something where you are the key player, right, it's never going to be sellable.
Like if I'm doing a consulting business or a, a, a law business where I am the key player, well, no one's going to want to buy you for that. But like a consulting business over some area that I have some specialty, I'm never going to be able to sell that because I am the key person in that
Simone Collins: business. It is referred to as key man risk.
And like sometimes even like, even if you have really important salespeople, it will scare. It will scare people who are looking to buy. Cause they're like, man, so much of this business depends on this one person. That's a little bit too risky. Can I close with just returning to your [00:23:00] mother's statement of just ask for more money?
Malcolm Collins: Hold on before we close. There's one more thing I need to say about key man risk. If you are going into one of these businesses, like if you have some skill set and you're like, I think I could do this on my own, which you're really going to need to learn. It's how to do math, cold outreach. And that is for a separate video or for something to you explore on your own.
But if you're like, I have this skillset and I don't understand how my company gets all these clients can learn how to build a sales pipeline. That could be another video for us and how to do math, cold outreach.
Simone Collins: Well, just like with finding a partner, right? You, you, you're not going to just. You know, approach five people and find your wife.
So as I was saying we've been advised to just ask for more money. Now an employee can do this 100 percent and also like key employees can do this and, and pretty consistently get higher wages. There's a risk to this that I think a lot of people don't consider. And so I just want to end with this one warning in terms of the just ask for more.
If someone does end up paying you more, if your boss pays you more the more salary you end up making, the more it means that you're going to be the first person on the chopping [00:24:00] block when, you know, your, your business goes through some kind of hard point because they're going to look at, okay. Who right now is costing me the very most, you know, what, what is the most expensive thing I can cut?
And so if you are not making that is like literally provably bringing in more money than you are costing, the more money that you demand, the more you put yourself at risk for being fired. So I just wanted to end with that because it's so You
Malcolm Collins: can get that raise in the short term, but you are now on the list to be fired. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of employees, they don't realize when they're asking us, they've come to us and I think they walk away feeling great because they got the raise and they don't understand that now they're on the fired
Simone Collins: list.
Well, and the most important thing too is you know, people, when they ask for raises, it's often like, Oh, you know, my family, this, or I just had this surgery that, or, you know, whatever, like, Oh, it's just been really hard for me or my rent's really high. The business does not care about your personal life.
The business cares about how essential you [00:25:00] are for the business, making money. So you really, when you want to ask for a raise, you need to basically show, demonstrate that you are making more money than you're asking for. And that if they want to keep getting that money from you, that they need to pay you more, but that they're going to make more money from you being there than from you not being there.
And none of
Malcolm Collins: this is CEO cruelty or anything like that. Your value to the business is literally what you cost the business. Less than what you make the business, the higher that cushion is, the more job security you have less than that. The more you were milking for the company, but the less job security you have because you are literally worse, less to the company.
Simone Collins: So just something to consider because it really astounds us as CEOs, like how little people get that. Like, we're just like, I, you know, I love you and I love your family and I love whatever you like.
Malcolm Collins: We never ask our board for raises. We are, we are so underpaid at this point that I think we're basically unfireable because they, we could never be replaced, which is what we [00:26:00] wanted.
We wanted job security more than wells. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Love
Simone Collins: you, Simone. Love you too, Malcolm..
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