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How to Do Good AND Make Money | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

"If you want to do good, make money." Po-Shen Loh, a social entrepreneur and Carnegie Mellon math professor who coached the US Math Olympiad team for a decade, learned this from a philanthropist he'd approached for a donation. The answer: don't ask for money, make it, then use it to do good. He'd already seen the trap: if you lose money on every person you help, you stay dependent on philanthropy forever. Impact without sustainability doesn't last. So for 10 years, he's been building situations where, in his words, "2+2=5," in which everyone involved comes out ahead. And he finally made one that checks all the boxes: LIVE, a venture operating on margins over 50% where the profit funds the mission. We asked him to explain how it works. 00:00 Intro 01:15 Make 2+2=5 06:32 We Invented a Better Model 13:01 Learning From What Didn't Work to Build What Does 17:23 How to Get Paid to Do Good 22:12 Try Everything But Quit 25:41 The Best Time to Be a Social Entrepreneur --- Begin your 2-week free trial with Attio, the AI-native CRM platform to power your growth👉https://attio.com/eo --- EO is a global media brand for builders. We tell the defining stories of founders shaping the future: people who see what others don't and build what they believe in. Subscribe to EO: https://www.youtube.com/@eoglobal EO Magazine: https://www.eomag.io Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eostudio.official/ X: https://x.com/eostudi0 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eo-studio EO Studio: https://eo.team/ Business inquiries: partner@eoeoeo.net Build what you believe in.

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Jul 23, 202631mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:001:15

    Intro

    1. PL

      Hi, I'm Po-Shen Loh. I'm a mathematician, but more I'm a social entrepreneur. And what that means is I'm interested in trying to solve some real problems for real people, and that's my main driving force for what I do. But in order to do that, you need to have money. So we use the method of entrepreneurship to have enough money to try to solve social causes. It's not quite a nonprofit. We don't want to only do things that will cost us money and require donations for every single person we help. Because if we lose value on every person we help, we then are completely dependent on philanthropy. Instead, the question is how to create an engine so that we can make money on each person we help, so that we can make more help. Don't start by thinking of something super grand like, "I'm gonna make a new foundation AI model." You can start much, much simpler. It's a different-- a totally different mindset. Of course, there are things that you're passionate about because you're watching this from a social perspective. Great. That means that you see that there are people who need help. What are they paying for to help give them that help? [piano music] [keyboard clicking]

  2. 1:156:32

    Make 2+2=5

    1. PL

      So I've run three different ventures for about ten years. I came to really appreciate social entrepreneurship as figuring out how to create value in the world, solving other people's problems in a way where everybody who's involved all gets some gain in the entire system. It's important that we also keep some of the value. If you need money for every person you help, we then are completely dependent on philanthropy. You need to ask for more and more and more money. And my eventual observation was for social entrepreneurship, if what you're doing really does, on average, make the world a better place, then you're actually creating value out of nothing. That's true. That's actually possible. Sometimes the whole is bigger than the sum of their parts. Two plus two equals five sometimes. That's a good thing. So I go and find the situations where two plus two equals five. I try to make sure that everyone who's involved in the whole thing, employees, partners, customers, you name it, everyone needs to get a net gain of value. A customer can get a net gain of value even if they pay you, because they feel like they paid you for something, and they got more than what they paid out of it. Okay? So once I figure out this whole system, then on the net, we actually even gain money per person we help. Well, actually, so far, that's just normal entrepreneurship. What makes it social is that I happen to have control of the company. If the control of the company is in the hands of people who just want money, you have to just make sure you make a lot of money. But with what we did, we managed to reach profitability early enough that I actually still have control of the company. So the kinds of decisions that we make are not purely designed to just maximize profit. The whole point, I guess, of entrepreneurship is to scale stuff. That allows us to have a very, very rich experience. At that stage, it cannot just be that I do everything myself. So then I started to think, "What are ways to do this?" There are people who try to do this through technology, maybe recording videos of themselves and then letting everyone see those videos. But I guess because I'm a network theorist, I like to think of ways that I can use my abilities to construct a network or to cause a network to come together, and then the network itself has value. Always looking for where is two plus two equals to five. I want to find all of these. And one such place is when you bring people together. A very simple example of why is because you could imagine that there's a person over here who has too much of one thing and not enough of a second thing. Then you could imagine there's another person who has not enough of the first thing and too much of the second thing, the opposite. So if you can find these two people, if you introduce them to each other, they will thank you because they will just go switch, right? The one that has too much of one will give to the one who's not enough, and the other way around. In fact, they might even pay for it, and they're thankful to you. You've created value. Two plus two is now five. That's the value of a network in the simplest way for one link. Or it can get even more complicated situations where with all of these different people, between all of them, their needs and their wants balance, where everyone gets a net gain. You can create a lot of value by creating a network instead. That's how I invented the LIVE product. The LIVE product is where you have win-win situation. In fact, the experience we deliver is two high schoolers who are kind and really, really clever, really good at math. We incentivize them to teach by hiring professional actors who supervise them and give them real-time feedback while they live stream math lessons to eleven, twelve, and thirteen year olds. This exchange is very beneficial for the older kid because there are a lot of people in the world who are very good at math for whom, uh, learning communication skills would be good for them, right? It helps them in their entire life. Okay, so they wanna join. We find professional actors who are looking for part-time, paid remote work jobs. We give them a great deal. They then guarantee the class is good. We also put two teaching assistants in every classroom. The teaching assistants actually are usually not from the US, for the only reason being that our classes are US evenings, and I had a hard time hiring people who wanted to work their main work every day in the night. But then I realized that in Malaysia and in the Philippines, it's perfect daylight hours when ours is evenings. Okay, we can make another win-win situation. And then as, as a net result, we make all of these classes which can teach the middle school kids, and the classes that we make end up being really fun. It's like they're taught by people who are a little bit older. The people are coached by actors, so they're funny. The people are super smart anyway. So suddenly we're creating a product where everyone wins.

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    3. PL

      [keyboard clicking]

  3. 6:3213:01

    We Invented a Better Model

    1. PL

      So I have this XB is the big organizing company for all of them. It's actually a for-profit company. And so underneath it, we can have all kinds of different things. We do have an xb.com website. We actually also have that Novid app, and we also have the LIVE classes. And actually, the LIVE happens to make enough money that it also pays for XB at this point. Novid, we also pay for through the LIVE. So these, these two things which are, like, the do-good stuff, we are actually just paying for ourselves. People are curious, How in the world does this support all of these different social ventures? Well, that's designed to be approximately 23 US dollars per hour for each student who's taking the class. We set that by looking at the entire market and seeing what are people willing to pay for extracurricular math classes. Honestly, we could probably have charged way more. Like, we could probably have bumped that price way higher to 30, 40 or so because what we have teaching-- the people who we have teaching are extraordinary. And out of these, out of these high school students that have taught these classes, 30 of them ended up going to MIT, six of them ended up going to Harvard. I don't think that is necessarily what makes you strong, but I, I mention this because many people who go for the tutoring ads, they will say, "Oh, get tutored by a Harvard person." You know the price is gonna go nuts. So what I'm explaining is the kinds of service that we're delivering should be very expensive. Then why in the world do we only charge 23? It's because we, we can. It's because we have another breakthrough. We made a 30-person class more fun than a one-person class. Not just more fun, more effective. This is where when you're trying to make a breakthrough, you do need to have innovation in a startup. Startups cannot usually just go and say, "We will do what everyone else is doing." No, no, no. There has to be some innovation. Before us, everyone thought if you do an online math class, math is boring. You cannot have more than five kids in the room because no one's gonna pay attention. Five kids, you stare at them. Like w-with a Zoom call, if there are five kids and one teacher, you can see everyone, and if they're not paying attention, you say, "Jimmy, what do you think?" That is how everyone thought online math class has to be because they assumed it's boring. They also assumed that the way that the math class worked was that you tell the kids what to do, and you walk them through the steps. We fundamentally changed both of these philosophies. The first is our math class is not trying to teach you how to do a standard method. Our math class is trying to teach you how to generate your own idea if you've never seen something before. So we constantly ask the students, "Here's a problem that you've never seen before, anything like it. What do you think you should do?" We've actually observed that if there are only five kids, brainstorming is hard. They just very quietly sit and stare at each other because no one has any ideas. You need enough people. Okay, I've just proven why five is worse than more. But the second thing is I've actually seen examples of online interactions where more is better: livestreams. If there are only five people watching the livestream, it feels dead, and that's because of the chat. So what I discovered was that in a livestream format, which is what all the kids are used to today, they like to be in something where the chat is flowing with lots of nice, fun, happy, and productive contributions. That happens when you have 30. If you have five, you don't have that. If you have 30, you do have that. If you do 30 though, you have to be careful. There could be nonsense. With Zoom, the problem is if anyone put a bad message, it was there forever. There was no way to delete a bad message. So I was analyzing this and realizing, "Aha, because those bad messages stay forever, that's why the teachers shut off the kids chatting," or they told the kids only say the answer because they were afraid the kid will say some bad something. So I said, "Then I need to build a little piece of software to put moderation." So on our system, we actually use a different chat system by which the students can suggest things, and then we actually go and we filter out every bad message, and we only let the good messages through. Good could include the wrong answer. That's fine. Uh, like being bold and trying to suggest the wrong answer is fine. But saying, "That was dumb," nope, that gets cut out. So once we built this system, then it became more like the online livestream vibe. Suddenly 30 kids is better than five kids. Now 30 times $23 an hour is good. You see, the point is that there's a unit economics. The way I think about money is I think about the unit economics, which means every unit of product that we deliver, how much did it cost to create and how much do we earn from doing it? If you were selling at $23 an hour and you have five people inside paying you, you will only make $115 an hour, and you have to share that among all the different people who are doing this thing. We can take 23 times 30. 23 times 30 is much bigger. That's 690 an hour. That's close to $700 an hour. So our situation is that our unit economics have $700 an hour going in approximately, and then we have to spend some money going out. The net is that we probably only spend like half of that. The net result is we end up getting profit margins over 50%, and that's how we can go and support all of the other things that we do. You have to take into account the fact that we have to train the high school students, and that's actually very expensive because the high school students leave after two years. Oh my gosh, this is a terrible business method. I don't wanna say model 'cause business model is a word. But this business method most other people would never wanna do because your teaching staff has to renew every year. This is ridiculous. Like, there's a huge amount of effort that we spend teaching our high schoolers how to teach. The reason we wanna do that is because I'm a social entrepreneur, and we see that as a very valuable output that we're creating, a network of kind and clever and very well-spoken high schoolers who grow up and will change the world. We don't get money back from that, but that's a good we're providing for society. We will do it just because we think it's a good thing to do. But this is why I also know as an entrepreneur, I don't expect any venture-backed startup to try to fight with us on this. It would be too painful for them. It, it's like a lot of pain to keep working with all these high schoolers unless you intrinsically think there's a value in spewing these wonderful people out into the world because they're not gonna make any more money for you. You know, you train them up to do great things, and then you don't get any of the money. But we're willing to do it. Okay. Right. But so the net result is we end up getting profit margins over 50%, and that's how we can go and support all of the other things that we do. Like, all the other things that we do are funded by this, the fact that we have an excess on this one thing. Why do we have an excess on this one thing? It's because we invented a better model. [gentle music]

  4. 13:0117:23

    Learning From What Didn't Work to Build What Does

    1. PL

      [keyboard clacking] When I started, I thought, "Oh, every company that gets to lots and lots of users makes money." That's what I thought at the beginning. That's actually wrong. I mean, even the xp.com website, at its height, we would get half a million people coming through every month. We never made any money off of it. Ultimately, it's useful to always be thinking, "Are there ways that you can go through and get all the way to success?" And it's also good to understand whether, oh, wait, those people are coming through, but they're only coming through and spending 15 seconds. We didn't see a good way to convert into revenue. We actually ran out of money. So you see, the original xp.com, we were funded initially by some investors, and at that point, we thought maybe we could make this into, like, make an absolute ton of money in the usual Silicon Valley way. Then we realized we're not gonna be able to grow that fast, and we also found out that what we were doing was of interest to philanthropy because we were doing good work for people. So I thought, "Okay, well, philanthropy is even better because that's not with equity attached. Then you don't lose control of the company. Let's try doing that for a while." And in fact, we actually did get a big amount of philanthropy, and I got very excited because I thought, "Okay, we can do this with philanthropy now." And then at some point, the philanthropy got not interested in funding anymore. That's how I learned nonprofit is dangerous because if you ever stop getting funding, you're out. So unfortunately, I couldn't get new funding on the philanthropy side. But the reason we were able to do that is because we accidentally found a way to make some money with a totally different product. What's happening here is that there's an xp.com free website to learn math. We started that in 2014. In 2018, December, a Chinese company, a Chinese startup company, found me and said, "Can you make some video recordings of your math class? People will buy it." I said, "Are you serious? You can't sell recorded math classes." I just didn't think it would work. But they thought it would work, so I said, "Okay, fine, I'll try it." I was on the way to Bangladesh anyway. I was trying to go and do some other social impact stuff there. And so I stopped in Shanghai for three days, filmed something, and then they actually started making money. Small amount, but enough so that we didn't need to raise any more investments. This is actually how I know there's another way to make a company. It's through bootstrapping. Because even though the original xp.com didn't go anywhere, these other things that we built, we didn't use the original investor money. We actually used bootstrapped money earned from these math classes sold in China. So I want to emphasize it is okay to make money. Actually, I learned this from a philanthropist. It was a life-changing conversation I had with a philanthropist because I was asking him for money. By that time, we actually also get donations for the kinds of work that we did, which was more on the nonprofit route. And then when I was talking to that philanthropist, he said, "Well, since you have a way of making money, just make money, and then use the money to do good." And what he commented was, "If you make the money, then you can spend it." What a concept. Actually, once I learned that that was happening, that's when I said, "Okay, how do we make better and better and better versions, always using what we've already earned to make the next one?" So we were very, very, very, very tight on money, very disciplined. If we earn money, we can use the money we've earned and try to make more money and try to make more out of it and more out of it and more out of it. Because we had all of that going on, what happened in January 2020, we had to let go of a lot of our team because the original thing that we were doing was not making money growth, and it was also not what the philanthropist was interested in anymore. That then just wouldn't work. Unfortunately, that one had to fold down. So that was, that was painful because these are people that I enjoyed working with, and unfortunately that had to end. If my 2014 self was watching this about to start XP, what I would tell that person is, "Make sure that whatever you come up with has a way of actually making money that you can see. Don't start with something that just gets big and then figure out how to make money later. Figure out how to make money first." But I think the bigger lesson is just, can you reach profitability without losing control of your company? That's probably the bigger point because the, the main thing is if you have lost control of your company and then you start doing the stuff like giving away free stuff, you're gonna have to deal with some investors asking you, "Why exactly are you doing that?" Even if it makes long-term financial sense, it could be that doing that, you'll make even more sales later. But maybe the investor is shortsighted. You never know. So the control becomes important.

  5. 17:2322:12

    How to Get Paid to Do Good

    1. PL

      [gentle music] [keyboard clacking] So the important thing is we have a thing that can make money. The live classes, interestingly enough, under them, there's two kinds of live classes. One kind of live classes are the ones where the students pay for the classes, so that one we make money from, and we also have the classes going for free to rural kids. And we are about to open some classes going for free to Africa too. We use some of our money to give away the free classes, but there's also a lot of donations which come in which like what we're doing. The way that works is that there's a separate 501 [c] [3] American language for nonprofit registered charity. So there's a separate nonprofit entity They are our fiscal sponsor. So what that means is when someone wants to donate to the causes that we're doing, they actually donate to that charity. Now, that charity then buys, then contracts us to do the work. For example, we're giving away free classes. Donations go into the nonprofit. The nonprofit then pays us, and then we deliver the free classes. The easiest way to understand this flow is there are often situations where people will donate laptops to schools. The way that always works is that the money donates to a nonprofit entity. The nonprofit entity then buys laptops from Apple or from Google. Apple and Google are for-profit entities, but they just happen to make really good laptops that are well-suited for this particular market. And it happens to be that the nonprofit made the decision the best vendor to source for these laptops is Apple or Google or whatever. So our situation is that we just make the best from a cost perspective and a quality perspective advanced math lessons, and then the nonprofit entity chooses us to deliver those services. It is actually possible to get philanthropic dollars for work that you're doing if what you're doing is you're delivering it to groups that would otherwise not have bought it for some reason. Because we have that discipline to make a product that people will actually buy, and also keeping the price point low, interestingly enough, then it's easier to make a case for the nonprofit that this is the best way to spend those dollars. If a nonprofit was buying laptops for a school, they wouldn't want to buy overpriced bad laptops. Now, what was the most compelling to the, the people who were donating for charity, it was that the thing works. Uh, now here's an important detail. When we started, a lot of people thought the things we were doing were way too ambitious. "What? You're gonna get a bunch of high school students who are good at math, and you're gonna teach them how to be funny? And you're telling me that there will be people who will take these classes? And there are so many things that are hard to do in that space." At the beginning, people were like, "It's not gonna work. How are, how are you gonna build this thing? It's a dream." Okay, that's the value of being a social entrepreneur. We make money. So we use the fact that we made money actually on a different product to pay for, to bootstrap the creation of the first two classes taught by two students each. We made money. Once we made money, we made more money. Then we made more money, then we made enough money that we had extra money. With the extra money, I started going to low-income neighborhoods to see with my own eyes, wow, there are all these kids in these regions where they actually wanna learn math. They really do wanna learn math, and now we know how to find them. After we spent a lot of our money doing it, we're able to go and build out the whole rural side. At this point, we're teaching over a hundred of these underprivileged kids, and they're having a great time. Once we got the first class of Montana kids, those kids are awesome. Like, those kids are just really interested in learning. They wouldn't have had the opportunity otherwise. They're very engaged. They have very high potential as well. Now that we're already doing it, it's very easy to go and explain to other philanthropists, "See? It works. We got this." For the philanthropists, I found the biggest thing that helped was to be able to show it already works on some small scale. Actually, these days, if I was doing it again, I wouldn't take a single investor. In fact, the whole thing I'm doing right now doesn't use the investors. The only reason we have investors is because I'm giving them back for what they supported me a long time ago. If I didn't do that, we would have zero investors, and we would still be able to do everything we did. And my first thought is, if you're trying to make something where you're getting investor backing, think very carefully, is that really the right thing to do, right? Maybe the answer is no. Unless you have investors who for some reason are themselves very interested in social things. So if you can see what I'm saying, now it becomes a question of can you find the right investor? It probably won't be a venture capital fund. A venture capital fund is a bunch of people who are responsible for taking care of other people's money become bigger. But an individual investor who's already made it in life and wants to see some good stuff happen in the world, they might give to you out of this idea that, yeah, some of it's also because it's for good. Think that those high schoolers who graduate out of our network, I expect some of them to get very, very wealthy because of the skill sets they have, and they'll be very wealthy people who care about people. They might actually be happy to do, uh, this kind of an investment. That's actually why I'm building this network.

  6. 22:1225:41

    Try Everything But Quit

    1. PL

      [keyboard clacking] If I had thought it would be hard, I don't know if I'd have dared to try. So I'm actually very happy that I thought it would be easy, and it turned out to not be easy. But I also don't like giving up. I've never seriously considered quitting. I think the reason I wouldn't ever quit is because I'm lucky enough that I'm cash flow positive. I want to emphasize, the earlier you can get revenue and get cash flow positive, the better. Because then the only thing that might happen is you go slower. If you're cash flow negative, you can just run out of money. You can become cash flow negative by hiring more people. What I mean by cash flow positive is you have a unit in your business which that unit entirely can generate enough money to power itself, so to speak, right? Your, your, your company needs to have a piece where if you lost everything except that piece, you would be profitable. Then with that, you can grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I don't ever need to give up. It just means I slow down if I need to, down to that core, and then rebuild again. If you're a social entrepreneur and you chose you care about certain things, if you have the power to not give up because you have a profitable core, then you would say, "Why in the world do I give up? I should just go and find a way to make this work." A lot of people give up because they don't like failing. I don't like succeeding too fast. This is actually how I operate. I'll give an example of something that's totally different but will... but it's very easy to explain. I was at one point organizing a conference, and so I was in charge of the conference committee. We were going to invite speakers. I had some people working with me. So we were gonna have nine speakers. So I told the people who were working with me, I said, "Make a list of 90 people. I want that when you reach out to speakers, I want that your statistical success rate ended up being 10%." If your success rate was too high, like 80%, that means you asked for people who are not famous enough. You see, you aim too low. So if your success rate is 1%, you aim too high. 10% is good. It just takes you 10 times as long. And this at first, the people were, "What?" You know, 10 times-- 10% success. Honestly, the things I work on are, like, 1% success, or .1% success. I don't wanna attack something unless I think it's really unlikely. What that means is, if I get it, it's gonna be huge, okay? So I actually expect that I try something, it doesn't work. I did this video interview with you guys the first time, the, the EO one that got to three million views or whatever, more than three million now. I'd done a lot more [laughs] , a lot more video interviews with a lot more people, but I didn't mind that some of the ones I did maybe only one thousand views. It's because I expect it to be hard, right? And then finally, we got one. This is successful. But I don't look to always be getting this, then I look to get even harder. So then I wanna go and try things that are even harder and even harder and even harder. Like the thing I'm trying to do now, which is to get explosion of science and technology across rural America. That's hard. No one's ever done that before. But I actually think we'll be able to pull it off. When I first started thinking of this, that was one whole year ago. I didn't have anything at that time. I was just like, "Let me try. I think there might be something here." So I think the important thing is to feel like you want to see that what you tried was too hard, because that's how you know you're trying hard enough things. If the things you try work too fast, you're not gonna make a breakthrough. You're aiming too low. Feel like I cheated myself if it was successful too early. It's like, yeah, of course it won't work, but I'm gonna try, and you just try, try, try, try, try. One works and bam, now it's big. That's a new story. Then you can make another big jump from there. [instrumental music]

  7. 25:4130:54

    The Best Time to Be a Social Entrepreneur

    1. PL

      I think that in the age of AI, social entrepreneurship is even more important because there will be some very, very successful companies. And in the old days, a very successful company would translate into wealth for normal people. When a company became very successful, it had to hire lots of people, and so all the people under it would gain some money out of it. In the age of AI, a very successful, economically successful company might be able to do it with very few people because it can use AI for the rest. So then what you'd end up seeing is you'd end up seeing that capitalistic, that company did well, uh, the investors did well, the owners did well, but it didn't trickle down too much to the rest of the people. You see, because capital doesn't have a soul. Capital is just money, and the money makes more money. Investors often are controlling other people's capital. They're just making money into more money into more money. So these days, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach the entrepreneurial skills to people who really do care about the world and hopefully help more of these people maybe be able to create their own ventures where they still maintain control. I think that this particular time in history is one of the best times for young people to get involved in business and I hope social entrepreneurship. Because these days, if you have some idea, you can actually use AI. You used to need to get a lot of money invested in, in order to get moving. You used to have to hire a software engineer, or maybe not just one, a whole team of software engineers. Just this morning, I was using, uh, Anthropic's Claude in order to do a whole bunch of software engineering. It's really good. You can use AI to help you write slogans. You can use AI to help you with marketing. Pretty soon there will be AI agents which can help you co-- do communications. So it turns out that today you might not need to get much investment in order to get something off the ground. So the real question then becomes, can you come up with something that people would actually pay for? Could you become profitable without losing control of your venture? I think the answer is yes. So the idea is don't think first about how you make a big complicated thing where you need to spend a lot of money first. Many people hear about the glorious startups in Silicon Valley. Those are glorious, but there are actually very mundane ways to do things too, where you don't start by having something huge. Then you can maintain control of your company. [instrumental music] Some people wonder if I'm altruistic because I seem to want to make this world a better place. Actually, I'm just really selfish. It turns out that what makes me happy is making other people happy. That's what I do for fun. Now, this is a funny thing. I actually do really enjoy doing something and seeing a whole room of very, like, smiling faces. It's just fun. That's why I like teaching. That's why I like performing. That's why I like giving talks. So actually, I'm just a really selfish guy. But you see, why, why I said this is because I think that the more people in the world that there are who discover just how much fun it is to make other people's lives really bright, that's gonna make a great world. I do happen to think that you'll feel really good when you go and make someone else happy, so I would like to introduce that to you. I'd like to show you that this is, this is a thing, and then you might decide that you'd like to do this too. So I'm one of these guys who's not gonna go there and say, "You must change." No, I'll tell you, I think, I think you might like it. If you don't change, well, it's, it's your life. I'm not gonna get into your way. But I wanna make sure that all of these people that we can show this to, we give them a chance, so to speak. Maybe after seeing these things you're thinking, "Hmm, I wanna try this too." So a realistic thing to do right away is to think, "Are there things that people are paying for that I can do better than what they're paying for?" Start thinking, "Can I make a much better version of that?" Or rather, "Can I make something that really answers their pain point, and how much would it cost me to make that?" Don't start by thinking of something super grand, like, "I'm gonna make a new foundation AI model." Yes, sure, if you do that, you'll be also a billionaire. Very good. But you can start much, much simpler. There are lots of products in the world that people are paying for. It's a different-- a totally different mindset. And of course, there are things that you're passionate about because you're watching this from a social perspective. Great. That means that you see that there are people who need help. What are they paying for to help give them that help? Interestingly, you might find out that it doesn't cost you a huge amount of, amount of money to create. And if it does, keep shopping around. You don't have to do the first idea that comes to your mind. But once you find something that you can generate some cash, that will give you more freedom. Then you get this little core that makes some money. Then you start to make the core bigger and bigger. If there's one thing to take away and to remember, I think there's a huge value in people who really care about doing something bigger than themself. Find those people. Our network is not meant to be exclusive. We are not the only ones who know how to find this. As you go through the world, you can tell by looking at people's eyes whether some people really, really do care about these things. Become friends with them. The fact that you also are this kind of person will mean that someday, someday you guys might work together, or they might introduce you to someone else, and this will give you more and more and more and more ideas. The network is perhaps the most important part of your net worth these days. [outro music]

Episode duration: 31:12

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