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My First MillionThis Man Got Richer Than Jeff Bezos With A Boring Business (#361)
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Kanye vs Adidas: Yeezy feud spills into board callouts and a quirky Donda Academy
Sam recaps Kanye West’s ongoing fight with Adidas around the Yeezy partnership, describing public threats and posting photos of board members. They also poke fun at Kanye’s Donda Academy website and curriculum, noting odd details like the site design and activities such as parkour.
- •Sam outlines the scale of Yeezy revenue and Kanye’s alleged complaints about Adidas stealing designs and excluding him from meetings
- •Kanye’s social posts target Adidas board members and link their other roles to his grievances
- •The discussion detours into Donda Academy’s website, navigation items, and unusual presentation
- •They read parts of the school’s schedule, including worship, enrichment classes, choir, and after-school parkour
- •They frame the segment as entertaining but also tinged with concern about Kanye’s behavior
Billy of the Week: Gautam Adani rises to the world’s #3 richest—through ports, power, and industrial scale
Shaan introduces Gautam Adani and explains why many people haven’t heard of him despite his rank among the world’s richest. They walk through Adani’s business focus on industrial infrastructure like ports and power, plus a personal story Shaan shares about trying to involve Adani in a port project.
- •Shaan positions Adani as newly the third richest person and contrasts him with tech founders
- •Adani’s businesses are described as industrial: coal, ports, plastics, and power
- •Shaan tells a story about pitching Adani to build a port in Australia due to Adani’s reputation in ports
- •Adani’s early life is summarized: dropping out, sorting diamonds, becoming a broker, then scaling into plastics and trading
- •They mention Adani Group having multiple publicly listed companies under the broader umbrella
Debt-fueled expansion and the ‘house of cards’ question around Adani’s structure
Shaan describes skepticism around Adani’s heavy use of debt and complex financial structuring. Sam reacts by contrasting this with his preference for simple business models, questioning how money ultimately flows and gets repaid in more engineered setups.
- •Shaan describes Adani’s acquisition approach and heavy debt usage across interconnected companies
- •They discuss the idea of leveraging public listings, share pledges, loans, and bonds as a growth engine
- •Shaan raises the open question of whether the structure is stable or could collapse
- •Sam explains feeling self-conscious about not understanding complex ‘financial engineering’ compared with straightforward buy-low/sell-high models
- •They reflect on how people gain an advantage by mastering financing mechanics
Learning financial engineering: borrowing against assets, curiosity, and the CFO mindset
They broaden from Adani into how entrepreneurs learn financing tools like borrowing against stock and using debt strategically. Shaan argues it’s a progression for builders to learn how to keep more money and leverage capital efficiently, and shares an example of a finance-obsessed operator who prefers being a CFO over a CEO.
- •Sam recounts struggling to understand borrowing against stock until a banker walked him through it
- •Shaan explains why borrowing can preserve ownership while avoiding taxes triggered by selling
- •They discuss how builders often start with product and sales, then later learn capital structure and efficiency
- •Shaan references Xavier from Enduring Ventures and his interest in financing structures
- •They mention Xavier’s experience building a solar business and learning underwriting and debt access as a ‘necessary evil’ that became a fascination
MrBeast’s ‘translation/internationalization machine’ for global YouTube growth
Shaan shifts to MrBeast and argues his most interesting business isn’t YouTube, chocolate, or burgers—it’s his translation and dubbing expansion into international markets. They describe how MrBeast invests heavily in high-quality dubbing and local channel management to unlock massive additional viewership.
- •Shaan describes seeing MrBeast’s international channels and being surprised by fluent-language versions of his videos
- •They explain the strategy: reuse expensive core videos by localizing them for big YouTube markets
- •MrBeast hires local country managers to run platform accounts, uploads, and community engagement
- •They highlight the decision to hire top-tier voice talent (e.g., a well-known dub voice) rather than cheap translation
- •Shaan emphasizes the principle of doing the ‘doper thing’ to create stronger audience impact
Productizing the internal machine: MrBeast offers localization as a service to other creators
Shaan explains that MrBeast turned localization from a brand-expansion tactic into a service business for other YouTubers, taking a share of international ad revenue. Sam reacts by suggesting this could out-earn consumer businesses like chocolate, given the economics and scalability.
- •Shaan describes the service model: MrBeast’s team handles translation, channel ops, and community management for other creators
- •They discuss revenue sharing, framed as creators giving up a portion of incremental international ad revenue
- •Shaan argues a single in-country team can support many creators, making the model efficient
- •Sam compares likely profitability to Feastables and discusses challenges of scaling physical consumer products
- •They reference MrBeast’s ability to draw massive crowds to physical launches, underscoring his distribution power
Turning cost centers into profit centers: AWS and beyond (media, warehouses, charcoal, APIs)
They generalize the MrBeast model into a broader business pattern: converting an internal expense into a standalone profit engine. They run through examples across tech, media, logistics, and manufacturing by describing how internal capabilities become products.
- •Shaan uses AWS as the flagship example: internal server infrastructure turned into a rental service
- •They discuss FreightWaves/FreightAlley as a media arm becoming profitable while feeding the SaaS funnel
- •Sam shares an anecdote about a founder building an aviation-themed real estate community and using media to support it
- •Shaan mentions D2C brands turning warehouses into fulfillment services for others
- •They cover Ford’s leftover wood becoming Kingsford charcoal and cite Foursquare’s data API becoming a core business
The trap of ‘we should sell our internal tool’: Slack vs publisher CMS distractions
Sam adds a caution: while spinning out internal tools can be great, it can also be a distraction for small teams. They contrast successful cases like Slack with examples where companies tried to commercialize internal systems and struggled, and Sam emphasizes timing and organizational scale.
- •Sam uses Slack’s origin story: a game team built an internal comms tool and pivoted to productize it
- •He argues many publishers tried selling custom CMS platforms and often found it distracting
- •Sam notes AWS wasn’t launched by a tiny startup; he cites Amazon having about 5,000 employees at launch
- •They discuss how small teams may not have the bandwidth to support a second product line
- •Shaan and Sam reference The Hustle’s internal email/ads tooling as something they considered productizing
Can ‘small-looking’ markets become massive? Beehiiv, founder execution, and non-obvious categories
Their internal-tool discussion turns into a debate about market size for newsletter platforms and similar creator tools. Shaan explains why he invested in beehiiv after experiencing the founder’s responsiveness and because some ‘niche’ markets unexpectedly become huge; Sam remains skeptical about certain ad-driven newsletter economics.
- •Sam questions whether newsletter infrastructure companies can become truly massive venture-scale businesses
- •Shaan describes investing after seeing fast execution and product iteration from the founder while using it as a customer
- •They talk about how markets that appear niche can grow into major behaviors and categories
- •Shaan cites past examples of underestimated ideas becoming huge, including streaming and e-commerce platforms
- •They note the common mistake of judging a new category by older, plateaued predecessors
Big outcomes even founders didn’t predict: Airbnb, Amazon, and early Zuckerberg expectations
They reinforce the ‘markets can surprise you’ theme with stories where even founders underestimated scale. Sam recounts a YC-era story about increasing numbers in pitches, and Shaan recalls an early clip where Zuckerberg downplayed the need for Facebook to expand beyond colleges.
- •Sam shares a story about advice to replace ‘millions’ with ‘billions’ in pitch expectations
- •He recounts a story of Bezos pitching a comparatively modest revenue target early on
- •Shaan describes an early Zuckerberg interview where he questioned why Facebook needed to get bigger
- •They contrast those early attitudes with later reality as companies scaled dramatically
- •The segment bridges into Zuckerberg’s present-day persona and decision-making
Team Zuck: MMA training, public perception, and decision-making under impossible scrutiny
Shaan and Sam react to a video of Zuckerberg training MMA and argue it humanizes him and challenges common stereotypes. They discuss the idea that operating a giant communication platform forces imperfect tradeoffs, using an example from a long-form interview where Zuckerberg is asked how he’d handle misinformation controversies.
- •They describe Zuckerberg’s MMA clip as surprisingly impressive and evidence of commitment
- •Shaan argues much of the hate stems from awkwardness and that critics overlook what he built
- •They discuss the impossibility of staying ‘neutral’ when every moderation choice angers one side
- •Sam highlights a moment where Zuckerberg asks, ‘How would you handle it?’ to frame the difficulty
- •They characterize Zuckerberg as a relentless competitor who keeps trying to improve products despite constant scrutiny
‘Personal Chadification’: tech leaders training, and fitness as identity and mental reset
They riff on a tweet about tech leaders lifting and training, then expand into their own fitness routines and motivations. Sam advocates lifting and diet changes as life-improving, while Shaan describes exercise as a forced form of presence—more like practical meditation than physique optimization.
- •Shaan quotes a tweet framing tech leaders’ shift toward lifting and training as a broader trend
- •Sam says he’s been pursuing this for years and describes feeling happier and healthier from lifting and diet changes
- •They reference mobility work and myofascial release practices as part of training routines
- •Shaan explains the biggest benefit for him: an hour of focused presence away from screens and work thoughts
- •They end with a comedic tangent about extreme hypotheticals, acknowledging they’ve gone off the rails
