My First Million

Iman Abuzeid (@ImanAbuzeid) just finished raising $15M for her nurse hiring platform Incredible Health which was led by Silicon Valley's premier venture fund Andreessen Horowitz. Growing up in a family where everyone (literally) were doctors, she naturally followed the same path. Except when she finished medical school and received her MD, she decided not to work as a doctor for even 1 day and went corporate. After being equipped with an MBA and consulting experience, she left to Silicon Valley to make her mark on the world. Listen to hear her story, her "framework" for how to think about your career, why she thinks being in silicon valley is a competitive advantage and how she pivoted her company from a failing startup to one of the most exciting startups of 2019. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Arianna Simpson (@AriannaSimpson) quit her comfortable job at Facebook to take a big bet on Bitcoin. She put over 50% of her net worth into Bitcoin back in 2014, and boy did it pay off. Now she's running a multi-million dollar hedge fund, is a renown speaker, and one of the most respected investors in cryptocurrency. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

John Fiorentino (@johnhfio) wants you to relax. And so far, its' working. He sold over $15 million worth of his product Gravity Blanket and Moon Pod. He talks to us about being broke, crashing on friends couches - to inventing and marketing the most popular blanket since the Snuggie, raising over $5 million on Kickstarter * why he thinks Silicon Valley is wasting too much time talking about tactics rather than focusing on making great products. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Brian Scudamore (@BrianScudamore) is North America’s Junk Man. He turned a $700 pickup truck into one of the world's most successful franchises. Hear how he got started, got on Oprah, stumbled and almost killed his business, and the philosophies he uses to run his multimillion dollar junk empire! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Aleks Svetski (@AleksSvetski) wanted to be a millionaire by 20... and he was on that path. He turned his $5K textbook money into more than $50,000 in the stock market! Until the 2008 global financial crisis hit... he didn't just lose all his money, he was negative quarter of a million. This setback ignited his entrepreneurial spirit where he started a door knocking hustle to get out his debt and make that cool million. Again, until the government betrayed his business and he went back to square one becoming a hippie on a sabbatical... and now he's back again with the lessons he's learned with his newfound passion: Bitcoin. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Season 2 of The Hustle's podcast is here - and we're talking to Moiz Ali (@moizali). Have you ever looked at the back of your deodorant stick and read the ingredients? Aluminum zirconium trichlorohydrex? PPG-14 Butyl Ether? Well, Moiz saw that and created Native, a natural deodorant without all the chemical junk. He built the company from his brother's dining table - doing sales, marketing, operations & customer service as a one-man-show. His hard work paid off, as he sold the company for $100M to Proctor & Gamble just 2.5 years after it launched. Listen in to hear the backstory of how he started using just $1k, how the company almost died (twice), and how he negotiated a $100M sale of the business! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There's a lot of you out there and we (showrunners Shaan Puri - @ShaanVP & Ishan Haque - @IshanHaq) wanna spend some time chatting to you and answer some of your questions about the pod, your hustle and any other random Q's your dying to ask. Should we make this a weekly thing? Let us know your feedback and questions to be answered in next weeks potential episode through messaging us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or even Facebook. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We have on Gelena (@gelenasays) & Keith Wasserman (@Keith_Wasserman), a husband and wife Real Estate duo who borrowed $5k during the end of the 2008 recession and have turned it into a $1.3 billion dollar portfolio. Learn how they create monthly income streams and sometimes double, triple or quadruple their equity from multi-family real estate. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Michael Birch sold his social networking site to AOL for $850M....and then bought it back for $1M years later. (buy low, sell high. boys and girls). His business portfolio is impressive. He's an early investor in companies like Calm and Pinterest, owns two giant hotels, and bought a private island off of Richard Branson. Despite all that success, he's a down to earth guy, and in this podcast he talks through his early struggles and failed ideas before he had his billion dollar breakthrough and reminisces his days being head to head with Zuckerberg. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jack Smith (@_jacksmith) is the most clever entrepreneur I know. He’s cofounded multiple startups: Vungle, Coin, Shyp. With Vungle recently selling for $750M. We talk about his early businesses as a kid, selling prank itching powder on the playground - all the way to his infamous “LinkedIn Hack” that got him his first $120k investment check. Got feedback or questions? Email me at [email protected] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

James Hong (@jhong) is the creator of Hot or Not? He sits down to tell us how the silly website went from 42 friends, to 2 million page views per day within a week. I love his philosophy of running it like an "internet laundromat" - collecting nickels & quarters from the machine (up to $20,000 per night!) Great guy, great energy, checkout the episode. - shaan (@shaanvp on twitter) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Who knew a product about other products could be worth tens of millions... Ryan Hoover (@rrhoover) tells us the struggle of trying to find a place in the startup world and how to tackle job rejection the right way - becoming his own boss! Truly starting from scratch, he runs us through the scrappy early days of e-mailing people one by one just to gain an extra dozen users... now that's some hustle! Tune into this episode and he'll teach you ways to push that little bit further to making your first million. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) is the founder of The Hustle - a simple email newsletter that has surpassed 1M daily subscribers and will be north of 8 figures this year. Sam walks us through how he built The Hustle from scratch as well as his adventures starting a hot dog stand (7min), selling booze on the internet (13min), meeting celebrities on the street and convincing them to hire him (11min) and how he would get rich if he was 21 again! (33min) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ramon Van Meer (@ramonvanmeer) has never seen a soap opera. Yet somehow, he built the most popular soap opera blog on the planet - and was raking in millions per year! Today's conversation is about how he got the idea, and flipped a $49 WordPress theme into a multi-million dollar payday.

We talk with tech founder & investor Suleman "Suli" Ali (@sulemanali) about his journey from making $76k a year at Microsoft to selling multiple companies for $100,000,000+. Highlights: Meeting Naval (19:00) getting grilled by Keith Rabois (22:00), & risking his life savings on TinyCo (57:00) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.