How I Made My First $1M - The Andrew Wilkinson Story

I was making a small amount of money for something I hated, and then I started making a large amount of money for something I would have done anyway. For free. Like it was fun. All right, what's up? We got our friend at the house, Andrew Wilkinson here. Andrew famously is the co-founder of Tiny. He started off as a barista, ended up creating a design agency that was super, super successful. I think it's a very simple design slack and a bunch of other popular Silicon Valley products that you may have used. Started buying businesses, read about Warren Buffett, read about Charlie Munger, started buying businesses, now owns like, you know, a portfolio of 30 plus companies, I think. And recently took the company public and then stepped down to CEO.

我曾经做一些我讨厌的事情来赚取少量的钱，然后我开始做一些即使免费也会去做的事情，并赚取大量的收入。因为这很有趣。好了，大家好！我们家里来了位朋友，Andrew Wilkinson。他是Tiny公司的联合创始人，非常有名。他起初是一名咖啡师，然后创办了一个非常成功的设计公司。他设计了一个非常简单的 Slack 应用及其他一些你可能使用过的硅谷热门产品。之后他开始购买企业，读了关于沃伦·巴菲特和查理·芒格的书，继续购买企业。现在他拥有了一个包含30多家公司的投资组合。不久前，他将公司上市并辞去了CEO的职务。

And Andrew is here on his, I don't know, vacation tour after stepping down to CEO. Andrew, good to see you, man. Your skin looks great. The glow looks good. You seem happy. You got that non-operator glow. All right, let's take a quick break. I got to tell you, you've ever seen those Coachella posters where it's got all the artists names and you're like, oh my God, wow, they got, you know, friend again and squirrel eggs. And that's what the HubSpot inbound conference looks like. Just listen to the speaker list that they have. I don't know how they pull this off, but listen to this. Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, Cara Swisher, Matt Wolf, Dharmesh, they got Brian Halligan.

安德鲁来了，我不知道，他是在卸任CEO后休假旅行。安德鲁，很高兴见到你。你的皮肤看起来很棒，气色很好。你看起来很开心，有那种不是运营者的光彩。好，我们先休息一下。我得告诉你，你见过那些科切拉音乐节的海报吗，上面有所有艺术家的名字，你会感叹，哇，他们请到了这个那个。而HubSpot的Inbound大会也差不多，看一下他们的演讲嘉宾名单。我不知道他们是怎么做到的，但听听这些名字吧：瑞安·雷诺兹、塞雷娜·威廉姆斯、卡拉·斯威舍、马特·沃尔夫、达梅什，他们还有布莱恩·哈里根。

They got tons of good speakers at HubSpot inbound. It's coming up. It's September 18th to the 20th. It's live in Boston. And it's where you go. If you want to learn marketing sales, AI trends, you want to know where the puck is going so that you can be there before everybody else. Tons of great talks on stage where you're going to learn sales strategies and proven marketing tactics, but also the networking where you get to meet other people and understand what are other people in the industry doing, how are other people getting ahead. So check it out. Go to inbound.com to see the lineup and grab your tickets today.

HubSpot Inbound 活动有许多优秀的演讲嘉宾。活动日期即将到来，将于9月18日至20日现场在波士顿举行。如果你想学习市场营销、销售、AI趋势，想在别人之前知道行业走向，这就是你要去的地方。会上有大量精彩的演讲，让你学到销售策略和验证过的营销战术，还能通过社交环节结识其他人，了解同行在做什么、如何取得进展。快去看看，访问inbound.com查询活动日程并立即购票。

Enough about talking to how much of a babe you are. All right. So Andrew, I sent you a voice note. You start off as a barista at a coffee shop and you've done very well in business. And I said, I want to know what were the different jumps, like income jumps that actually made a difference. And you said there was four levels. Yeah, totally. Well, I think the best money that I ever made was jumping from being a barista to making like 60 bucks an hour. Well, so you go from barista, you start designing websites.

好了，关于你有多吸引人的话题就谈到这儿吧。好了，Andrew，我给你发了一条语音消息。你一开始在咖啡店当咖啡师，后来在生意上做得很好。我想知道你在收入上经历了哪些重要的飞跃。你说有四个阶段。是的，完全正确。我最赚钱的阶段就是从咖啡师跳到每小时赚大约60美元。你从咖啡师开始，然后开始设计网站。

So you go from $6.50 an hour to $60 an hour. And it sounds like that might have been somewhat happenstance. Did you, was that intentional to make that shift or just kind of you got an opportunity? Oh, lucky balance came your way. What made that shift happen? So I was working, making coffees every day for all the people who come in. And there's these two guys that would come in every single day. They'd roll in looking like they just got out of bed at 10 in the morning. They're probably like five years older than me. So like 24, 25.

所以，你的薪资从每小时6.50美元涨到每小时60美元。听起来这变化有点偶然。那么，你是有意要做这个转变还是偶然接到了机会？有什么幸运的因素吗？这个转变是怎么发生的？ 事情是这样的：我每天都在工作，为所有来店的人做咖啡。有两个家伙每天都会来店里，看起来像是早上10点刚起床的样子。他们大概比我大五岁左右，也就是24、25岁的样子。

And they would just come in and they would sit on their laptops all day, just drinking espresso after espresso. And one day I asked them, what do you guys do? Like, don't you have jobs? And they go, Oh, we're web designers. We just walk into random businesses. We ask them if they have a website and then we say, we'll make one for 500 bucks. And so that day I was like, well, forget this, like, I don't want to make the espresso. I want to be drinking the espresso. I want to be these guys. And so I went and I bought a book on web design and a couple of days later, I walked into a place and sold the guy website.

他们进来咖啡馆，整天坐在笔记本电脑前，一个接一个地喝浓缩咖啡。有一天，我问他们：“你们在做什么？难道你们没有工作吗？”他们回答说：“哦，我们是网页设计师。我们会随机走进一些商店，问他们有没有网站，然后告诉他们我们可以用500美元帮他们做一个网站。”那天我决定，我不想再做浓缩咖啡了，我要成为喝咖啡的那个人。我去买了一本关于网页设计的书，几天后，我走进一家店面，卖给店主一个网站。

And within a couple of weeks, I'd quit my job. Wait, did you know anything about design? Yeah, I did actually because when I was a teenager, I had a tech news website and I knew how to use like Dreamweaver, like really basic web design and stuff. So it like wasn't rocket science to me. Like I knew these guys were smart, but they weren't, you know, they didn't have any crazy qualifications. It was nothing I couldn't learn. And so I just kind of dove in and got lucky. Do you remember who you approached that first one? Yeah, it was a pulled pork barbecue joint. And there is this place called Pig here locally.

几周之内，我就辞掉了工作。等等，你之前懂设计吗？是的，其实我懂一些，因为我十几岁的时候有个科技新闻网站，我会用Dreamweaver之类的软件做一些基本的网页设计。所以对我来说，设计并不是太难的事情。我知道那些人很聪明，但他们并没有什么特别高深的资质。这些东西对我来说都能学会。所以我就跳进去试了试，结果幸运地成功了。你还记得你最开始联系的是谁吗？是的，是一家卖拉猪肉烧烤的地方，本地有一家叫做Pig的店。

And yeah, it was like, I think I got like 500 bucks and some free pulled pork sandwiches. You know, I basically got unlimited sandwiches for a while. That's pretty awesome. I was making a small amount of money for something I hated. And then I started making a large amount of money for something I would have done anyway. Free. Like it was fun. It was fun designing websites and coding websites. The first money I really ever made outside of like a college job, what I was in school was I actually won a business plan pitch competition and we won $25,000 of cash.

是啊，我记得当时我拿到了大概500美元，还有一些免费的烤肉三明治。就是，我可以无限量地吃三明治。这真的很棒。我以前为了做一些自己讨厌的事情只能赚一点点钱，然后我开始靠做那些我本来就会免费做的事情赚大钱。比如说设计和编写网站，这对我来说很有趣。实际上，我在大学兼职工作以外赚到的第一笔钱是来自一个商业计划演示比赛，我们赢得了25,000美元的奖金。

And they made some NBA, some grad business school student work for us for five K. It's a one $30,000 of total comp and me and my two co-founders lived for one year together on $25,000. But it was awesome. Like we didn't really know how much money a business takes. We didn't know we didn't know how much money it takes to live because we'd just been in college the whole time. So to us, that was like, oh, that'll last us a long time. And we lived off of it for one year, but it was the best money at that time. It was a big jump because we didn't have to get a job. So it was freedom. It's like, oh, we don't even have to think about money or a job because we got the lump sum cash upfront and we got to go do the go try the thing we wanted to try, you know, together as friends.

他们让一些NBA球员和一些商学院研究生为我们工作，每人5000美元，总共花了大约30000美元。我和另外两个联合创始人一年只花了25000美元。那段时间很棒，因为我们根本不知道开办一个企业需要多少钱，也不知道生活需要多少钱，因为我们一直都在上大学。对我们来说，那钱感觉可以用很久。我们用这笔钱生活了一年，当时觉得这钱真的是太好了。这是一个巨大的改变，因为我们不用找工作了。这种自由感让我们觉得，我们不需要去考虑钱或者工作的问题，因为我们一开始就拿到了这笔资金，然后可以一起去尝试我们想尝试的事情。

That was probably the first level. And like Andrew saying, the early dollars create a lot more freedom than the later dollars, I think is the way that you're explaining it. And those early, early dollars and early freedom matter a lot more than the later dollars because you only get so much incremental freedom. In fact, you might actually get less freedom if you start buying a bunch of shit that now you are a slave to. My first level was almost the same as yours, Sean. It was $24,000. I think I was 23 or maybe 24. I had a small website that I sold, but I still had to work there. It was basically an aqua hire, but after taxes and everything was said and done, I think I had $24,000 at the time I was spending $2,000 a month and living expenses. And I said, I have a year. I have a year of expenses saved up.

那可能是第一个阶段。就像Andrew说的，早期赚的钱比后期赚的钱带来的自由度要大得多，应该是你解释的意思。而且那些早期的钱和早期得到的自由比后期的钱更重要，因为你只会获得有限的增量自由。事实上，如果你开始买一堆东西，反而可能会失去一些自由，因为你变成了这些东西的奴隶。我的第一个阶段几乎和你的相同，Sean。我赚了24,000美元，那时我大概23岁或者24岁。我卖了一个小网站，但我仍然需要在那工作。这基本上是一次收购招聘，但在扣税和所有事情处理完后，我手头有24,000美元。当时我的生活开销是每月2,000美元。我告诉自己，我有一年的生活费存下来了。

And I felt like I was like, let's go to Australia. It's like, let's live. Like let's go take a trip. Let's go to Thailand. I like to have a $24,000. I felt incredibly wealthy. By the way, that's a powerful thing to do is change the denomination into time instead of money. So, you know, if you have $24,000, $36,000 or $90,000, it's kind of like Chuck E. Cheese money. It's tokens that you don't really understand what this does for you. And what most people do is they just sort of keep working blindly. They'll put in the bank and then they don't really know how to use it, what to do with it.

我感觉自己好像在说，“去澳大利亚吧。就像是说，去生活吧。去旅行吧。去泰国吧。” 当时我手里有两万四千美元，感觉自己非常富有。顺便说一下，把钱转换成时间而不是金钱是一种很有力量的做法。你知道，如果你有两万四千美元、三万六千美元或九万美元，就像是在Chuck E. Cheese那种儿童乐园里的代币，你不太明白这些钱能为你做什么。而大多数人只是盲目地继续工作，把钱存进银行，但他们并不知道怎么使用这些钱，该做些什么。

A more important question is, how do I get myself a year of freedom or 18 months of freedom where I could either just go enjoy myself purely or go take a shot at creating a new life for myself, a new chapter, a new, a new path for myself. And early on, it doesn't take much to get a year. Like both of us basically did it on $25,000, which I think is surprising. It's surprising even for me to hear it right now because my current life burn rates a lot higher, right? But, you know, were you slept on air mattresses? It's like, well, why do we need, you know, and then we got to, you got to mattress and headboard money eventually, but at first, it doesn't really matter.

更重要的问题是，我如何给自己争取一年的自由，或者18个月的自由时间，这段时间我可以纯粹地去享受生活，或者尝试为自己创造一个新的生活、新的篇章、新的道路。早期，这其实不需要花费太多。我们两个人基本上是用2万5千美元实现了这一点，这让我感到惊讶。即使是现在听到这个数字，我也觉得惊讶，因为我现在的生活成本要高得多。那时候我们睡在充气床垫上，想着为什么需要更好的床，然后最终我们也买得起床垫和床头板了，但一开始这些都没有那么重要。

But a year of freedom or 18 months of freedom, 24 months of freedom is a good way to dominate things when you don't have a huge sum of money. I use this app. I didn't use Mint. I use this one app where every time I spent anything, I typed it in how much money I'd spent for that. So if I went and got coffee was $250, I wrote $250 in there. And then I had this spreadsheet where I took the average of the trailing six months. And I said, that is my monthly burn. And then here's how much money I've saved. Get to 12 months. And so I use an app.

但是，有一年的自由，或者18个月的自由，24个月的自由，是在你没有一大笔钱的时候去掌控事情的好办法。我用这个应用，我没有用Mint。我用这个应用，每次花钱时，我都会输入我花了多少钱。所以如果我去买咖啡花了$2.50，我会在里面写$2.50。然后，我有一个电子表格，我会取过去六个月的平均值，然后说这是我每月的开销。然后，看我存了多少钱。达到12个月的量。因此，我使用一个应用。

Alright, guys, really quick. So back when I was running the hustle, we had this premium newsletter called trends. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. So they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analysts and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. And it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends, for spotting different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. So if you want to stay ahead of the game and you want to find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist, this is the ultimate guide. So if you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now back to the show.

好的，大家，简单说一下。当我做 Hustle 的时候，我们有一个高级通讯叫 Trends。它的运作方式是我们雇了很多分析师，创造了一套研究不同公司、创意和新兴趋势的方法手册，帮助你赚钱和建立业务。HubSpot 做了件很酷的事情。他们拿了我们给分析师用的这套手册，把它变成了一本任何人都可以下载的操作指南和资源。这本指南详细讲解了我们用来发现即将出现的趋势以及发现那些将会迅速壮大的公司的各种方法。所以，如果你想走在前沿，找到很棒的商业创意或别人还不知道的不同市场，这就是终极指南。如果你想了解，可以查看描述中的链接。现在回到节目中。

Alright. So you've made it to level two. Now the next level, you said I went from self-employed to boss. So what does that mean? What I over time discovered was that there was all these online job boards and there was companies in San Francisco posting, looking for freelance designers and developers and stuff. So I was doing these like little $500 local websites and I found these Silicon Valley startups posting. And this was like what like what you would call today, like product design or interface design. And so I got this project designing an interface for an ad manager for some startup and I did a really good job. The guy really liked it and it was like $2,000 for basically no work. This is the project I mentioned before.

好的。那么你已经到了第二级。现在你说从自雇变成了老板。这是什么意思呢？我在一段时间后发现，网上有很多招聘网站，旧金山的一些公司在上面发布招聘信息，寻找自由职业的设计师和开发人员。当时我还在做一些当地的小型网站项目，大概500美元一个。然后我发现这些硅谷的初创公司在招聘。这种工作现在被称作产品设计或者界面设计。于是，我接了一个为某个初创公司设计广告管理界面的项目。我做得很好，对方非常满意，几乎没费什么力气就赚了2000美元。这就是我之前提到的那个项目。

So it was like maybe five days of work for two grand, which ended up being $2,600, Canadian. So it's very sweet. And the guy goes, Hey, this is pretty good. Can you do coding? Like, can you do some JavaScript work? And I just say yes. And I don't know anything about JavaScript. I'm like, whatever, I can figure it out. So I frantically try and learn JavaScript and I can't. And so I go to my friend who is literally just my girlfriend's best friends, boyfriend, who's in computer science. And I say, Hey, how much would you charge me to do this? JavaScript work? And he goes, I'll do it for 500 bucks. And so I think I'm going to get negotiated down by this client.

所以，大概五天的工作赚了两千美元，最终换算成加币是两千六百加元。感觉很不错。然后那个人说，“嘿，这不错啊，你会写代码吗？比如JavaScript的活你能干吗？”我就说，“会啊。”其实我对JavaScript一窍不通，心想随便吧，我可以学。但我拼命学习JavaScript，却根本学不会。于是我去找我朋友，他其实就是我女友闺蜜的男朋友，学计算机科学的。我问他，“你帮我做这个JavaScript的工作，要多少钱？”他说，“500美元。”所以我以为这个客户会再跟我讨价还价。

And so I go to the client and I say, it'll be a thousand bucks. And they say, okay, sounds good. And so in that moment, I was like, Oh my God, I just made $500. And I did absolutely no work. So that's that crazy transition of going from being a self employed person, selling your time to being someone who can sell other people's time, which to me is like the big leverage point. That's great. Yeah. You so you have that realization. Did you start devouring any books or how did you learn how to do that better than, you know, than being an absolute rookie at it?

于是我去找客户，我说，这个项目需要一千美元。他们说，好的，听起来不错。就在那一刻，我心想，天哪，我刚刚赚了500美元，而我什么都没做。这就是从自雇人士，售卖自己的时间，到成为一个能售卖他人时间的人之间的巨大转变，对我来说这是一个重要的杠杆点。太棒了。你有这种领悟后，你是开始狂读书籍，还是通过其它方式来学习如何做得更好，而不是一个完全的新手？

It was mostly trial and error in the beginning. And it was really, it was really stressful, honestly, because I think when you start delegating to other people, they always do a worse job than you do. And so you are kind of panicking and you, there's no, there's no like process or system or anything. And around that time I read this book called the E-Myth. It's kind of cheesy. It's by Michael Gerber, but I recommend it to everyone. And he really talks about this idea of trying to think of your business as a machine, right?

一开始主要是靠试验和错误。说实话，那段时间真的很有压力。因为当你开始把事情委派给别人的时候，他们总是做得不如你。所以你会感到有些恐慌，再加上又没有什么流程或系统。就在那段时间，我读了一本叫《E-Myth》的书。有点老套，是迈克尔·戈伯（Michael Gerber）写的，但我推荐给每个人。他书中讲到一个重要的观点，就是要把你的业务当成一台机器来思考。

And I think for me, that was the, that was a big breakthrough, that mental model of my business is a machine and I'm the engineer and all the different people are widgets within the machine. And if one doesn't work or something is squeaky, you can swap out the people. But at the end of the day, you have a process, you have a strategy and you have people on the bus. And if you have the right people on the right bus, the right strategy and the right vision, things will go well. And that was when things really took off. That was when I started hiring, you know, I had like a dozen people. I was making, you know, over a million dollars a year personally.

我认为对我来说，这是一个巨大的突破，这种关于我生意的思维模式是：我的生意是一台机器，而我是工程师，所有不同的人都是机器中的部件。如果某个部件出现问题或者有异响，你可以更换人员。但归根结底，你有一个过程，一个策略，以及人。只要你有合适的人在合适的位置，用正确的策略和远见，事情就会顺利进行。就在那时，事情真正开始起飞。我开始雇佣员工，当时我有大约十几个人，年收入已经超过了一百万美元。

You know, I got a BMW. I started dressing nice. And really that was like the, the kind of sloppy, like the first phase was like, you know, okay, I can do all the stuff I wanted to do and call it. I can buy beer. I can go for a nice dinner and stuff. Wait, how old were you when you made your first, is that million profit? Yeah. I think I was 20, 22 or 23. That's huge. That's huge. Oh, yeah, it was amazing. You didn't go to college, right? Or you dropped out. I dropped out of college. I went to journalism school for like two or three months.

你知道吗，我买了一辆宝马。我开始穿得很讲究。实际上，那就像是比较随意的第一阶段，就好像，嗯，我可以做我想做的所有事情。我可以买啤酒，可以去吃顿好饭之类的。等等，你赚到第一个……是赚了一百万时，你多大？是的，我想那时我大概20、22或23岁。那真是太厉害了。哦，是的，那真是太棒了。你没上大学，对吧？还是你退学了？我退学了。我上了两三个月的新闻学校。

So you did a million in profit two years into being an agency. I started when I was 19 years old. And so probably four years in something like that, three or four years in. That's massive. It was, it was crazy. I mean, it felt like it felt like an absolute fortune. And frankly, it was. And at that point, like that was when I was like, oh, like, I'll just buy whatever I want, like I would walk into Best Buy and just buy like a crazy TV. I would buy, you know, the best speakers money could buy.

所以你在成立公司两年后就赚了一百万的利润。我是在19岁时开始的，大概三四年后达到这样的业绩。这真的很厉害。当时真是感觉像是赚了一大笔钱，而且确实是。在那个时候，我就觉得，哦，我可以随心所欲地买东西了。我走进Best Buy商店，随便就买了一台超好的电视，买了最贵的音响设备。

I would buy video games, like whatever an idiot, 23 year old wants to spend money on, I would spend money on that. And ultimately it was like, it was very eight hundred dollars. You're like, okay, well now what? My taste still even match my, my, my income right now. Yeah. It was very, it was very kind of empty and hedonistic. Do you ever read Rich Dad Poor Dad Andrew? Yeah. He has that. Uh, Sam, you've read that book. He's got that. No, thing. Do you know about that? Yeah. People hate on that guy. I'm not sure why, but what about it?

我会买视频游戏，就像一个23岁的傻瓜想花钱买什么我就买什么。最终，这笔钱大概花了八百美元。你会觉得，好吧，那现在呢？我的品味仍然与我目前的收入相匹配。对吧？这一切都显得很空虚和享乐主义。你读过《富爸爸穷爸爸》吗，Andrew？对，他书中有那种观点。Sam，你读过那本书吗？你知道那种观点吗？是的。有人不喜欢那个人，我不太清楚为什么，但那本书说了什么？

Well, I mean, any, any business guy who becomes popular and starts selling anything. I think he sells a lot of shit. He sells like gold. He sells like real estate, course, he sell a lot of stuff. But Andrew, you basically just described his thing. I remember reading this book and I had this mental model then of what you're supposed to do in your career. So basically he's like, he has this four quadrant grid and it's basically, he is the first one. You're an employee. You have a job. And he's like, for most people, this is what your parents tell you. Go to, go to a good school so you can get a good job. And they kind of make it sound like getting a good job is the end point. That is the like, that's the end of the rainbow. That's the pot of gold.

好吧，我的意思是，任何一个变得流行并开始卖东西的商人，我认为他卖了很多东西。他卖黄金，卖房地产，卖课程，卖很多东西。但是，安德鲁，你基本上就是描述了他的策略。我记得读过一本书，当时在我的脑海中形成了一个关于你在职业生涯中应该做什么的思维模式。所以基本上他有一个四象限的图表，而第一个象限就是，你是一名员工，你有一份工作。他说，对于大多数人而言，他们的父母会告诉他们：上好学校，这样你就能找到一份好工作。而他们往往把找到一份好工作描述成终点，那就像彩虹的尽头，那就是宝藏。

And what he's, what he points out, he's like, you know, basically you start as a E. Then you go to the bottom quadrant S where self employed. So you go from employee to self-employed. That's what you described barista to solo freelance web designer. Then you go to be business owner. That's when you owned your agency. And the last one is I, he's like the goal, the goal for everybody is to get to I, where you're an investor, your money works for your money and you do whatever the hell you want. Um, and so you, and eventually with time that you became, ah, you became an investor, but like this path going from ESBI is one that for me, I didn't even really, I didn't understand how the board game was laid out.

他指出的意思是，你基本上是从员工（即E）开始的。然后你进入自雇者（S）的类别，从员工变成自雇者。这就像你描述的，从咖啡师到自由职业的网站设计师。接下来你成为企业主（B），就是你拥有自己的公司了。最后一个阶段是投资者（I），他的意思是，每个人的目标都是达到投资者的阶段，在这个阶段，你的钱为你工作，你可以做任何你想做的事。最终，随着时间的推移，你成了投资者，但这条从E到S再到B最后到I的路径，对于我来说，我一开始甚至没有理解这个“棋盘游戏”的布局。

I didn't know where you're supposed to go. Right. It's like playing a video game, but not understanding you. You need to save the princess from the castle. Um, it's like, Oh, once I know that now I could start to move in that direction, but until I even knew that I didn't really even understand what the hell I was supposed to be doing. This one diagram was very useful for me. And that was in level two for you was between what a million dollars a year and what was your upper limit? Yeah. I mean, I was paying myself 500 to a million a year and I was profiting more than that. And I started, uh, incubating businesses. And so I had that classic thing where I had overconfidence.

我不知道你应该去哪里。对，就像在玩电子游戏，但你不明白自己的任务。你要从城堡里拯救公主。嗯，一旦我知道了这一点，我就可以朝那个方向前进，但在此之前，我根本不知道自己该做什么。这个图表对我来说非常有用。当时你在第二阶段，你的年收入在一百万到上限是多少？对，我那时给自己支付年薪五十万到一百万，收益比这更多。我开始孵化一些新业务，所以当时我有一种典型的过度自信。

The way I would put it is that my first business was a very easy business. So I did the equivalent of walking into the gym and I got lucky. I picked up really light weights and it built my confidence. And then for the next five, 10 years, I would walk into the gym and try and deadlift 300 pounds, but I didn't know that was hard. Right. And so I started an e-commerce business. I started a restaurant. I started multiple software businesses that I bootstrapped and lost in one case to over 10 million dollars. Um, but it was really fun because I would just be in the shower and I would think, Oh, man, that's a great business idea. I'll start that right now today. Uh, I had no filter whatsoever. And it was really exciting, frankly, like I was just, I was constantly starting new stuff.

我想把它表达为，我的第一个生意非常简单。就像是走进健身房，然后幸运地发现拿起了非常轻的重量，这建立了我的信心。接下来的五到十年里，每次走进健身房，我都会尝试举起300磅的重量，而我却不知道这有多难。所以我开始了一个电商生意，开了一家餐馆，并且启动了多个软件公司。我自筹资金，甚至有一次亏损超过一千万美元。 但是，这一切都非常有趣。我经常在洗澡的时候突然想到一个很棒的商业想法，然后当天就开始行动。我丝毫没有任何过滤机制。坦白说，这非常令人振奋，我不断地启动新项目。

Starting a restaurant is an awesome way to lose money though. Oh yeah. And I lost, uh, I think I lost a million bucks doing that. Cat furniture, uh, restaurant, skin cream, SaaS company. You tried, uh, you did the full decathlon of like business ideas. We had a blog, we had a viral blog. We tried to write a book for it. Um, we had a concierge service. What was the viral blog? We had clients from hell. It was like really big on Tumblr for a while. Do you know it? We basically we would, we would have all these like, um, we would go to conferences and meet other designers and stuff. And everyone would bitch about their crazy clients and share screenshots of like insane emails they would received and stuff where that's just like the guy asking for them to make the logo bigger over and over again. And so we started sharing those and it just went crazy viral. And so we ended up making a book.

开餐馆确实是一个赔钱的好方法。哦，对。我好像赔了大约一百万美元。猫家具啊，餐馆，护肤霜，SaaS公司。你尝试了，嗯，你尝试了各种商业想法，真是全能选手啊。我们还搞过博客，一个病毒式传播的博客。我们试着为它写了一本书。我们还有一个礼宾服务。那个病毒式博客是什么？是“地狱客户”。曾经在Tumblr上非常火爆。你知道吗？基本上我们会去参加一些会议，认识其他设计师。大家都会抱怨他们那疯狂的客户，分享收到的荒唐邮件截图，比如反复要求把logo弄大一点的客户。所以我们开始分享这些故事，结果就疯狂地病毒式传播了，最后我们还出版了一本书。

Dude, we need to bring back Tumblr. Tumblr was great. I love the, I love the Tumblr days. I, I still go back and I'll read old people's tumblers. It's awesome. I love it. I mean, Twitter kind of is that now, but I felt Tumblr had a better environment and it was more friendly and better content. I made so many friends from Tumblr and I still meet people like at conferences that know me from Tumblr back in the day. What age were you when level three ended or level two ended? Um, I ended that probably like 27. I think that was when I sold my first business.

哥们儿，我们真的需要让Tumblr回归。Tumblr当时真是太棒了。我很怀念那些Tumblr的日子。我至今还会回去看一些老用户的Tumblr博客，真的很有趣。我很喜欢。虽然现在Twitter有点取代了它的地位，但我觉得Tumblr的环境更好，更友好，内容也更精彩。我通过Tumblr结识了很多朋友，现在去参加一些会议时，还会遇到以前认识我的Tumblr用户。你是什么时候结束三阶或者二阶的？嗯，我大概27岁左右结束吧，那时候我卖掉了我的第一家企业。

What did you sell for? And what was it? So I sold it for 7 million bucks and it was the one business I started in level two. So I started all these different companies. I, so I had my original web design company, Metalab. It was profitable. I would live off part of that profit. And then the rest of it went to starting all those other businesses I talked about. The one business that worked was I met Toby from Shopify. Um, and Harley as well. In 2010 at a conference and at the time, Shopify is pretty small. And they said, Hey, we really love your design work. Would you make some templates, some themes for Shopify? And I was like, Oh, you know, I guess we could do these guys a favor. They seem nice. I tried to get them to pay me and they actually said, no, no, no. This is going to be like a store, right? The iPhone app store. And I was like, Oh, like, okay, I guess so. And so we did it. I literally thought we were doing them a favor. And we put up a bunch of themes in their store and we started making like $10, $20,000. A month, like basically immediately. And what year, what year was that? 2011, probably 2010, 2011. All right.

你卖了多少钱？卖的是什么呢？ 我卖得了700万美元，这是一家我在第二阶段创办的公司。 我创办了很多不同的公司，一开始是我的原创网页设计公司Metalab，这家公司是盈利的，我靠其中一部分利润生活，剩下的钱就用来启动所有那些我提到的其他业务。起作用的那家公司是我在一个会议上遇到的Shopify的Toby和Harley。 2010年，我在一个会议上认识了他们，当时Shopify还很小。他们跟我说：“我们非常喜欢你的设计作品，你能为Shopify做一些模板和主题吗？”我想，“哦，我猜我们可以帮他们一个忙，他们看起来挺不错的。”我试图让他们付钱，但他们说：“不，不。这将会像一个商店，就像iPhone应用商店那样。”我想，“哦，好吧，我猜可以。”于是我们做了这个项目。我真的以为我们是在帮他们一个忙。我们在他们的商店里放了一堆主题，几乎立刻我们就开始每月赚1万到2万美元。那是哪一年呢？大概是2011年，可能是2010年或者2011年。

2011, you're doing 20 or 30 grand a month. Is this called pixel union? It's called pixel union. And so I had the, I had the original design agency. I had pixel union and that started making quite a bit of money. And then I had all these chaotic other businesses. And basically what happened was I decided that I wanted to have like a nest egg. I wanted to have enough money in the bank that I didn't have to worry about money anymore. And cause what I had, what I had had is cash flow. I had a ton of cash flow, but I never kept much money in the bank. I'd spend whatever I needed personally. Everything else would get invested, even though I didn't really understand investing in these businesses I was incubating. And so I ended up getting an offer to sell that business for seven million bucks and it was three million upfront, one and a half earn out, and then the rest in stock in the new business. And I remember I went to the ATM on the day it closed and I checked my balance. I was in like a strip mall and I saw three million. It was like three million, 100,000 or something like that on the chip. And I was like, I'm done. Like I'm rich. I'm good forever. And that was a big mindset shift.

2011年，你每个月赚两三万美元。这家公司叫Pixel Union吗？对，叫Pixel Union。那时候我有一家原始设计公司，还有Pixel Union，这家公司开始赚了不少钱。另外我还有一些杂七杂八的生意。基本上，最后我决定要存一笔钱，我想要有足够的钱在银行里，这样我就不需要再担心钱的问题了。我以前有的是现金流，现金流非常多，但银行里的钱不多，个人需要花什么就花什么，其他的钱都投资到那些我在孵化的业务上，尽管我并不真正了解投资。后来我收到一个出价，卖掉这家公司七百万美元，其中三百万是现款，150万是绩效奖金，剩下的则是新公司股票。我记得交易完成的那天，我去自动取款机查余额。当时我在一个商场里，看到账户上有三百万，大概三百一十万左右。我心想，我完成了，我这下算是富有了，永远不需要再为钱担心。这时候我的心态有了很大的变化。

Suddenly I had money, more money than I could use to incubate businesses. I'd also incubated a lot of businesses. And I realized that starting companies is really hard. If you think about my failure rate, I probably started 10 different projects or companies and one of those worked really well. And so there was a lot of pain and I had to lay a lot of people off and go through a lot of hard times to do that. And frankly, I felt pretty burnt out. And around that time, I was like, well, I guess I've got to learn how to invest. But to me, investing was something that like guys and suits did. Like it was super boring. I had no interest in real estate or stocks, but I'd always heard about Warren Buffett. And when I read about Warren Buffett, that changed everything for me.

突然之间我有了很多钱，比我能用来孵化企业的钱还多。我也已经孵化了很多企业。我意识到，创办公司真的很难。如果你看看我的失败率，我大概启动了十个不同的项目或公司，其中只有一个做得非常好。所以经历了很多痛苦，我不得不解雇很多人，度过了很多艰难的时光。坦白说，我感到相当疲惫。在那段时间，我想着，我可能得学会如何投资。但对我来说，投资就像是那些穿西装的人做的事，似乎非常无聊。我对房地产或股票一点兴趣都没有，但我一直听说过沃伦·巴菲特。当我读到关于沃伦·巴菲特的内容时，一切都改变了。

What I what I ended up doing is I had all the incubated businesses. I actually shut almost all of them down. And I'd sold that business for three million. I had another one and a half coming. And I also got dividends out of that business because I still in 20% of it. And then metal by this point was making three or four million dollars of profit a year. And so I went from burning a lot of cash and living in a lifestyle to suddenly having a pile of cash and a lot of unencumbered cash flow coming in that just kept piling up. So by that point, if you think about if you're making four or five million dollars a year, at this point, I buy a really nice house. Not as crazy. I could have gone crazy, but I bought like a responsible nice house. I bought, you know, a nice, a nicer car, I bought myself like a Porsche.

我最终做的是关闭了几乎所有我孵化的公司。我以三百万美元卖掉了一家公司，还有一百五十万即将到账。因为我仍持有那家公司20%的股份，所以我还能从中获得分红。与此同时，另一家公司每年已经能赚三到四百万美元的利润。所以，我从以前烧钱过日子的状态，一下子变成了手里有大笔现金及源源不断的现金流，因此钱越积越多。想想每年能赚四、五百万美元，于是我买了一栋非常不错的房子，但并没有买非常奢华的，只是负责任地买了一栋好房子。我还买了一辆不错的车，比如一辆保时捷。

And I had a Tesla, which at the time was like super crazy. And I started getting into investing at this point. What was this 20% rule you had? So basically I was like, I will spend up to 20% of my cash flow personally. And the other 80% has to go back to investing. And so I knew that, you know, on 20% of five million bucks, you know, I could live a pretty damn good life spending a million dollars a year. I wouldn't go out of my way to spend that much post tax or pre pre tax. So I would I would basically live it up as much as possible.

我那时候有一辆特斯拉，当时感觉特疯狂。我也开始涉足投资。你当时提到的那个20%的规则是什么？基本上，我会将个人现金流的20%用于消费，其余80%则用于投资。所以，我知道在500万现金流的20%上，我每年花100万美元可以过上很不错的生活。而且我并不会刻意去花那么多钱，不管是税后还是税前。我会尽量享受生活。

But then I also knew I'd always be compounding the rest. And that model actually worked really well for me because I didn't have this mindset that so many entrepreneurs have where they're like, shit, I got to live like a popper and then I got to become a prince. I got to sell my company for some huge amount of money. I was just able to live on cash flows the entire time. Sam, can we talk about some of your popper? What the fuck is a popper? Popper tendencies you had as Sam chugged a Dr. Pepper while you were talking. So Sam, what were you doing when you were building the hustle? How did you live? Were there any cheap skate?

但我也知道我会一直在复利投资。而这种模式对我非常有效，因为我没有像许多企业家那样的心态，不用想着“天啊，我得像个穷人一样生活，然后成为王子。我得把公司卖个天价。” 我可以一直依靠现金流生活。Sam，我们能不能谈谈你的节俭习惯？什么是“节俭习惯”？Sam在你说话的时候喝了一口Dr. Pepper。那么，Sam，你在建立Hustle的时候是怎么生活的？有没有什么抠门的行为？

Oh, yeah. So my wife worked at Facebook at the time. So dinner was like I gave her top wear containers and she would bring home prosciutto and cheese because they always had like shark food reports. I was dinner was sponsored by by meta. Yeah. So we I was on a prosciutto diet because that didn't get old fast. The second thing I'm ashamed to say I did this, but listen to this. So do you guys remember when Uber Eats and DoorDash and what were the other ones caviar? So these meal delivery services all came out the same time and you would get $20 for free for your first order.

哦，对了。当时我妻子在Facebook工作。所以晚饭时，我给她一些餐盒，她会带回家火腿和奶酪，因为公司总是有各种食物报告。可以说，我的晚饭是由Meta（Facebook的母公司）赞助的。我的饮食基本就是火腿，因为这种食物不会很快吃腻。还有一件让我感到羞愧的事，但我得说出来。你们还记得Uber Eats、DoorDash，还有那些叫Caviar的送餐服务吧？这几个送餐服务大约是在同一时间出现的，你首次下单时会获得20美元的免费优惠。

So I built a iPhone emulator on our computer where we created this ring where we were constantly referring each other to these like new. So I basically had like $5,000 of free caviar. So I would basically people would be like, it's just startup funded. I was like, no, but we are fueled. We're fueled by VC, but we're not funded. And so I did that for a long time. I also would sneak on the bus and not pay and I would get caught all the time. But the thing is, is if they ask for your ID, you just say you don't have an ID. And so that was that's not it's not illegal not to have an ID.

所以，我在我们的电脑上构建了一个iPhone模拟器，我们在这个模拟器里创建了一个互相推荐的新游戏。结果我基本上得到了价值约5000美元的免费鱼子酱。有人问我这种情况是不是由创业公司资助的，我会说不是，但我们确实得到了风险投资的支持，但不能算是直接资助。所以我这样做了很长一段时间。我还经常偷偷上公交车不付费，并且经常被抓到。但关键是，如果他们要查你的身份证，你只要说你没有身份证就行了。没有身份证并不犯法。

So I got away with like two grand worth of bus tickets. Yeah, there's nobody checks on San Francisco. They did. I get trouble all the time, but they would say, you know, do you have your ID? I'm like, I don't have an ID. So I'll tell you, you know. But yeah. So hopefully there's a statute of limitations on these things. Cause I definitely broke the law a little bit. I was also on a whole food scholarship as well. Let's just say that the, the, the hot bar was right next to the exit.

所以我偷偷使用了价值两千美元的公交车票。是的，在旧金山几乎没人查票。他们查到过我几次，但通常只是问我有没有身份证，我就说没有。所以，嗯，希望这些事情有时效限制吧，因为我确实稍微违法了一下。我还有张全食超市的奖学金卡。总之，那个自助热餐区就在出口边上。

So, so Andrew, you, when you were spending 20% pre-tax, that's like you're spending 40% of your post tax money. That's a lot to be spending during that time. And then you shifted it. You, you once you started investing, you made a change. You're like, no, no more 20% rule. You changed it to some other rule, right? Right. What, what did you shift to? Yeah. I just kept dropping that percent over time as, as the numbers got bigger, I just kept dropping it and dropping it and dropping it. And, uh, But not because you're spending less.

所以，安德鲁，当你在税前花费20%的时候，这相当于你在税后花费了40%。这个比例在当时是相当高的。后来你做了一个改变，一旦你开始投资，你放弃了20%的规则，对吧？对。那么你改成了什么规则呢？是这样，我随着数字变大，逐渐降低了这个百分比，一直在调低。但是并不是因为你花得少了。

No, not necessarily. I mean, in some cases I was spending more than numbers just got bigger. So around this time, so, so I'll talk about some of the things I started doing. So I started angel investing. So, you know, I'd meet a friend or some interesting entrepreneur and I'd invest 25 grand in their company. And if I look back, like I probably should have bought stocks in real estate, like I didn't understand the lack of liquidity in that and just how like high risk it is and crazy. So I have a whole bunch of investments from that era. I have no idea what's going to happen with them.

不，不一定是这样。我只是说，有些情况下我花的钱比数字显示的要多。所以就在那段时间，我开始做一些新的事情。我开始做天使投资。比如，我会遇到一个朋友或者某个有趣的创业者，然后我会投资他们公司2.5万美元。如果回头来看，我可能本该买房地产股票，因为我当时不了解那种投资缺乏流动性，而且风险很高，非常不稳定。所以我有一堆那个时期的投资，现在都不知道会发生什么。

But mostly a lot of that time was actually spent having this breakthrough moment of realizing that I don't need to be the CEO, that I don't need to run my own companies. And so at that time, every single company, I was the CEO of that. So as me and Chris, I'm the CEO, he's the CFO. And we're just jumping around like chickens with our heads cut off between all the different businesses. And when I read about Warren Buffett, I was just like, oh my God, this guy has abstracted business to the craziest degree to the point where he doesn't actually do anything except for a read and buy like one business a year. And the idea that you could just hire a CEO to run your company was kind of crazy.

但实际上，大部分时间我是经历了一次重大的突破时刻，意识到自己不必一定要当 CEO，不必一定要自己经营公司。那时，我在每家公司都是 CEO，我和 Chris，他是 CFO，我们在不同的业务之间就像无头苍蝇一样乱转。然后我读到了关于沃伦·巴菲特的故事，顿时觉得太不可思议了，这个人把商业简化到了极致，他几乎什么都不做，只是读书和一年买一家企业。能够雇一个 CEO 来管理你的公司这个想法对我来说简直太疯狂了。

Like I think a lot of people have this feeling around, you know, why would someone come and work for me? I felt like that all the time. I felt like, yeah, you're like, what are you doing? Yeah, this is like, why? Like, don't you know the math? Like this doesn't make any sense. But then over time, you realize like people want stability and they want surety and they want to have health benefits and all this stuff you don't get. And so I realized like there's this whole other class of people where they want to run a company for somebody else. They want to be a CEO. They want to be able to make, you know, millions of dollars, but they don't necessarily need to make like a billion dollars.

很多人都会有这样的感觉，你知道的，就像是，为什么会有人愿意为我工作？我以前经常有这种感觉。我觉得，嗯，你在干什么呢？就像是，为什么？难道你不懂得其中的道理吗？这样做完全不合逻辑。但随着时间推移，我明白了，人们其实需要的是稳定和确实的保障，比如医疗福利等等，这些是你自己做不到的。所以我意识到，实际上有一类人，他们希望能为别人管理一家公司。他们想当CEO，他们希望能赚到几百万美元，但不一定非要赚到几十亿美元。

And that was crazy for me when I started hiring CEOs because before I knew it, all the businesses started like doubling. And the reason they doubled was because I was only giving 20% of my time to all the companies. And frankly, I didn't know what I was doing. And I just started hiring better and better people to run my companies. And there's this crazy inflection point where we started spinning out the companies, hiring CEOs and then buying new businesses and just putting CEOs in to run those businesses. And when we started doing that, the numbers scaled really, really quickly.

当我开始雇佣CEO时，这对我来说简直是疯狂，因为不知不觉中，所有的企业都开始翻倍增长。增长的原因是，我之前只能把20%的时间分给所有公司，坦白说，我当时并不知道我在做什么。我只是开始雇佣越来越优秀的人来管理我的公司。在我们开始剥离这些公司、雇佣CEO并收购新业务然后让这些CEO管理时，我们达到了一个疯狂的转折点。那时，我们的业务规模增长得非常非常快。

So you did a lot of angel investing in this period and we'll talk about the rest of the stage. But have you seen a good return from those investments? Because that was a good era. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, to be honest. The problem with angel investing is like, I just still, I've slowed down, but I mostly just do it on gut. And so I think I have like 25 or $30 million of venture. And it's just been this like death by a thousand paper cuts thing. So I think if you take that cohort, I had one, my friend Stewart, who we used to share an office with, I put 75 grand into his business and then he sold it to Workday. And I 10x my money there.

所以你在这段时间做了很多天使投资，我们会讨论其他阶段的情况。但是你从这些投资中获得了不错的回报吗？因为那是一个不错的时期。对，我的意思是，老实说，我不太确定。天使投资的问题在于，我基本上都是凭直觉进行投资的，最近才放慢了节奏。所以我大概有2500万到3000万美元的风险投资，感觉就像是每一张小纸片累积起来造成的慢性死亡。所以如果你看这一批投资的话，我有一个朋友Stewart，我们以前共用一个办公室，我向他的公司投资了7.5万美元，然后他把公司卖给了Workday。我在那笔投资上赚了10倍。

And I think that between that and a few other investments, I think I've definitely got my money back from that cohort. Maybe made a good, you know, a reasonable return. But the problem is I've just kept going and I don't really track it. Like it's all in one big Excel spreadsheet somewhere and I don't mark it. 25 million dollars of angel investments. That's a ton, maybe even 30. That's an insane amount of angel investments. What? That's basically irresponsible, my friend. I know. I know. This is the problem with the invest in X is not going to return all that money.

我认为，通过这个和其他一些投资，我肯定已经收回了那部分投资的成本，甚至可能还获得了不错的回报。但是问题是，我一直在继续投资，却没有真正跟踪这些投资。所有投资都记录在一个庞大的Excel表格里，但我没有特别标记出来。我已经进行了2500万美元甚至可能3000万美元的天使投资。这是一个巨大的数目，简直是疯狂。这样做其实是不负责任的，我的朋友。我知道，这就是问题所在，投资X并没有带来所有这些钱的回报。

How do you, why do you think you've returned $30 million? I don't think that no, no, I'm not saying I've returned 30 million. I've literally put $30 million in adventure. I don't, but you say you've brought, you may be broken even, right? You think you think you've no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to be clear. I think you were so full of shit. You're telling me you don't have a spreadsheet that just like if I have 30, no, my friend, no, it didn't matter.

你是怎么，为什么你认为你已经回报了三千万美元？我不认为，不，不，我并不是在说我回报了三千万美元。我是说我确实在冒险领域投入了三千万美元。我不，不，当你说你大概收支平衡了，对吗？你认为你认为你——不，不，不，不，不，明确地说，我觉得你满嘴胡扯。你在告诉我你没有一个表格来计算这三千万美元，不，我的朋友，不，那个无关紧要。

I don't know. Billionaire if you are many billions of theirs. You track $30 million. That's not, that's not couch money regardless of who you are. No. So I actually have, when I say I returned, I mean, from that cohort. So like maybe I invested like two or three million dollars over that period. And I'm saying I might have got that money back, but the rest, most, so much of it was done over the last 10 years in, in bursts that I don't even know. I don't know where we're at in terms of payback.

我不知道。即使你是亿万富翁，拥有很多个亿。你要追踪那3000万美元。无论你是谁，那都不是小数目。所以当我说我收回投资时，我是指从那笔钱中收回。可能我在那段时间里投资了两三百万美元，我可能已经把这些钱收回了，但剩下的大部分是在过去十年里分批次投入的，我真的不知道回报情况如何。

I honestly, I don't track it because it's such a pain in the ass to get marked to markets and I don't trust them. And so I'm literally just going, either they sell or we get liquidity or we don't. And so for me, it's all marked at book value until I think it sounds crazy, but that is actually more par for the course, I think, for the way Angel investing works. Because I think if you're listening to this, you don't know Angel investing, it sounds insane.

老实说，我不追踪这些东西，因为要进行市场估值实在是太麻烦了，而且我也不信任这些估值。所以我基本上就看他们卖不卖，或者我们有没有流动资金。而对于我来说，这些投资都按照账面价值来计算，直到某种程度上我才会调整。这可能听起来很疯狂，但实际上这更符合天使投资的运作方式。如果你听到这段话，对天使投资不太了解，可能会觉得这很不可思议。

And there is a bit of it that's insane. That's a very big number to put into it. But these are like 10 year odysseys. People stop sending updates. Even when they raise it up rounds, you're done fully believe you don't fully know if that's you can't really take that and count that until it's fully realized. And so it is very easy to lose track of the portfolio and where it's at because you don't really know where it's at. That's kind of a reality situation. And a company will raise money.

这其中有点疯狂。这个金额实在是太大了。但这类投资往往是10年的长跑。在这期间，人们常常停下来，不再提供最新情况。即使他们再融资，你也不能完全确信，这笔投资究竟会如何，直到全部兑现。这就很容易让人无法跟踪投资组合的状况，因为你真的不知道它具体的进展。这就是现实情况。公司会继续筹集资金。

It's a huge valuation. And then a year later, it's going out of business. And so I've invested a lot of money in Angel as well. And like I track which company and which year I invested in, but half of them don't send updates. The other half, they have markups and I'll put it in there, but I don't count it as real net worth. And then I'll be and then another portion when they sell, you don't know they're going to sell until when the deal's done a large part of the time. I counted as my net worth, by the way, as the principal I invested, but half.

这是一个巨大的估值。而一年后，公司倒闭了。我在天使投资方面也投入了很多钱。我会记录在每家公司和每年投资的情况，但一半公司不会发更新。另一半虽然会有估值上升，但我不会把它算作我的实际净资产。并且有时公司被卖掉了，你常常要等到交易完成了才知道。我会把我投资的本金作为我的净资产的一部分来计算，但仅算一半。

Totally 100%. That's how I think about it too. I think of it as roulette. And I think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker, right? Poker has way better odds than roulette. If you're good at poker, you can actually win. You've got, you know, 60% odds. When you play roulette, you've got 50% odds. It's a terrible game. And Angel investing is frankly a roulette table. You're just having fun and it's fun to be able to say, you know, oh, I gave this entrepreneur who ended up building this great company. 25 grand along the way.

完全同意，我也是这么认为的。我把它看作是轮盘赌。我觉得我们之前聊的这段时间，就像是我在学习如何玩扑克，对吧？扑克的胜算比轮盘赌高得多。如果你擅长扑克，你真的能赢，有60%的胜算。而玩轮盘赌，你只有50%的胜算，这是一个糟糕的游戏。而天使投资实际上就像是在玩轮盘赌，你只是觉得好玩，而且能说自己在过程中为某个最终成功创业的企业家投入了2.5万美元，这也很有趣。

But I've realized it's a lot more kind of soulless than playing poker. It's more fun. You feel smart playing poker. You feel dumb playing roulette. Also the narratives we tell ourselves is just like roulette where you're like, I knew it. I thought 11 was coming because I saw it 11 flash up over there. And then that's why. And if you if you talked to a lot of angel investors, it's like, you know, you bet on two guys when they had a different idea. And then it turned, you know, you bet on Stuart Butterfield when he was building a game and then it turns into slack.

但我意识到，与玩扑克相比，这种游戏要无趣得多。扑克更有趣，玩扑克时你会觉得自己很聪明，而玩轮盘赌时你会觉得自己很傻。此外，我们自我讲述的故事也很像轮盘赌，就像你会说：“我知道的，我觉得11就要来了，因为我看到那边闪过一个11。” 而如果你和很多天使投资人谈谈，他们会说：“你知道的，你在他们有不同想法的时候，赌了两个人。” 最终，你投资斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德当他在做一个游戏时，结果那个游戏变成了Slack。

And, you know, did you know, you might have known that Stuart was good, but did you really know? You know, and I think a lot of people attribute skill to where there was luck or not, not the other way around. So that you're making your money, you're making your money right at the beginning of the greatest bull market in American history. And so starting in 2010 or so, you know what their average returns are for the last 15 years, that's some P500. Before inflation, I think it's 14%, which basically means you double your money every five years. So what would that be? One million become two million become four million. So you would have forex your money just doing that boring shit, but that's way more boring.

你知道吗，斯图尔特很厉害，这你可能听说过，但你真的了解吗？我觉得很多人把运气的成功归功于技能，而不是反过来。比如你在美国历史上最大的牛市开始时赚钱，比如从2010年开始，过去15年里，他们的平均回报率是多少，你知道吗？标普500指数。在通货膨胀之前，大约是14%，这基本上意味着你每五年资金翻一番。这样的话，一百万会变成两百万，然后变成四百万。这样做虽然很无聊，但实际上你的钱翻了四倍。

Yeah, that's the thing. I think one of my regrets looking back is I wish that I had bought apartment buildings or something really boring, just as a diversification thing and stocks and just been really disciplined there. And instead, you know, I was maybe, I was just shoveling, you know, $100,000 a month out to all these different startups. And then that number went up and up and up over time as I had more free cash to deploy.

是的，就是这样。我回头看，其中一个让我后悔的事情是，我希望当时能买些公寓楼或者其他真的很无聊但可以用来分散投资的东西，再加上股票，并且一直严格执行。而实际上，我可能每个月都把十万美元投到不同的初创公司，随着我手头上可用的现金增加，这个数字也不断上升。

And again, like, I have winners in there, like I invested in SpaceX. I've invested in some great funds. There's some awesome companies in there. But to Sean's point, like, unless you're reporting the LPs and making up numbers, frankly, with up rounds, like, you just have to wait. Yeah. All right. First of all, thank you for sharing all those levels because it's interesting, Ed. B, you don't have to. And most people do not. Props to you for being transparent about it. And also the takeaway I have is like, it takes a lot of wandering and you go through these areas.

再说一遍，我确实有一些成功的投资，比如我投资了SpaceX。我也投资了一些很棒的基金，还有一些非常优秀的公司。 但是，从肖恩的观点来看，除非你向有限合伙人汇报并编造一些数字，实际上以更高的估值融资，否则你只能等待。好的，首先，感谢你分享这些层面的内容，因为非常有趣，埃德。其次，你其实不需要分享这些，但大多数人并不这么做。感谢你的透明。而且我得到的一个结论是：这需要很多探索和历经各个阶段。

You go through these phases. It's kind of the same way you were talking about Tumblr. And it's like, yeah, I had my teen emo phase. It's like, yeah, you go and experiment over there and then you kind of learn. You have some fun, but you kind of learned that's not it. That's not the right path for me. And it sounds like you had a bunch of those and I'm glad you shared it. I want to ask you, you have a question on here. Do you really need to be a billionaire? What are your thoughts on that? I we forgot one level. We forgot one level. What's the last level?

你会经历这些阶段。这跟你谈论 Tumblr 时的道理差不多。就像，我有过我的青少年情绪化阶段。是的，你会去尝试一些东西，然后从中学到一些东西。你会玩得开心，但最终发现那不是我该走的路。看起来你有很多这样的经历，我很高兴你分享了这些。我想问你，你这里有一个问题：你是否真的需要成为亿万富翁？你对此有什么看法？我们忘记了一个层次。最后一个层次是什么？

So so last level is when I took my company public and I had tens of millions of dollars in the bank, both in my companies and personally. And what's weird is I'd reached the end, right? I think that's the goal that so many entrepreneurs think they want. And what I realized is even then with all that money in the bank, I was still anxious. I still fought with my partner. I still got irritated with day to day life problems. Like ultimately, like it's kind of like travel. We all think we want to go to Bali.

所以，最后一个阶段是我把公司上市时，我的公司和我个人账户里都有数千万美元。奇怪的是，我以为自己达到了终点，对吧？我想这应该是许多企业家梦寐以求的目标。但我意识到，即便拥有这么多钱，我依然感到焦虑，还是会和我的合作伙伴争吵，依旧会被日常生活中的问题弄得心烦意乱。归根结底，这有点像旅行，我们都以为自己想去巴厘岛。

If only I moved to Bali, then I'd be happy. The problem with moving to Bali is your brain comes with you and it turned out my brain is just really anxious. Before I had anything, I would want to pump my own chest all the time because I felt like I haven't lived it to my potential. Once, you know, I got lucky and things kind of worked out, I was like, you know, I'm going to not talk about the shit anymore because there's more to life now and this burden does feel weird. I don't even want to bring it up. So I'm just going to be kind of a little more private about this.

如果我搬到巴厘岛，我就会开心了。问题是，当你搬到巴厘岛时，大脑也会跟着你，而事实证明我的大脑非常焦虑。在我还一无所有的时候，我总是想要通过奋斗来证明自己，因为我觉得自己没有达到潜力。后来，我很幸运，事情有了好转，我决定不再谈论那些负面情绪，因为生活中还有更多值得关注的事情，这种负担的感觉也变得很奇怪。我甚至不想提起这些。所以我会变得更私密一些。

Why, why not just act like that? Because I wish somebody had told me. It's kind of like, um, oh, money didn't make you happy. Yeah, kind of figured that meaning you made a bunch of money and it didn't fundamentally change your overall level of happiness or these materialistic things didn't make you happy. I think you're probably smart enough to have not been totally surprised by that. Um, what did surprise you? Well, I think what surprised me was the weight of the money, right? So, you know, we have wrote in this in the prep talk, but like this question of like, do you really need to be a billionaire or do you want to be a billionaire? But you wanted to be. I wanted to be. I always wanted to be because I didn't have enough money growing up. Money was a four letter word in our house. Right. My parents fought about money all the time. And so in my weird little anxious child brain, I said, okay, I want as much money as possible. If I have a lot of money, then everyone will stop fighting. And I think what was counterintuitive is that it didn't, it didn't cause that. So it actually caused familial discord. It didn't get me friends. It isolated me from other people because I was unrelatable.

为什么，为什么不能像那样行事呢？因为我希望有人早些告诉我。这有点像，呃，钱买不到快乐。是的，我大概明白它的意思，就是你赚了很多钱，但它并没有从根本上改变你整体的幸福水平，这些物质上的东西并不会让你快乐。我觉得你可能足够聪明，不会对此完全感到意外。那么，是什么让你感到意外呢？嗯，我想让我惊讶的是金钱的负担，对吧？我们在准备讲话的时候写了这个问题，就像这个问题：你真的需要成为亿万富翁吗，或者你只是想成为亿万富翁？但你确实想成为亿万富翁。我想成为。我一直想成为，因为我从小就没有足够的钱。钱在我们家是一个禁忌词。我父母总是为钱争吵。所以在我那个奇怪的小小焦虑的大脑里，我告诉自己，好吧，我要赚尽可能多的钱。如果我有很多钱，那么大家就会停止争吵。然而，出乎意料的是，这并没有发生。实际上，它导致了家庭不和，并没有给我带来朋友，反而让我和其他人疏远，因为我变得不易理解。

What's the thing you wish somebody told you? So you wish somebody told you, Hey, these things are not going to fundamentally make you happy. The anxiety you're carrying, you're going to carry it over here too. What do you wish that they told you instead? The question is like, what's the actual amount of money you want to spend each year that makes you happy and just working in reverse from there and then figuring out, okay, what is my life's work after that? I think overshooting is a mistake that a lot of people make myself included. And I think they think, okay, I need to be a billionaire or be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When in reality, that is overdoing it. It's like, you know, look, you have you have you have a belly and you can only eat so much food. Why do you need a hundred X that amount of food? If you have a hundred X the amount of food you need, well, it's actually kind of stressful because A, it's wasteful. You don't want the food to go bad and you got to do something with the food. And so the book, frankly, is like, it's kind of like a letter to myself. Ten years ago to say like, hey, you don't need to go there. Like just like good things are not where you think they are. If money, so you're in a weird position where your job is, you know, as an investor, your job is you're doing a good job based on your return. So you're doing a good job based on how much money your clients or your yourself make. But if money wasn't part of it, would you still be investing? Did you just get into that to make money or is this how you'd spend your time regardless? I really like relationships and I think business is a great way to build relationships. That sounds kind of cheesy, but like business is a shared language where if I meet, even a like a guy who owns a plumbing company, I know I'll be able to get along with him because we speak the same language. We can get into interesting conversations and through that I can make friends. And I've found that my, for me, like my zone of genius is like building relationships with people. And so if I can build relationships with people and invest in their businesses or buy their businesses, that like I'm really happy doing that. I love doing that.

你希望有人曾告诉你什么？你希望有人对你说：“这些东西不会从根本上让你快乐。你所携带的焦虑，你会在这里也一样带着。”那么，你希望他们告诉你什么呢？问题在于——每年你想花多少钱能让你感到快乐，然后从这个数字反推，来找到适合自己的生活工作。我认为很多人，包括我在内，都会犯过度追求的错误。他们觉得自己需要成为亿万富翁或拥有数亿资产，但实际上这是过度了。就好比你有一个胃，你只能吃这么多食物，为什么需要100倍于你的食物呢？如果你有100倍于你需要的食物，这其实是有压力的，因为这是浪费。你不想让食物变质，还得想办法处理这些食物。所以，这本书其实就像是十年前写给我自己的一封信，告诉我：“嘿，你不需要走到那个地步，好的东西并不在你想的地方。” 作为投资者，你的工作是根据回报来评判你做得是否优秀，所以你做得好是看你或你的客户赚了多少钱。但是，如果钱不是其中一部分，你还会投资吗？你是为了赚钱才进入这个行业，还是即使没有钱你也会做这件事？我真的很喜欢建立关系，而我认为商业是建立关系的好途径。这听起来有点俗，但商业是一种共享语言，即使我遇到一个擁有水管公司的人，我也知道我们可以相处得很好，因为我们讲同一种语言。我们可以进行有趣的对话，通过这些对话我可以交到朋友。我发现我的天赋领域就是建立人际关系。所以如果我能够建立关系，投资他们的业务或者购买他们的业务，我会非常开心，我爱做这件事。

So Andrew, if you were going to go back, you said you should calculate how much you want to spend every year and then kind of work backwards from that. So let's do the math. What would you, you get to go in a time machine, you go back to 25 year old you and you get to have this conversation. What would you write down on the pen and paper to figure that out? Well, I think what you want to figure out is you want to say, what do I want to spend every year and then times it by 20? What do you think you would want to spend every year back then? I think, I think a million. I mean, okay, so let me put it this way. So a million dollars, you can live an incredible life and have one house go on incredible vacations. Like you can live an amazing life. If you want to fly private, add another million dollars. So that's two million dollars.

所以，安德鲁，如果你重回过去，你说你应该计算每年想要花多少钱，然后从那个数字开始倒推。我们来算算看。如果你可以坐上时光机，回到你25岁的时候，你会怎么样计算呢？你会在纸上写下什么？ 嗯，我觉得你需要弄清楚的是，你想每年花多少钱，然后乘以20。你当时每年想花多少钱呢？我想，大概一百万吧。也就是说，有一百万美元你可以过上非常棒的生活，有一套房子，还可以去度假。如果你想要坐私人飞机，那就再加一百万美元，也就是两百万美元。

And then you want to buffer. So call it three. And that allows you, you know, you basically go and you get into hobbies and toys and you collect cars or do whatever you want. Right. So call it three million bucks. So what's three times 20? So 60 million dollars. I think 60 million dollars. If you've got it liquid, that's, you know, you can live an incredible life and spend three to four million dollars a year. And it's awesome. So that's your target. I think about it. That's your target. Then you'd work backwards from that. And you also had these like three steps that you texted us. I don't know exactly what they mean, but you said launchpad enough and life's work. What do those mean?

然后你想要预留一些备用资金。那就定个标准，比如三百万美元。这样的话，你基本上可以去培养兴趣爱好，收集玩具和汽车，或者做任何你想做的事情，对吧？所以就定个目标三百万美元。那么三百万乘以20是多少？就是六千万美元。我认为，如果你有六千万美元的流动资金，你可以过上令人难以置信的生活，每年花费三到四百万美元就足够了。这是一个很棒的目标。我想这是你的目标。然后你就从这个目标倒推回去。你还提到了三个步骤，不过我不太清楚具体是什么意思。你说了“起跳台”、“够用”和“人生的工作”。这些到底是什么意思呢？

Yeah. So I think these are these really are the kind of goals that everyone should have. So launchpad is like, how do you make 250k a year? Right. And ideally passive. And if you can make 250k a year passive, then you don't need a job. And you have the freedom to be generative and start the things that you want. Past that enough is like, what's the amount you, what's the, what's the number? What's that number we were just talking about that you want to spend every year and how do you work backwards from there? So phase one might be you start a business. Let's say some online business. It makes you 250k a year passive. Great. That's your launchpad. Then for the next five or 10 years, you try and build up to that net worth number that you really want to get to. Call it 20, 30, 40 million dollars, whatever that is. And then you've got complete freedom. And then this is where the hard part comes in, which is discovering your life's work. It's like, what is that thing that you're just intrinsically drawn to that creates meaning? And also, how do you take the byproduct of your machine? You've now built a money machine, right? All your investments and all your businesses. And the byproduct of that is money. And how do you make meaning out of that money? For some people, it's compounding in more businesses. For other people, it's giving it away and doing philanthropy. For others, it's doing art projects or whatever it is. And I think that's the hard part is figuring out that second mountain they call it.

对啊，我认为这些真的是每个人都应该有的目标。首先，发射台阶段的目标是，如何实现每年收入25万美元，对吧？理想情况下，这个收入最好是被动的。如果你每年能有25万美元的被动收入，你就不需要一份工作的束缚，而有更多的自由去创造和启动你想做的事情。 接下来，就是要确定你每年想要支出的那个金额，倒退推算出需要的总资产。第一阶段可能是你开始一个生意，比如一个在线业务，每年能给你带来25万美元的被动收入。很好，这就是你的起点。然后在接下来的五到十年里，你努力积累，达到你真正想要的净资产数额，不管是2000万、3000万还是4000万美元。这样你就完全自由了。 接下来的难点就是发现你的“人生使命”，那是你本能上被吸引，并且能带来意义的事情。同时，你已经建立了一台赚钱的机器——所有的投资和业务——它的副产品就是金钱。如何用这副产品创造意义呢？对有些人来说，是用这些钱创建更多的业务；对另一些人来说，是做慈善捐赠；还有些人可能会用这些钱做艺术项目或其他事情。我认为难点就在于找出这个“第二座山”的真谛。

Sean, have you done the math? Like have you thought about that for you? Yeah. What's yours? Yeah, I did a long time ago. Before I sold my first business, I did this math. My assumption was that I would spend 300,000 dollars a year. And then I tried to do the four or five percent, assuming that that's four or five percent of your total. I forget what it was. I remember getting to six million. And I said, what is that math? That's yeah, 300. That's exactly it. So 300,000 a year of spending. And I thought six million. That's the target. And I drilled that into my brain. I said financial freedom is at six million. Six million means I could spend whatever I want.

肖恩，你有没有算过？就是说你有没有想过这个问题？嗯，你的情况是怎样的？我很久以前就算过了。在我卖掉第一家企业之前，我做了这个计算。我的假设是我每年会花30万美元。然后我尝试用4%到5%的收益来计算，假设这是你总金额的4%或5%。我忘记具体是多少了，但我记得算到了600万。我就问自己，这个数学怎么计算？嗯，没错，就是这么算的。所以每年花30万美元，而我认为目标是600万。我把这个数字深深刻在脑海里，我说财务自由就是600万。600万意味着我可以随心所欲地花钱。

And I made it like part of my like all of my passwords when I would log in. I had the number six in it. And I did all these things. I just kept at that time. I was like really focused on it. And I think actually it was like the right, I was the right way to think about it. You know, today I probably spend a little bit more than that. So it's not like it's, it's not like I was way off in my estimate. But I think round number 10 million is financial freedom for almost everybody. And 10 million is not that hard to get to. If you, if you own a business, you should be able to get to, you know, let's call it one to two million a year, profit a year and sell that thing for, you know, some of them between five and five and 10 X multiple depending on what industry you're in.

我把数字六加进了所有我登录用的密码里。我做了这些事，当时我就特别专注在这上面。我觉得那样做其实是对的，思路也是对的。今天我可能花费的比那时稍多一些，不过当时的估计也没有差太多。我认为一千万美元对于大多数人来说就是财务自由。而且如果你有一家公司，达到这个目标也不是太难。如果你的公司每年能赚一到两百万的利润，然后你可以以五到十倍的价格卖掉它，取决于你所在的行业。

That's not a hard way to get to 10 million. It's hard, but it's simple. Yeah, I guess like what I mean is like most people will never get to true financial independence where they're like, yes, I've made it. I don't have to worry about money ever again. Right. That's a very lucky few people, a few percentage of the population. Like I'll tell you this, I did this thing the other night, which I'm not really proud of. I went on LinkedIn and I searched my college class. So it's like, okay, let me go look at Duke 2010.

这并不是达到一千万的艰难方法。但确实不容易，不过很简单。是的，我的意思是，大多数人永远无法达到真正的财务独立，就是那种可以说“是的，我成功了，我再也不用担心钱了”的状态。这样的人只是极少数，可能只占总人口的一小部分。我告诉你吧，前几天晚上我做了件我不是很自豪的事。我上了LinkedIn，搜了一下我大学的同学，就是比如，我查了一下2010年杜克大学的同学。

Dude, that's my, that's my Friday night routine. I do it every Friday night at one o'clock. I literally do this on a Friday night. I got it all by schedule. I got a reminder on my calendar at one o'clock a.m. Friday night. I got a, like, you joke. This is literally what I did. My kids went to bed. My wife went to bed and I was like, all right, dig in, baby. Let's do this. I had never done it before, but I was like, let's do this. And I knew at the time I'm doing this for kind of a fdup reason, which is I just wanted to feel good about myself.

哥们，这就是我的——这是我周五晚上的固定节目。我每个周五凌晨一点都这么做。我真的每个周五晚上都这样。我都按时间表安排好了。我在日历上设置了提醒，周五凌晨一点。我不是开玩笑，这真的是我干的。我孩子睡觉了，老婆也睡觉了，我就想，好吧，开始吧，宝贝。咱们干吧。我以前从没这么做过，但我就想，咱们干吧。而且我当时知道我这么做有点不正常，就是因为我只是想让自己感觉好点。

I was like, I kind of knew, I was like, I think I've done well relative to the people of my class, but I knew maybe skill or intelligence or talent wise, or even work ethic wise. I was definitely average to maybe below average in my class. And so I was scrolling through it. I was looking it up and it was amazing. Man, these people who I know these people, these people were smarter than me, harder working than me, more talented than me. They're doing like just kind of random jobs. And I texted my college roommate and I was like, man, it's crazy that like this person, this one girl, I remember, I was like, she literally could have been president. Like she was polished. She was a phenomenal speaker, super hardworking, just knew everything about everything.

我当时心里想，我有点明白，我觉得相对于我的同学们来说，我做得还不错，但我也知道无论是技能、智慧、天赋还是工作态度，我在班里肯定只是平均水平，甚至可能低于平均水平。所以我一直在翻看这些信息，看到了一些让我震惊的事实。天啊，这些人我都认识，他们比我聪明，比我努力，天赋更高，但他们现在做的工作却只是些随便的职位。我给我大学室友发了条信息，我说，天啊，这简直太疯狂了，比如这个女孩，我记得她真的有当总统的潜力。她非常有风度，是个出色的演讲者，超勤奋，几乎什么都懂。

And I was like, and today she was like running, she was like an e-commerce manager at some e-comm brand that sells like, you know, some food product online. And nothing wrong with that. That's not like a bad thing. But I definitely feel like, you know, the potential was there for a lot more. If somebody had kind of sat us down and said, look, here's a blueprint. Here's a path that could get you to complete financial independence. Like if somebody our senior year had come and said, look, how much do you even know how much money you want, indeed?

我当时觉得，今天她好像是个电子商务经理，在一个卖食品的电商品牌工作。这个工作没什么不好，但我确实觉得她的潜力远不止这些。如果那时有人能坐下来对我们说：“看，这是一个蓝图，可以让你实现完全的财务独立。”就像如果有人在我们高年级时问我们：“你们真的知道自己想要多少钱吗？”

I'm like, none of us would have known. It's like, do the math. You sort of get there. You think, okay, maybe you get five million or 10 million bucks. And said, do you know how do you get there? And I would have been me as a senior would have said, I have no clue how you get there. Is that like salary and save up? Like, what am I supposed to do? And if somebody had said, no, no, here's what you could start a business. I guess to this, you sell for this multiple. That whole thing might take you five to seven years, maybe 10 years total. And by the time you're 31, you might be there, right? Like if somebody has sat me down, I would have really felt like thankful and been like, wow, I don't have to go do that.

我感觉，我们谁也不会知道的。这就像是，做一下计算，你会有个大致的概念。你想，好吧，也许你能赚到五百万或一千万美元。然后问自己，你知道怎么才能达到那个目标吗？作为一个高年级生的我会说，我完全不知道该怎么做到。那是指工资和储蓄吗？我该怎么做呢？如果有人告诉我，不，不，其实你可以创业。比如说，你卖出公司的估值是一个倍数。整个过程可能需要五到七年，也许总共十年。在你31岁的时候，可能就能实现这个目标。像这样的如果有人坐下来跟我讲，我真的会感激不尽，会觉得，哇，我不用去做那些摸不着头脑的事情了。

But I'm glad I know what it I can. I'm glad I even know what that looks like because I didn't know that my parents didn't do that. So they didn't teach me that. That's not something they knew, right? I saw this great quote, you can't ask somebody for directions to a place that they've never been. And I guess like growing up, I was asking people for directions to a place that they had never been. And so therefore they were just giving me all kinds of screwed up directions to places that I didn't want to go. And so yeah, I guess like this along with the way of saying, I think when I looked at that class thing, I guess like the I went into it trying to feel good about myself. And actually I ended up feeling bad. I was like, man, I feel like there was a lot of potential on the table. And most people took basically safety and prestige. Like they had a good job at a great company. And I'd rather have no job at my company, right? That's that's the shift that I wish like, you know, at least 25% of those people could have done that and been in a totally different position.

但我很高兴知道我能够知道的事情。我很高兴我甚至知道那是什么样子，因为我之前不知道我父母没有教我这些。所以他们没有教我这些。他们不知道这些，对吧？我看到一句很棒的话："你不能向一个从未去过某个地方的人询问如何到达那个地方的路。" 我想，在成长过程中，我一直在向那些从未去过的人问路。因此，他们给我的都是各种错误的、我不想去的地方的指引。所以，是的，我想，随着时间的推移，我意识到，当我看到那个班级的情景时，我本想通过这个过程让自己感觉良好，但实际上，我最终感觉很糟。我想：“天啊，我觉得有很多潜力都被浪费了。” 大多数人选择了基本的安全和名声，就像是在一家公司里找到了一份好工作。而我宁愿在自己的公司里一份工作也没有，对吧？这是我希望至少25%的人能够做到的转变，那样他们会处于完全不同的位置。

Yeah, I see so many people do this to a startups where they go, you know, my goal is financial freedom. And then they go and start a venture back startup. And it goes back to that roulette versus poker, where it's like, look, if you just started a boring business, like a trash hauling business or window cleaning business or whatever it is, you get it to one or $2 million of cash flow, sell it or hold it, you're set for life. And instead they go off and they raise all this money and they don't realize that they really have a 1%, you know, call it a one to 5% chance of success and maybe a 10% chance of like an okay outcome where they basically just make whatever they would have made over 10 years in a payout, you know, if they'd just done that or something. I feel like so many people are trapped in that way of thinking.

是的，我看到很多人对待初创企业时都会这样，他们说自己的目标是财务自由。然后他们创办了一家风险投资支持的初创公司。这就像轮盘赌与扑克的区别，如果你创办一个看起来无聊的生意，比如垃圾清理业务或窗户清洗业务等，做到一两百万美元的现金流，卖掉或持有，你这一辈子就可以安稳了。相反，他们去筹集大笔资金，却没意识到他们实际上只有1%到5%的成功几率，或者最多有10%的几率获得一个还算可以的结果，基本就是在10年内赚到他们本来通过普通生意也能赚到的钱。我觉得很多人都被这种思维方式困住了。

And I think there's this other great book that really inspired me with mine, which is called How to Get Rich as the best book. I mean, that's by far one of the best business books I've ever read because I read part of it. I read like a third of it. The book, I mean, the real, the real takeaway is it's similar to my book in some ways, right, where it's like, at the end of the day, the money like ruined the money, like ruined him, right? He became like addicted to money. And he basically in it goes, look, all my life, I want it to be a poet. And instead, I got obsessed with money and addicted to drugs. And I wish that I just quit at 35. He said he goes, he goes, I was a, I was a punch drunk boxer, but instead of boxing, it was making money. And I ended up spending $100 million on crack and whores, because he actually became, he was a crack addict. And he died with a partner and that was a prostitute. Like his, his then girlfriend was a prostitute he met. But the book has like 10 or 15 chapters and each is a different lesson.

我觉得还有另一本很棒的书对我写作启发很大，叫做《如何致富》。这本书，毫无疑问，是我读过的最好的商业书之一。虽然我只读了三分之一，但它已经让我受益匪浅。其实，书中的主要内容在某些方面和我的书相似，它讲到最后，金钱毁掉了他（作者）。他变得对金钱上瘾。书中说，他一生都想当诗人，但却迷失在对金钱的痴迷和毒品的依赖中。他说，他希望自己在35岁的时候就放弃。他自喻像个拳击手，但他迷醉的并不是拳击而是金钱。他最终花了一亿美元在毒品和性交易上，因为他是个瘾君子，并且死的时候身边是位他变成女朋友的妓女。这本书有十到十五章，每章讲述一个不同的教训。

But the main takeaway is that he's a really wealthy guy and he keeps it real, beautiful writing. And he talks about how, yeah, he got, he got drunk on it. And he, he talks about, I mean, this kind of thing we've been doing in this episode where we talk about the levels, right? What are all the different levels of wealth and what do they mean? And I remember reading it when my net worth was like 500 grand. And he's saying, Oh, you know, if you want to be really, if you might think like 50 million is a lot, but that's actually nothing, you know, here's what you got at 250 million, it's got like comfortably poor, comfortably rich. Yeah. And it's a very, and all the levels are quite high. You read that you get very humbled. Are you looking at the levels right now? Yeah. He has two of them. He has levels of non liquid money. And then he has levels of liquid money. And so he says wealth measured in cash in hand or quickly realizable assets. So kind of like liquidish assets. And what he says is 100 to 400 K, that's the comfortably poor, 401 million, the comfortably off one to two million, the comfortably wealthy.

但主要的观点是他是一个非常富有的人，而且他很真实，写得很漂亮。他讲到自己曾经被财富冲昏了头脑。我们在这一集中聊到的一个话题就是财富的不同等级以及它们的意义。我记得自己净资产大概是50万美元时读到这本书。他说，如果你认为5000万很多，那其实不算什么。他详细讲解了2500万时的情况，分成“舒适的穷人”和“舒适的富人”等几种等级。所有这些等级都很高，读到后让人感到十分谦逊。你现在在看这些等级吗？他有两种分类：一种是非流动资金的等级，另一种是流动资金的等级。他说按手头现金或快速变现的资产来衡量财富时，10万到40万是“舒适的穷人”，40万到100万是“刚刚够用”，100万到200万是“舒适的富人”。

And then it goes the lesser rich, the comfortably rich, the rich, the seriously rich, that 70 to 100 million. What does rich start at 100 to 200? The truly rich, and then over 200 million, the filthy and super rich. Yeah, it's a it's a great chart that he made. I love that chart. Yeah. And by the way, like, I guess for what it's worth, even though I just went on this rant about how you can kind of reverse engineer financial independence, I got a disagree with one thing that you said Andrew, so I think you have it. I think am I characterizing this right? I think you have a belief, which is like, you should kind of like focus on these increments, like get to the 250 K, get a few million in the bank, and then like start, then you start kind of finding your life's work as you as you go, right? You can decide how much money you really want, get to it, get to your enough number, and then figure out your life's work. Is that correct?

然后来说，那些较不富有的，舒适富有的，富有的，非常富有的，那些有七千万到一亿的人。那什么是富有，起点是从一亿到两亿吗？真正的富有，然后超过两亿，就是超级富有和极度富有。对，那是他制作的一张很棒的图表。我真的很喜欢那张图表。对了，顺便提一句，尽管我刚才对如何逆向工程财务独立进行了这样的讨论，但我不同意你所说的一件事，安德鲁。所以我觉得你是这么认为的，对吗？你有一个信念，就是说，你应该专注于这些增量，比如先达到二十五万，在银行里存几百万，然后像这样逐步来，然后你再开始寻找你的人生事业，对吗？你可以决定你真的想要多少钱，达到你的"够了"的数字，然后再去找你的人生事业。这样说对吗？

Yeah, but I think that if you overshoot that it causes a lot of stress, right? I had a meeting once, I want to tell you guys about it. My company got acquired by Twitch, and Twitch hires this new guy, the guy who's currently the CEO of Twitch, this guy, Dan Clancy. And I go into Dan's office, and he's my new boss, and he's like, all right, yeah, I want to do a one-on-one, he has like five direct reports, I'm one of his direct reports, and he's like, you know, I always with my, I want to have a good relationship, I want to understand where you're trying to go, and then I can help you get there. So like, you know, what's the dream for you? You're like an L, I was like an L7 at the time, so you want to get to L8, like, you know, the like the little ladder they create inside the company, and I think L10 is like the CEO, and there's no nine. It's like some weird system where you get to eight, then you get to 10, or you don't get there. Going, going clear in Scientology. Yeah, exactly. I think Bezos is a 12 or 13 or something like that, and like, that's the top level. So he's like, what's the goal? And I was like, I in my head, I was like, do I tell this guy, I don't really give a fuck about being at this company, or do I have to lie and pretend I want to be here when I'm really just vesting out for like the next year? I was like, all right, let's go with the truth. So I go, honestly, like, I did the steals, that's how I got here. That amount of money kind of matters to me. I want to vest that out. I want to have fun while I'm here. I want to do good work while I'm here. I want to meet cool people, but honestly, like not looking for a long term fit here. You know, there's not a one night stand. It's like a one year stand for me. And I tell him this, and he said, okay, great. He does a flinch. And I'm like, okay, I respect this guy. And he goes, I don't want to waste my time then trying to figure out like, you know, your path here. But he's like, I also don't want to check out on you. And I was like, Oh, thank you. I was like, that's my hesitation. I didn't want to tell you that because I didn't want you to just totally write me off as like a guy you don't want to spend any time with for the next year, because I'm not a part of the long term. He's like, no, no, no. And he goes, tell me what is the plan that outside of here? And I go, you know, and this is where I went to like, this is how I used to think at the time. I had this insecurity, which made me want to say something very ambitious. I thought, you know, I live in Silicon Valley and you know, in Hollywood, you're measured on your, your beauty and your IMDB in Silicon Valley. It's how ambitious is your story. What are you trying to change and disrupt and all this stuff? So I said, I said, I really want to start a school like a university.

是啊，但是我觉得如果你做过头了，会引起很大的压力，对吧？我有一次开会，我想跟你们讲讲。我的公司被Twitch收购了，Twitch雇了一个新的人，现在Twitch的CEO，这家伙叫Dan Clancy。所以我去见了Dan，他是我的新老板。他说，好的，我想搞个一对一的谈话，他有五个直接下属，而我就是其中之一。他说，你知道吗，我总是希望跟我的下属有个良好的关系，我想理解你想去哪，然后我可以帮助你实现。所以他说，你的梦想是什么？当时我在公司的级别是L7，他问我是不是想升到L8，你知道的，公司内部的那个晋升阶梯。我想L10就是CEO，没有L9。这有点像个奇怪的系统，你要么升到L8，要么升到L10，要么就没机会。有点像山达基教徒的“清醒”过程。是的，正是这样。我想贝佐斯是12级或者13级，差不多就是最高级别了。他说，你的目标是什么？当时我脑子里在想，我是告诉这个家伙我其实根本不在乎留在这家公司，还是撒个谎假装自己很想待在这里，其实我只是想在未来一年到期套现？最终我决定讲真话。所以我说，老实说，我是因为完成了这笔交易才来到这里。对于我来说，那笔钱很重要。我想等到股权全部归属后离开，我想在这里期间过得开心，做些好工作，认识一些很酷的人，但说实话，我并没有长期待在这里的打算。对我来说，这不是一夜情，而是一年情。我告诉他这些后，他竟然非常冷静地接受了，我当时觉得，这家伙我挺尊重的。他接着说，那我也不想浪费时间去帮你规划在这里的未来。他还说，我也不想对你完全置之不理。我说，谢谢你，这也是我为什么刚开始犹豫要不要告诉你实话，我不想让你觉得我不是长期跟你共事的人，就把我当成不值得投入时间的人。他说，不不不，然后问我离开这里之后的计划是什么？然后我开始讲述，我当时是这么想的。那时我有一种不安全感，让我总想说一些非常有野心的话。我想，我住在硅谷，在好莱坞人们看你的外貌和你的IMDb，而在硅谷是看你的故事有多么具有野心，你想要改变和颠覆什么。所以我说，我真的想创办一所学校，像大学一样的学校。

So I go to the speech and I tell him this thing and I don't know if you guys have ever done this, but you give your material as an entrepreneur, you're saying it to your employees, your investors all the time. You have these speeches that you kind of know the reaction that you get. And if you always get like a nodding, like, wow, that sounds great. Sounds really well thought through that's a great framework for that. You start to get used to that.

所以我去演讲，把这件事情告诉了他。我不知道你们有没有这样的经历，作为一个创业者，你经常会向你的员工、投资者传达你的想法。你有这些演讲稿，你大概能预见到听众的反应。如果你总是得到点头认可，比如“哇，这听起来很棒”，或者“这想法真的很周全，这是个很好的框架”，你就会开始习惯这种反应。

So I give him my framework. I say to do this, you need three things. You need skills, you need capital, and you need connections. And what I'm doing right now is the next three years, I'm building those three up. I'm building my capital by being here. I'm building my skills by doing this. I'm building my connections by doing this. And that's what I need to do the thing. I give him this whole speech.

所以我把我的框架告诉了他。我说，要做到这一点，你需要三样东西。你需要技能、资本和人脉。现在我正在为接下来的三年做准备，我在这些方面努力提升。我通过在这里积累资本，通过做这些事来提升技能，通过这些活动来拓展人脉。这些就是我所需要的。我跟他讲了这一整套思路。

And I'm so used to people being like, Oh, that sounds really well thought through, you know, sounds great. He's gonna be like Mark Walberg in the department being like Hawthorne. Like, come on, man. Like, give it a literally what he did to me. He goes, yeah, I don't buy all that. And then he would tell me what I'm just like, okay, well, that's all I got. So so what do you want me to say?

我已经习惯了别人对我的想法说：“哦，这听起来很有道理，挺不错的。” 但是他像《无间行者》里的马克·沃尔伯格一样，根本不买账。他直接对我说：“我不相信这些。” 我只能无奈地回答：“好吧，我也只能说这么多了，那么你想让我说什么呢？”

He goes, I don't believe in the deferred life plan. It goes anytime I he's like, I'm older and wiser. He's like, you know, I just if ever hear somebody who wants to do something and then they give me a bunch of reasons why they're not just going and doing it right now, it tends to be a bad decision to not go do the thing you want to do. He's like, it's okay. If you don't know what you want to do, then sure you go wander around, you try to figure it out. But if you know, you're he's like, you're an entrepreneur.

他说，我不相信推迟生活计划。他说，每当我听到有人想做什么事，却找了一堆理由为什么现在不去做，我认为这通常是一个不好的决策。然后他说，如果你不知道自己想做什么，那当然可以随便摸索，试图弄清楚。但如果你已经知道了——你是个企业家。

If somebody told you they wanted to start a business, would you tell them first go to business school, read these 10 books first, then go start, you know, go do a practice session doing this, go hire a coach. No, you tell them like, start the business and you'll figure it out as you go. That's how you get good at business by doing business. There is no real substitute to getting good at the thing besides doing the thing. And he goes, if you want to do that, you should go do it.

如果有人告诉你他们想创业，你会先让他们去上商学院，然后读这十本书，再去开始、再去练习，找个教练吗？不是的，你会告诉他们，开始创业，你会在过程中自己摸索出来的。你通过做生意来学会做生意，这是唯一的方式。如果你想做，那就去做吧。

I don't believe in the deferred life plan. And ever since he said that to me, you know, there's something good about getting just like served like that, just getting owned to your face. And you're like, huh, thank you. That was like a real gift that you gave me because you could have just like everybody else just nodded along and said, all right, sounds good. Good luck. And instead, he kind of shook me up a little bit and changed my frame on that. And so that's the only one thing I would say, Andrew, is like, you have this thing of like, go figure out your life's work, which is, I don't know, maybe a better plan is to like start by saying what I really love doing.

我不相信推迟生活计划。从他对我说那句话开始，我意识到，有时候直接当面被点醒反而是一件好事。这种直接的反馈让我感到非常感谢。他本可以像其他人一样，只是点头附和说“好啊，祝你好运”，但他却稍微震撼了我一下，改变了我的思维方式。所以我唯一想对你说的，就是你总是强调去找到你生命中的工作，但也许更好的计划是先搞清楚你真正热爱的事情是什么。

Or you loved designing websites, designing products. And you want to just been happier doing that. You might have made as much money if you had just like gone for that versus I think the way that maybe you do things about definitely the way I did things, which was first, I'm going to go make the money, then I'm going to do the things I want. And actually, as I look back now, and if I was going to give advice to myself now, I would say, I don't think you need to do it that way. That works.

也许你喜欢设计网站，设计产品。而且你会因为做这些事情感到更快乐。如果你选择追求这些兴趣，你可能会赚差不多的钱。相比之下，我和你现在的做法可能是先去赚钱，然后才去做自己喜欢的事情。回头看，我现在会给自己的建议是，不一定非要这样做。这种方式是有效的，但未必是唯一的选择。

That is one way way to work to make it work. But you might be better off just going and trying to do the thing if you know what the thing is. You know, do you know that parable, the fishermen and the businessman? You know that one? Yeah, love that one. So good. So okay, so there's this like, you know, Wall Street guy, and he's on vacation on a small tropical island. And he sees this man who's fishing down by the water. And he walks up and he says, Hey, what are you up to? And he says, I'm fishing for the morning, and I'm going to get a fish and I'm going to feed my family.

那是一种让它发挥作用的方法。不过如果你知道要做的事情，可能直接去尝试更好。你知道那个寓言吗，渔夫和商人的故事？你知道那个吗？对，我超喜欢那个故事。太棒了。所以话说，有个华尔街的商人，他正在一个热带小岛上度假。他看到一个人在水边钓鱼，就走过去问他：“嘿，你在干什么呢？”那个人回答：“我在钓鱼，我要钓条鱼回去喂家人。”

And the guy goes, Oh, will you ever think about turning that into a business? And he goes, well, how would that work? And he says, well, first you get a couple other buddies and you fish more, you got more fish, and then you sell them at the market. Well, and then what? Well, and then you would buy a boat and you'd be even more efficient and you could freeze them and you could ship them all over the world and you have a great business. And then he goes, well, and then what? And then he says, well, you didn't get a fleet of ships.

那个家伙说，噢，你有没有想过把这个变成一门生意？他回答说，那要怎么做呢？对方说，首先你找几个朋友一起钓鱼，钓到更多的鱼，然后拿到市场上去卖。然后呢？然后你可以买一艘船，这样效率更高，可以把鱼冷冻起来，运到世界各地去卖，生意就越来越大。然后呢？然后你就可以买一整队船只。

Well, and then what after that, well, and then you take the company public and then what? Well, and then you could retire and you could just fish all day. And so the joke is like the guy is already doing the thing he loves. Why would he go and build this big business? And I think it's like, look, do you want to chop wood in your backyard or do you want to own a sawmill? Do you want to be Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Steve Els from Chipotle? I think that is the ultimate question of like, what is your happy place and how can you optimize your life around being in that?

嗯，然后呢？然后你可以让公司上市，然后呢？然后你可以退休，整天去钓鱼。笑话就在这里，那个人已经在做他喜欢的事情了，为什么还要去建立一个大企业呢？我觉得这就像，你是想在自家后院砍柴，还是想拥有一个锯木厂？你是想成为《寿司之神》中的次郎，还是Chipotle的创始人史蒂夫·埃尔斯？最终的问题在于，什么才是你的快乐之地，你如何围绕这个来优化你的人生。

Yeah, I mean, I remember one time I told that story and I was like, wait, what's the punchline? You remember that, Sean? I was like, I'm not really sure what the takeaway is, but like, should I go and like fish or I don't know. You remember that? No, it's a good story though. But Andrew, when's the book officially come out? July 9th. It's actually a great book. Like I have a lot of friends that have come out with books and never enough is actually one that I sat down and read the entire thing, not because I was trying to be your friend, but because I thought it was awesome. The writing's good. What are you looking at, Sean? I'm looking at the book. Well, I had the same reaction. I would have said it's a good book anyways, because I'm your friend, but it actually is a good book. I read it in like three nights, basically. I read out when it was still a PDF. There's three, there's three good stories. I remember from Andrew. So there's the Charlie Munger story. So it's basically the crazy way that you actually ended up meeting your hero and kind of almost doing a business deal with them.

对啊，我记得有一次我讲那个故事时，我突然想，等等，笑点是什么？你记得吗，肖恩？当时我就有点糊涂，不知道要表达什么，但我是说，我该去钓鱼还是干嘛，我也不清楚。你记得那一次吗？不过那确实是个好故事。不过，安德鲁，你的书什么时候正式出版？7月9日。这真的是一本好书。我有很多朋友都出过书，但《永不满足》是我真正花时间坐下来通读的，不是因为我是你的朋友，而是因为我觉得这本书很棒。写得很好。你在看什么，肖恩？我在看那本书。我的感觉也是一样。即使不是因为我是你的朋友，我也会说这是一部好书。我基本上用了三个晚上把它读完的。我还在它是PDF版本时就读完了。安德鲁有三个好故事我记得很清楚。其中有个是关于查理·芒格的故事，说的是你怎样以一种疯狂的方式见到了你心中的英雄，几乎还和他做成了一桩生意。

There's the Pixel Union sale and then buyback story. I thought that was a great one of kind of your first big win in terms of an exit. And you shared the numbers and you talked about how it went down and then how it went slightly wrong. I liked that story. And then the last one, I won't give away the ending, but the ending is dope. And the ending was so good. I was like, did he just do this for the book? Like, I was like, did he just make this ending so he needed a good ending for the book? So he just did this thing in real life? Or was that real? But it was a very good way to end the book. I liked it. It was all real.

有Pixel Union的出售和回购的故事。我认为这是你第一次在退出方面取得重大胜利的一个很棒的案例。你分享了具体的数据，讲述了整个过程，以及其中出现的小问题。我很喜欢这个故事。然后最后一个故事，我不会揭露结局，但结局真的很棒。结局非常精彩，我都在想，他是为了书才这样做的吗？我是说，他为了让书有个好结局而在现实中做了这件事？还是说这是真的？但无论如何，这个结局是非常好的。我很喜欢。这一切都是真实的。

Dude, thanks for doing this again. And never enough. What's the best place to buy out? A website or Amazon? Does it matter? You just go to never, never enough.com. There's all the links there or you can just go on Amazon and buy it there. And that's the pod.

兄弟，再次感谢你帮忙。真的非常感激。买东西最好的地方是什么？是一个网站还是亚马逊？有区别吗？你只需要去 never, never enough.com。那里有所有的链接，或者你也可以直接去亚马逊买。就是这样啦。