Meet the young billionaires getting rich off AI

3 22-year-olds became billionaires by paying doctors and lawyers to grade AI answers for OpenAI and Anthropic. The money is going to whoever spots what AI still gets wrong and sells the fix to the people building it. The Federal Reserve reported that AI adoption still at only 18% of American firms at the end of 2025. So more than 8 out of every 10 companies around you still haven't really implemented it, and their customers are sitting there waiting for someone who has. So here's how the young billionaires get rich off AI actually did it, and none of them invented a chatbot. Brendan Foody runs a company called Mercore with 2 friends he met on his high school debate team, and all 3 of them are worth about $2.2 billion each. It started with something they heard in a meeting with OpenAI. Foody, Adarsh Hiramath, and Surya Mitta grew up in the Bay Area and competed together on the speech and debate team at Belarmine College Preparatory. In 2023, they started a company and dropped out of college to run it. The first version was nothing to do with artificial intelligence. At a hackathon in São Paulo, they built a way to match skilled engineers overseas with American companies that needed them. They handled all the paperwork and the payments, and they took a small cut off every deal they made. It was a recruiting business. It was boring on purpose. They took meetings with OpenAI and xAI, and they heard the same problem twice. The labs had all the computing power money could buy and all the internet text there was to read. What they didn't have was people who could tell them whether an answer that AI gave was actually any good. If a model, an LLM, writes a contract, you need a lawyer to say where it's wrong. If it writes code, you need an engineer to catch if there's a security hole. If it gives medical advice, you need a doctor to make sure that it was correct. So they pointed their recruiting business at that. Merckor hires real doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and engineers to grade what the LLMs produce. The expert they hire, Mark Stevens, output and then writes the scoring guide that the lab uses to grade the next 10,000 answers. Merckor finds those people, runs the workflow, handles all the payments in dozens of countries, and charges their fee on top of that. There's no breakthrough algorithm in any of this. They found out that a lab with billions of dollars of computers was short on cardiologists, and then they went and they hired them for that. The experts get paid $75 to $150 an hour, which is real money for a few hours a week on top of an existing day job. A radiologist reads scans all day long, then spends 3 evenings a month telling an LLM where it got a scan wrong. And by October 2025, Merkur was managing about 30,000 contractors and paying out roughly $2 million a day. Its customers included OpenAI and Anthropic. That same month, investors valued the company at $10 billion. Each of the 3 founders owns about 22% of it, which puts each of them at around $2.2 billion. They were all 22 years old. Forbes says they're the youngest self-made billionaires ever to make the list, younger than Mark Zuckerberg, who got there at 23. 2 years from a hackathon project all the way to that. No degree. They didn't have a patent. They didn't create an algorithm that nobody else could write. Now, you might be thinking, okay, those 22-year-olds, they're geniuses. They're from Silicon Valley. They have Peter Thiel in their contacts. And you might be 45 with a business that sells something a lot more physical than them. What they actually did wasn't a technical breakthrough. And that's what I'm trying to model here for you guys. They sat in a room with a buyer. They listened to what the buyer couldn't get anywhere else. And they went and they solved the problem for them. A $10 billion company, and that's all it does. You can do that inside your industry right now, this week, with the phone that— the phone that you're holding right now. Let's go back to that Federal Reserve number. Only about 18% of American companies are implementing AI effectively. That means the race is wide open in your town, in your industry, and the 82% who haven't really touched any of it yet this year. So here are the 6 young billionaires getting rich off AI, where each of them came from, and the one move that made them rich that you can learn from as well. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Edwin Chen never took a dollar. Edwin Chen is 37 years old. His parents came over from Taiwan and ran a restaurant, and he worked in the family kitchen as a teenager before the boarding school and before MIT. At MIT, he studied math, computer science, and linguistics. Then he about 10 years as a research scientist inside the biggest names in the industry. So Google, Facebook, Twitter. He also did a stretch at Clarium, the hedge fund Peter Thiel ran, but he walked away from all of it and moved out of the Bay Area. He had always hated the Silicon Valley status game. In 2020, he started Surge AI on his own out of an apartment with the money that he had saved from those 10 years of working. He didn't have a co-founder. He had no pitch deck. He had no outside investors. Surge finds the doctors, lawyers, and engineers who can tell an AI lab where its model went wrong and grades the output. By 2024, it was doing $1.2 billion in revenue with around 110 people, and Google and Anthropic were both paying customers. No company in history has reached $1 billion of revenue faster without raising outside money. Chen owns about 75% of it now. Forbes puts him on the list of the 400 richest Americans as the youngest person on that list, and you would probably never even heard his name until watching this video here. So what you can do is copy the order that he did everything in revenue first from a customer for work that you can already do. So think about 3 things that you can sell right now to somebody who has paid you before, then message those 3 people tonight and ask what they're working on and see if you can help them. Alexander Wang took the job nobody wanted. Alexander Wang grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town where America built the atomic bomb. Both of his parents were weapons physicists at the laboratory there, and they had come from China. He entered his first math contest in 6th grade, For one reason, the prize was a trip to Disney. He won it. Then he made the Math Olympiad program, the United States physics team, and the finals of the National Computing Olympiad twice. As a teenager, he was always trying to automate restocking his own fridge when he worked out the thing that later made him rich. What was holding AI back wasn't the algorithms. Nobody had labeled any of the data. So he went to MIT to study machine learning, and that lasted about a year. At 19, he dropped out. His first company wasn't the one that actually made him rich. In 2015, he and a designer he knew from Quora, Lucy Guo, built an app for booking doctor's appointments, and it went nowhere. Guo said, we couldn't focus on product dev because we were just calling doctors all day. Then a roommate joked that what they really needed was an API for humans, and that joke became Scale AI. Scale labels data. Real people sit down and draw a box around every car, every stop sign, every pedestrian in a picture so that a model An LLM AI can learn what it's looking at. Millions of boxes, one at a time. Every lab needed that work done, and none of them wanted to be the company that did it. In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale and made Wang its chief AI officer. He's 29 now, worth about $3.6 billion. So find the job in your industry that everybody needs and nobody wants to do. Think about the last time a client apologized before asking you for something. Sorry, I know this is a pain, but could you, you know, whatever comes after that, that's the job. Call the client this week and offer to take it off their hands every month. Lucy Guo left in 2018 and got rich in 2025. So Lucy Guo was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon when Peter Thiel's foundation offered her $100,000 to quit. That's what the Thiel Fellowship does, if you didn't know. It pays people under 20 to leave school and go build something. She took it. She designed that Snapchat where she was the first woman in that job, and then at Quora where she met Alexander Wang. She was in the doctor's appointment app with him too, the one that failed. Guo said, we wish there were an API that could call the doctors for us every time somebody was sick. That's a good idea. Made an appointment in the app. So in 2016, the two of them went and built that instead and called it Scale AI. She was 21. 2 years later, she was gone. They had some disagreements about how the company should be run. And in 2018, she left the company that she had co-founded. Meta's $14.3 billion was still 7 years away at that point, but she kept her shares. For the next 7 years, she had no job there. She didn't have a title. She didn't have a say in any of the decisions that Scale made. But in April 2025, Forbes named her the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire. billionaire at 30 on a stake worth about $1.25 billion. In December 2022, she launched Passes, where creators sell directly to the people who follow them, and she raised around $50 million for it. Olivia Dunne and Bella Thorne are both in on it. So start your next thing before you know how the last one goes, right? Guo had no idea in 2018 what those shares would be worth, and she didn't wait to find out. And you can write down the one thing you'd build in business if your current company went away, and then give yourself 2 hours on the weekend to start making progress on it. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Michael Troll sold his company to SpaceX. So Michael Troll is 25. He wrote his first code at 11 so he could build his own mobile games, and at 14 he built a programming game. He was a national computing Olympiad finalist, and at MIT he co-created created Highlight, an AI programming competition that pulled in more than 10,000 entrants. In 2022, he and 3 MIT classmates started a company called AnySphere. One of them, Aman Sanger, had sat in his high school classes in New York. Troll was 21 when he raised their Series A. Then he spent almost a year building the wrong product. They went after mechanical engineering software tools for designing actual physical parts in an industry that none of them knew anything about. Troll has called that year wandering in the desert. So they went back to the one job they understood completely, which was writing code all day with tools that were too slow, and they built Cursor. Now, it nearly didn't work as a business. They charged $20 to $40 a month while paying out more than that to OpenAI and Anthropic to run it, which left them with a gross margin of around 30%. In April 2025, their AI support agent invented a login rule that didn't exist, and a wave of customers canceled before a human could even step in. But in November 2025, Cursor passed $1 billion in annual revenue, Faster than any business software company had ever done it at a $29.3 billion valuation. Then on the 14th of August of 2026, SpaceX bought the whole company for $60 billion in stock, the largest startup acquisition anybody has ever recorded. Each of the 4 co-founders walked away with about $2.4 billion of Elon Musk's rocket company. So build for the job that you already do all day long. They lost a year on an industry that they didn't understand. Then built a tool for the one thing they really knew completely. So write down the 3 parts of your own work that waste most of the time this week and pick the one that you could easily describe to AI to start building. Erwin Trinivas quit OpenAI right before ChatGPT. Erwin Trinivas grew up in the middle-class part of Chennai. His father worked at a bank and his mother stayed home. She used to point at the IIT Madras campus near their house and tell him, this is where you're going to study. He got in, then he missed a computer science seat by a fraction of a grade point and he fell into a depression. He taught himself Python at night, competed on Kaggle, and graduated in 2017 as the top student in his dual degree. Berkeley came next, a PhD under Pieter Abbeel. His internship at DeepMind in London came with housing so bad that he slept at the office, and it was there he picked up a book about how Google was founded. At OpenAI in 2018, he stopped believing that he was good enough. He said, "I went to OpenAI and I felt like really bad because people were so much better than me. It was a big reality check." He finished the PhD in 2021 and went back to OpenAI full time. He was 27 on the research staff at OpenAI doing the exact work he had trained his whole life to do. But he quit in August 2022, weeks before ChatGPT came out, when nobody outside the labs knew it was coming. That same month, he and two other engineers, Dennis Jarats and Andy Konwinski, started Perplexity. He had wanted to build a better way to search since he read that book in the. DeepMind office. It didn't start as a search engine. The first product was a tool for searching Twitter in English. The answer engine came after that, and Jeff Bezos put money in. By 2025, Perplexity was valued at $20 billion, with 100 million people using it every single month. TrueNavas is 32 and worth about $2.5 billion. Google made $63 billion from search in the last 3 months of 2025. Every dollar that is advertising— a search that answers your questions and sends you on your way earns Google nothing, so Google will always give you a page to try to stay on. Perplexity answers the questions and shows you where the answers came from, and Google can't copy that without giving up how it gets paid. So for you, you can write down the biggest company in your market at the top of a page tonight, and underneath it lists 5 things that it can't do for a customer without costing itself money. One of those 5 things is a business that you could start. Brendan Foody skipped his finals. So Brendan Foody, one of the 3 that I talked about at the top who We opened this video with— grew up in the Bay Area, and both of his parents are software engineers. His mother works on Meta's real estate team, and his father started a graphics company in the 1990s. At 16, Foudi ran his first business, charging his friends $500 each to get them Amazon Web Services credits. He met Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Mehta in rhetoric class at an all-boys high school in San Jose, and the 3 of them ended up on the debate team together. Hiremath and Mehta had known each other since they were 10 from elementary school debate tournaments, and Hiremath was only put into debate because his parents worried And he was too quiet. Those two became the first team ever to win all three national policy championships. Foodie is dyslexic. Competitive debate runs on enormous volumes of reading. He got good at the other side of it instead: listening to a person and answering exactly what they said. Years later, that's what he did when he was in the room with OpenAI. In August 2023, as college sophomores, they started Mercor out of their dorm rooms. Foodie skipped his finals. Higher Math left the Harvard program where he was taking a bachelor's and a master's at the same time, and the next year the Thiel Foundation handed all. All 3 of them $100,000 each to stay out of university. Merkur didn't start as an AI company either. It matched software engineers in India with American companies and interviewed them with an automated video avatar. Then OpenAI and xAI told them what they were actually short of, and they pointed that same business at finding doctors, lawyers, and PhDs to grade what the LLM models were producing. 2 years later, Merkur was valued at $10 billion, and each of them was worth $2.2 billion at 22 years old. Foodie said, it's definitely crazy. It feels very surreal. So think about 3 conversations this week with people who already sell to your customers and ask what their clients keep asking that nobody else is supplying. The door is open right now. Foodie and his friends, they didn't have money, they didn't have a degree, they didn't have a product that anybody wanted yet. What they had was a hackathon project and the nerve to ask a customer what they felt was missing. Again, only 18% of companies are really using AI effectively. You're early even though it doesn't feel early. And it will never feel early. The best time to start is right now. Pick the one thing that you're already best at and have a deep passion for. Mix it up with what you already know about AI, and then go ask ten customers who need help and go work with them. Congratulations! You're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn the AI model that is making millionaires this year. This is the first moment in history where one person with a laptop can outearn an entire company. AI is real and it is going to change every industry. Generative AI is on track to add up to $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy, according to McKinsey. And that number is a window into the biggest wealth shift of your lifetime. The ability to use these tools is both fun and empowering. And the people who step through it in the next 12 months are going to look back on this year as the year that everything changed for them. Let me tell you about a guy named Tony Dinh. He was a software engineer with a safe 6-figure job at a big tech company. Good money, good title, the kind of job you're supposed to feel lucky to have. But he wanted to build his own thing, and so he walked away from it and started shipping Tiny products that he built on his own, building in public where the whole internet could watch him either win or fall on his face. Then the AI wave hit, and he built a tool called Typing Mind. It's a faster, cleaner, more powerful way to use AI chat with a better interface and extra features that the heavy users really love. One specific problem with one clean solution. And here's the best part: he runs the entire business completely alone. No employees, no office, no team. Just Just him and a laptop, often working while he travels the world. And that one tool pulls in over $130,000 a month. He posts his exact numbers in public, so it's not just a rumor. You can go and check for yourself. He didn't raise millions from different investors. He didn't hire 50 people. He found one expensive problem, pointed AI at it, and let the technology do most of the heavy lifting that he used to then build his whole company. That is the AI business model that is. Making millionaires right now. One person, one specific problem, AI doing the work of an entire team. Now here's where your brain often goes and tries to fight. You're thinking, that's great, but Tony, he's a coder. I'm not technical. I can't build a tool like that. I wouldn't even know where to start. And this is where we got to relax because we need to shift the thinking. The model is not about coding. Tony built a product, but the exact same model works as a service, and the service version doesn't need you to write a single line of code. You bring the relationships and you bring your judgment AI does the work. You can deliver the work that used to take a whole agency for a handful of clients and keep the money because you don't have the team to pay. The tools have gotten so good that the only thing standing between you and this is a decision just to start. So let me show you exactly how it works step by step. Step 1, pick one specific expensive problem. The biggest mistake people make is trying to help everybody with everything. They want to be a general AI consultant who does a little of this and a little of that. That never works. The money is in being laser specific. So Tony Dinh didn't build a tool that does 100 different things. He built one tool that solves one problem really well, making AI chat faster and easier for the people who live in it all day long. That's it. One specific painful problem that people pay real money already to solve. So your job is to find your version of that. Pick one type of person and one expensive headache that they might have right now. Maybe it's a small law firm when they need their client intake handled. Maybe it's real estate agents who need their listings written up and their follow-up emails sent off. Maybe it's local restaurants that need their social media run, right? The keyword is expensive. You want a problem where people are already spending money because that means demand is already proven. You're not creating a brand new market. You're entering one that already exists and doing it faster and cheaper with AI. So here's a quick test to find your problem. Look at what businesses around you are already hiring people to do that is boring, that is repetitive, and that is time-consuming. Writing product descriptions, answering the same customer questions over and over, editing videos, building simple reports, following up with leads. Every one of those is a task that AI can now do in a fraction of the time. And every one of those is something a business is already paying real money for. That is the opening for you. The line between what you do and who you serve has to be completely straight. When you try to serve everyone, you connect with no one. When you go all in on one specific person with one specific problem, then you become the obvious choice to work with. So before you go do anything else, Get super clear on this. Who do you help and what's one expensive problem you do solve for them? Write it down in one sentence. If you can't say it in one sentence, you're still too broad. Keep narrowing down until it's sharp. Step 2, start high, not cheap. This is where so many entrepreneurs sabotage themselves. They think the way to start is to sell something cheap, a $20 ebook, a $50 mini course, a small digital download. And I'm telling you, that's the slow road to go to nowhere, right? When you sell cheap stuff, you need thousands and thousands of customers just to make a living. And finding thousands of customers takes a massive, expensive marketing machine that you don't have yet. So just switch the math, go high ticket from day one. So let's look at how easy the numbers can get. So imagine you charge $2,000 a month to deliver an AI-powered service. You only need 4 clients to hit $96,000 a year. 4 clients. You can manage 4 clients from your kitchen table. Now picture 8 clients, and now you're nearly at $200,000 a year, still working alone. That's the power of starting high. A small number of clients who pay real money is 100 times easier to manage than a huge crowd of people who are paying you pennies. And high ticket does something else for you. People actually take it more seriously. When someone pays you $2,000 a month, they show up, they do the work, they get results, and they refer their friends. So don't be scared to charge what the work is worth. The AI does a lot of the heavy lifting on delivery, which means your margins are huge. You're not paying a team. You keep almost everything. But there's also one more reason why high ticket wins. With a small number of clients, you can give each one an incredible experience. You know their names, their businesses, their goals. You answer quickly. You overdeliver. That kind of care is impossible when you're just drowning in thousands of low-paying customers. And it's exactly what turns a client into somebody who stays for years and sends you everyone they know. So start high, serve a few people incredibly well, and let that fund everything you build. Step number 3, let AI do the work a team used to do. So this is the engine that makes the whole thing run. The reason one person can now do what used to take 20 people is that AI handles most of the actual labor. So your job is to build a simple system where the machine does the repetitive work and you do the thinking. Run everything through 3 filters. First, eliminate. Look at your day and cut anything that actually doesn't move the needle forward. So what do you mean by eliminate? I used to write detailed notes for a group of mine that I later found out nobody ever read, so I cut it out completely. Be honest about what's just busywork. Second, automate anything repetitive. Give it to AI. Turning a single long-form video into 20 short clips, transcribing every call so that you never lose an idea, drafting your outreach messages, writing your first drafts of your client work, organizing your research— AI can do all of that in minutes. Third, Third, delegate. For a few things AI can't do and shouldn't do, you get help. You can hire a part-time assistant for 5 to 10 hours a week to start so you learn to lead without the weight of having a full-time salary. When you stack these 3 things together, something pretty wild happens. You start delivering professional-level work at a speed that looks impossible for your clients. They think you have a whole team behind you and it's just you and your AI. Now let's look at a simple client. So say you land a client who needs 30 social media posts a month, a weekly newsletter, and all of their customer emails answered. A few years ago, that's 3 completely different hires. Today, you sit down with AI, you feed it their brain and their voice, and you generate first drafts of it all in an afternoon. You spend the rest of your time editing, adding a human touch, your taste, and making sure that it's excellent and you're proud of. The client sees agency-level output. Your actual cost is a few dollars in AI and a couple hours of undivided attention. And the gap here between what you can deliver and what you have to pay is where the millionaires are being made right now. Step 4, build relationships, not an audience. So a lot of people think that you need to go viral first, right? You think you need a million followers before you can make money. So you spend a year chasing views and end up broke and burned out. You don't need a giant audience for this model to work. You just need the right relationship. So let me give you a model that I teach my Movement Maker clients. Make a list of 50 people who could each be worth 6 or 7 figures to your business. Not customers, connectors, people who already have the audience or the network that you really want to reach. I call it the Money 50 list. Then instead of asking them for anything, you give first. Invite them to be a guest on a simple show or podcast that you run. You record the conversation, you make them look great, and you build a real relationship. I've had clients build 7-figure businesses off of a channel with fewer than than 50 targeted subscribers because they owned the relationships that mattered instead of chasing strangers and just views. And the give-first move works because it changes your whole relationship dynamic. Everyone else is sliding into people's DMs and inboxes asking for their time, their money, their attention, a favor. You show up offering to make them look good and put a light on their story. You're the only one giving instead of taking at the start, and that makes it different and unforgettable for them. I had a client who did a version of this by simply offering free coaching on Instagram. live just to show off what he knew. And in 2 weeks, he went from signing up 2 people to 55 in his high-ticket program and scaled past $1 million in just a few months. He didn't have a huge following. He led with value and just let the right people come to him. So stop obsessing about your follower count. Pick a handful of people who can change your business, serve them, connect with them, and watch what happens. Quality relationships beats a giant audience every single time. Step number 5, stay lean on purpose. Here's something that nobody actually talks about. The goal is not to build the biggest company. The goal is to keep the most money and the most freedom. So when you grow a giant team, you create a giant set of problems as well, right? Payroll management, drama, overhead. The whole magic of this AI model is that you can make a fortune while staying small. That's the freedom of this model. You get to design a business around the life you actually want. You don't need a fancy office. You don't need a perfect website. You don't need a finished logo or a big brand to begin. Multimillion-dollar businesses have been launched with none of that. What you need is one clear offer, AI doing a ton of the work, and a few great clients. Keep your costs near zero, keep your team tiny or nonexistent, and let the technology be your leverage. Lean is not the limitation here. Lean is your entire advantage. Think about what that actually buys you. No 2 investors to answer to. No staff meetings, no rent, no payroll deadline hanging over your head every 2 weeks. When your costs are nearly nothing, you can survive a slow month. You can take a real risk. You can, uh, survive a client who says no or is not a fit for you anymore because you're not desperate to cover this giant overhead. That freedom is its own special kind of wealth, and it's only possible because AI lets one person carry the load that used to need an entire team of employees. The smaller the machine is that you build, the more money you get to keep at the end of the day. Step six: Start before you're ready. Now this is the one that actually decides who wins. You can know all of these five steps above and still do nothing because you're waiting, waiting to learn more, waiting for the perfect idea, waiting until you feel qualified. And while you wait, someone less talented than you is starting messy and figuring it out as they go. Tony Din didn't wait until everything was perfect. He left a safe, high-paying job and started shipping small. Products in public one after another, learning from each one as he went. He didn't get it right on the first try. He kept going, and getting it going is what eventually got it right. So here's, here's your assignment this week, not someday, this week. Pick your one problem, write down your one offer, and have one real conversation with one person who might pay you for it. That's the whole start. Not a website, not a logo, not a business plan, not more research. One offer, and one conversation. The AI tools are sitting there right now, more powerful than anything a billion-dollar company had even just a few years ago, and they're free or nearly free, free to use today. The only thing missing is deciding to move. The window where this is wide open and uncrowded is right now. A year from now, a lot more people will have figured all of this out. The advantage belongs to the person who starts before it's obvious, and that person can be you. So the door's open right And it will not stay open forever. The people who win this won't be the ones with the most money or the best degree. They'll be the ones who actually started while everyone else was sitting around wondering if it was real. Pick one expensive problem, charge real money to solve it, let AI do the work of the team, build a few key relationships, and stay lean. You do not need permission and you do not need to feel ready because ready isn't real. You just need to start today, right where you are and with what you have. Now let's learn all of money explained in a few minutes. Nobody ever taught you money, and that's why it causes so much stress in your life. Our school systems teach us nothing about money. Nothing. It's pathetic. Money's just numbers in and numbers out, isn't it? See, that's what people get thrown off, I think. I think that's the root of a lot of financial problems for amateurs and professionals. When the Finra Foundation quizzed more than 25,000 American adults on 7 basic money questions, only 27% of them could get If you want to be rich— forget rich— if you just want to have basic financial security, you have to pay yourself first. There's 3 basic parts to a financial statement: income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow. You can teach a monkey that, but our schools don't teach that. Understanding how money works decides what you can say yes to, what you get to walk away from, and how much of your life actually you get to live. Most of us don't speak the language of finance, and I think that's on purpose. I think people in finance do not want you to know the secrets to wealth because that makes it easier for them to keep it. In 1992, Daymond John was living with his mom in Queens. He didn't have investors, no degree in business. He had $40 to his name. His mother had taught him how to sew, so he spent that $40 on fabric and made a few dozen tie-top hats.

$40 worth of fabric. I come home, I give my mother the, the stuff to sew the hats, and she says, I'm not sewing this, you're sewing this. I said, oh crap, now I gotta work at this. I sew the hats, and then all of a sudden I have all these hats and only one head.

So he took them to a street corner and sold every single one of them in a day for $800.

That's when I went out and sold those hats outside on that Good Friday, and I sold $800 worth of hats in one hour.

The hats worked, so So he expanded into shirts and jerseys.

Then I would start going to the Black Expos where there was like a basically flea market on the road, and I would try to sell shirts there.

His mom believed in it enough to mortgage the house they lived in for $100,000 and turn half the house into a factory.

She said, this is all we have, uh, why don't I go out and I take a loan on the house and, you know, you manufacture, deliver the clothes, and put the money back in.

Then he took samples to the Magic Apparel Show in Las Vegas. And walked out with $300,000 in orders.

I went to the Magic Trade Show, the trade show of the fashion industry, and I wrote $300,000 worth of orders.

But here's how that business actually works. The stores don't hand you money at the show. They order, then they pay you 30, 60, 90 days after you deliver. Meanwhile, you buy the fabric upfront and you have to pay the people who are sewing it. So Daymond had $300,000 of orders and and nothing coming in for months. The $100,000 from the house went into the fabric and the, and the employees. He got around $75,000 of the orders made, and 4 months later that money was gone and the store still hadn't paid him yet. So he went to a bank, they said no. He went to another bank, they said no. He went to 27 banks and every single one of them turned him down.

I went to 27 banks, I got turned down.

The orders kept coming in the whole time until he had about A million dollars of them sitting there and he couldn't fulfill them. His mother took what was left of their money and put an ad in the newspaper. It said, a million dollars in orders need financing. 33 people called.

And then Mom again comes to the rescue and says, I have an idea. She takes out an ad in the newspaper for, uh, says something like, million dollars in orders need financing. And 33 people call that ad.

One of them was a textile division of Samsung who wanted to test the urban market.

One was, uh, Samsung's textile division.

They agreed to pay to get his orders made, but they had one condition: he had to do $5 million in sales within 3 years. He did $30 million in 3 months, and by 1998, FUBU was doing over $350 million a year in worldwide sales. Orders aren't money. You can have a lot of sales and still have nothing in your bank Now, a lot of people think, okay, this doesn't apply to me because I may not have a business or I'm not making enough money yet for any of this to matter. You're thinking money stuff starts once there's money, but you don't need a business for any of this. If you get paid and you pay bills, you're already making these decisions every month. You're just making them without knowing the rules of money, and it costs you real money. If you're carrying a credit card balance at 20%, that's costing you today, whether or not you're making money. you ever learn about what compound interest is. All progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth: you're not bad with money. You were just never taught about it, and you can learn it. So here's how money actually works, start to finish. Money is a skill, not a personality. So you've probably said at some point, I'm just not a numbers person. Only 27% of adults got 5 of 7 basic money questions right. That's not about who's good with numbers. It's about what nobody actually teaches you. So being leads to doing. If you decide you're the person who understands money, you'll start opening the bank app instead of avoiding it. You'll start reading the statements instead of just the total. You've been waiting until you feel ready to look at your money. It doesn't work that way. It works the other way around. You look at it and then it stops being scary every time. So once a week for 20 minutes, you look at 3 things: what came in, what went out, and what is actually left. That's it. Don't worry yet about budgeting or giant spreadsheets with 400 rows. Just looking on purpose every week until it stops scaring you. And you know when the best time to start is? Right now. How about right now? Open the app while I keep talking. The number in there is the number whether you look at it or not. Looking doesn't cost you anything. Learn your 3 numbers before anything else. Almost every money disaster comes from mixing up revenue, profit, and cash flow. So revenue is what comes in, profit is what's left over, and mixing those 2 up is how somebody with a busy Business ends up with an empty bank account. The third one is cash flow, and this is about timing, and this is the one that actually kills a lot of businesses. You can run a profitable business and still go broke because the money you're owed arrives later than the bills you have to pay. Let's look at a real example. Let's look at a dance studio. On the year, the business was profitable. Looks great. But I pulled in his last three months, month by month. October was negative $5,300. November was positive $2,500. December was negative $900. So across the quarter, he was down $3,700 while believing he was doing fine. His fixed costs were about $20,000 a month before anything else happened. $11,000 of rent, $2,000 of insurance, instructor pay, software, cleaning. So the only question that matters is how much he has to bring in that month to cover it. $20,000 keeps the door open. So he set his target at $25,000. So there's something left at the end. Now he's not guessing anymore. He has a number to target. You have that number too, whether you're running a company or just your household. Add up what has to go out every month, no matter No matter what, that's the floor. Once you know that, you know exactly what the month has to bring in. And if that number scares you, that's exactly why you need to know what it is. You can't cut a cost that you've never written down. So put every expense on one page before you decide anything. Then take what's actually in the account and divide that by your monthly floor. So if you got $30,000 sitting there and you need $10,000 a month, you have 3 months. That's your runway. With runway, you can say no. Without it, you say yes to anything cuz you need the cash. Somebody with 6 months of runway can walk away from a bad client. Somebody with 3 weeks says yes to everything, including the work that's going to make the next 3 weeks worse for you. If your runway is under 3 months, that's the number to fix before anything else in this video. Your income problem is usually a price problem. If you want more money and you're an owner, the fastest change isn't cutting your expenses, it's what you charge. And I'll show you my own numbers so this isn't just some theory. So my mastermind is $50,000 a year. My growth strategy coaching program is $15,000 for 4 months. If somebody can't do that, we have smaller versions that people can join. I said those in that order on purpose. It's called price anchoring. When the first number somebody hears is $50,000, then the $15,000 sounds reasonable, and ones after that sound like a bargain. If I started with the lowest price first, nobody would ever pay me more than that. And when you do raise your price, raise it on the next new client, not the ones you already have. You get the new number without a single awkward conversation with existing clients. And you don't get paid for the hours, you get paid for the result. Somebody selling 6 coaching sessions is selling time. Somebody selling, I'm going to add $200,000 to your revenue this year, is selling an outcome. And an outcome can be worth 10 times the price of the time. Selling to a smaller number of people at a serious price is also just easier to run. Low-ticket offers at $50 a month needs thousands of customers, a marketing machine, and a support team. That's a real business, but it's a much harder one to build first. Make a list of 50 people. So here's what I'd do if I had to rebuild my income starting Monday with no ads and no audience. I'd write down 50 names, not 5,000 followers, 50 specific people who could each spend $50,000 with me in a year or send me 3 people who will. Real names, real companies, real people who already have the money and a problem that I know how to solve. Then I wouldn't pitch a single one of them. I'd start a show and invite them on as a guest. An invite is the easiest yes in business because you're offering somebody 45 minutes to talk about their own work. You're leading with a give instead of an ask. And after the recording, when the relationship is warm and real, you offer them a second opinion on something they're working on at no cost. You look at it, you tell them the truth, you give them your actual thinking from your expert opinion. And some of those turn into clients. Some send you 3 clients each. One of my clients works with home service businesses doing $10 million or more, where a normal client is worth $40,000 or $100,000 a year. And one platform-level deal is worth $1 million a year. At that size, you don't You don't need 50 wins, you need 2. And if you don't have a business yet, this still works. Write down 50 people who could hire you, who could promote you, or who could hand you the opportunity that changes your entire year. You're not asking any of them for anything upfront. You're making yourself useful to 50 people who could hire you one conversation at a time. Your 50 will look different than mine. Cool. Write it anyway. It's the single highest value document in your business, and it costs you an afternoon of Start with 10 names tonight. 10 is enough to tell you whether this list is something that can be real or not, or whether you've been just guessing about who your customer actually is. Pay yourself like an owner. So a job pays you, takes a tax, and hands you what's left over, right? A company earns, pays its costs, and then you choose how the money reaches you. That choice is worth a lot of money. So in Canada, where I am, money left inside a corporation is taxed at roughly 19 to 20%. While a big personal salary can hit at around 50%. So pulling out every dollar the second it comes in is one of the most expensive habits an owner can have. I pay myself a small, steady salary, so I have a clean personal record for things like the mortgage and the rest stays inside working in the business. There are legitimate costs a business can carry too. If you work from home, a share of the mortgage interest, the utilities, the internet can be a business expense because that's generally where the work happens. It usually gets worked out by space. So if your office is 1 room out of 8, that's about 12% of your house. So about 12% of those bills is a business cost. Keep the receipts, let your accountant run the actual numbers. Your country's rules are going to be different than mine, and I am not your accountant. So take this to a good one, but go with the right question. Don't walk in asking, how do I just pay less tax? Walk in asking how to structure what you pay yourself. That's now an owner's question and mindset, and it's worth thousands or tens of thousands a year. Buy your time back. Back. Eliminate, automate, delegate. So buying your time back is how you make more money. So do it in this order: eliminate, automate, delegate. Eliminate first because it's free. So go through your week and find what nobody actually needs. So I used to write up minutes after every mastermind meeting. It took me real time. And one day I realized nobody was reading them, not one person. So I stopped. And what happened? Nothing happened. Nobody cared. You've got something in your week right that nobody is reading either. So write down everything that you did last week. The parts that nobody would miss are the parts that you cut out. Automate is second. So anything repeatable that follows the same steps every time should be handled by software or AI instead of you and can be done at 11 PM. Delegate last and start much smaller than you think. You can hire somebody for an hour a day. That, that's it. That's how I started. It's cheap enough that it won't hurt you if it goes badly and it teaches you the real skill. The skill isn't hiring, it's handing work off and then letting someone So do it in that order. You'll want to jump straight to delegate, and then you're paying somebody to do work that you should have deleted or should be handed off to automation. And there's a number underneath all of this that you can actually calculate. Take what you want to earn in a year and then divide it by about 2,000 working hours. So if you want $200,000, your time is worth roughly $100 an hour. Now look at what you filled your last week. If you spent 6 hours on something you could hand off to automation, off for $25 an hour, you spent $600 of your own time to avoid paying $150. So you lost $450, and it felt like you were being strategic and careful. Then make the rest of it boring. So once you're earning money and keeping money, growing it should be the most boring part. For the first 10 years, compounding barely does anything. Then it does almost everything. So take $10,000 growing at 5% a year. After 10 years, it's worth about $16,000. Give it 30 years, it's worth $43,000. The $10,000 earned around $6,000 in its first decade and around $27,000 in the last 20 years. The extra 20 years did that, not a bigger return. That's why waiting is so costly. The last 20 years are where the money actually grows. If you wait to start, those are the years that you're giving up. Put it in an index fund that holds the whole market and just leave it there. You don't have to go and research individual stocks, not because you couldn't learn, but because those Those hours are hours you're not putting into your own business or career, and that's what actually changes your income. And leaving it all in cash isn't actually safe. Prices in America are roughly 22.5% higher than before 2020. So money sitting still has been losing real value this entire time. One more thing. Compounding works against you too, and it works a lot faster. So credit card rates are sitting around 20%, and new card offers are often higher than that. Compounding works on debt as well, and at 20%, It grows faster than any investment you're going to own. There is no investment you're going to find that reliably beats paying off a balance at 20%. So if you have a balance on your credit card, clear it before you invest a dollar. It's the best guaranteed return you'll ever get. You can learn this faster than you think. Nobody taught you any of this, and it isn't your fault. What you do now, though, is, is up to you. Daymond John didn't have a finance degree when he took those hats out to that street corner. He learned it the hard way. And the worst of it came after the mortgage money ran out with about $1 million in orders that he just couldn't fill and 27 banks saying no. A bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility and you have the ability. To watch the 7 Silent Killers of Success, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. The habits that kill your success are silent, and that's exactly why When I was at the peak of my career, I felt like I'm unbeatable, and I feel like I could do anything, like kind of walking on the water.