$1M by 19, $100M+ by 35 -- Here's How He Did It

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Val Katayev** (1:02)
It was strange, I was pulling up to my university or to college, and I would pull up in a, I would pull up in like a drop top Lexus, like a $70,000 car, and I was like 19, right? Right.

**Sam Parr** (1:26)
Dude, so Val, Shaan, he's not making it today, but that's okay.
So your thing went viral today. How many likes did you get? Like 3,3300?

**Val Katayev** (1:38)
Something like that. I had to turn off my notifications. I can't do when you work with, I don't know how you guys do it. I don't know how people do it while running full businesses, but I had to turn that off because I just can't concentrate. That thing just, my phone was just blowing up all day.

**Sam Parr** (1:51)
Now you know how I feel. It is crazy, right? It's crazy. So you had 3,000 followers and now you have like nine maybe, 9,000?

**Val Katayev** (1:58)
Something like that, yeah. I mean, it took me how many years to get up to like 2,700?
Yeah, now it's, I don't know. I didn't look to be honest with you, but I'm probably at like eight, 9,000 at this point.

**Sam Parr** (2:12)
So, all right, the background here is I met you through my, like we share like a best friend, Joe, and Joe told me about you. He goes, this guy is crazy. And so Val, let me tell you what I know about you and you tell me if it's right or wrong. And then I wanna hear your story. But basically he goes, and I won't reveal too many numbers. I'll let you talk about any number that you wanna talk about because I don't know if what I know is confidential or not. So I'm not gonna mention them. But you, as a 19 year old, you came from Russia.
You came from Russia?

**Val Katayev** (2:45)
I came from Uzbekistan, at the age of 11

**Sam Parr** (2:50)
And then you come here, you get a computer at 16 or 17 You start this affiliate marketing business. You're the only employee. By age 22, 23, you've made something like 30 million in profit from this one little business. From there, you parlayed that into a Lyric website that was one of the biggest Lyric websites in the world, which doesn't sound that impressive, but most people don't realize that Lyric websites are some of the most biggest websites in the world. And so that made another eight figures in profit. From there, you parlayed that into an ad network that now is like huge. From there, you've now launched a jewelry business that apparently, Joe has said it's bigger than all your other companies, but I don't know if that's true or not.
And then throughout all this, you've acquired and sold and developed like a hundred plus million dollars of real estate.
Is all this accurate?

**Val Katayev** (3:43)
Some of it. So, well, actually my first bit...

**Sam Parr** (3:46)
By the way, the reason I'm having you on here is because we've had a lot of really successful people on here do interesting stuff.
And there are like, a lot of them are well known, but you don't... I basically the other day begged you to like tweet something and I helped you write this tweet and it took like a few days and we got it out there. But like, besides that, you've pretty much have never done any press. You've never talked about this publicly. And when I met you, I was like, this is a gold mine. This guy has so many interesting stories. We gotta tell this story. So anyway, what was wrong and what was right?