How fortnite made me a millionaire

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I made My First Million when I turned 30 years old, but I'm going to walk you through every single business I tried before I made something that worked. And Sam, you can roast me for how bad my ideas were.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
All right. So I did this previously. You totally went up to me by having a presentation. So that's a little unfair. But it's like in Mean Girls where she shows up to the Halloween party and she doesn't know that she's supposed to dress slutty and she dresses scary. That's kind of how I feel right now. But that's okay. I'm incredibly excited to see what you have to do.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
Business number one, I tried to create the Chipotle of sushi. So this was my first big hair brained idea. It was called Sabi Sushi. And even though I didn't know anything about sushi, I had just tried sushi for the first time a month prior. I just thought, this is it. This is the big idea. I can create the Chipotle of sushi. We partnered with the Food Network Chef. We launched the thing. I learned how to make spicy tuna and all kinds of stuff.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:05)
And that was the guy who, what was your buddy's name, who bought the bag company?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:09)
Dan, yeah. So if you've seen the episode with Dan, Dan the Bag Man, where he bought a paper bag company now and is thriving, he was right next to me in the sushi trenches. Okay, so just kind of the summary of that whole venture, restaurants suck as a business, 10% operating margins, you're working morning, afternoon and night, you're open on weekends, there's no let up. My hand smelled like tuna all the time, it was just a brutal business to be in. And we literally did every dumb thing you could possibly think of. I sort of took a buffet tour of all the possible mistakes you could make in doing a business. And then, oh, my grade for this by the way, A for effort, but this business was an F. And I think in the end, we made something like $20,000 of profit before we voluntarily shut down the business because it was so brutal. But if you look at that in terms of the one year of full-time effort that it took us, I was making $1.82 an hour. So that was my big profit out of that business.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:01)
How much did it cost to start?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:02)
We got lucky. It was gonna cost half a million dollars to build out the restaurant. That was a combination of signing the lease with a personal guarantee, by the way, which is bad because restaurants fail.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:12)
And you had nothing to guarantee.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:15)
And I had nothing to back it up. So it was like, you'll be on the hook for this for 10 years unless you declare personal bankruptcy. And then you have to buy all the equipment. You got to do the build out, all this shit. We hired the fancy, we hired this architect who built the Vidara. He was the architect of the Vidara in Vegas. And again, every dumb mistake you make, we thought, oh, wow, he's the best. So he should design our restaurant. And he came up with this plan that was going to cost us half a million dollars to build out.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:39)
I mean, that's pretty ridiculous. That's like having like the guy who like developed the World Trade Center to like make your kids background playset.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:45)
Like my play structure, exactly. But we were like, yeah, that's so sick. We were really just changing the game out here.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
Did you tell him that? Was that your pitch?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:55)
We were crossing our eyes and dotting our T's, but that's not what you're supposed to do. That's not how those letters look. So yeah, we were doing everything wrong with maximal effort. So how much did it cost? We ended up, luckily, this beautiful, beautiful man with a beautiful set of hair named John Prendergrass met us and was like, hey guys, maybe test your concept before you commit 10 years and a personal guarantee to this thing. And we were like, how do you test a restaurant? And so he convinced us to basically do a delivery only restaurant out of a commissary kitchen. What today is called a cloud kitchen. It's very fancy today. Back then there was no Uber Eats, no Door Dash. And we just looked like bums who couldn't afford a restaurant. And so we tested it that way. That's why it actually cost us almost nothing to start. And we made $20,000 of profit in like, I don't know, one or two months. But we also were like, this is a trap. Every day that this succeeds is another day we're going to be in this business and I just want out. I'm only 21 years old. It's not too late. I'm still a minor and I don't need to have a life sentence in this business. Get me out of here.