There was a time when I nearly succumbed to the siren song of #vanlife. My wife was working as a travel nurse—I tagged along as a writer/entrepreneur—which meant that, for two years, we moved to a new city every three months. I thought about purchasing an RV on numerous occasions. It would’ve made a ton of sense over short-term apartment rentals, but I couldn’t bring myself to put down the cash—or take showers under a bag with a hole poked in it.
Sam Parr: A big CEO of a huge media company that you know of told me this business will never make more than $2 million dollars a year. And it wasn’t until like six months ago where I was like, “Man, there’s like a path to make literally $100 million a year in revenue.”
This year Away, a suitcase startup, raised $100m in new funding at a staggering $1.4 billion valuation. The company has raised a total of $181m and is rumored to have over $125m in revenue. The stats alone are quite amazing.
Joe Speiser started his first business when he was still in middle school. The New York-based entrepreneur has had his hands in many industries, from DVD review sites to an ad network that brought in $200m in annual revenue. And that was just in his 20s.
Young people crave stimulus — and the modern world obliges. Mobile phones and the internet provide constant streams of them: bright banner ads, colorful games, bingeable TV shows, infinitely scrolling content feeds. A text message buzzes and dopamine receptors in the brain respond with a quick biological fix.
Shaan Puri: At this point it’s a money printer.
A decade ago, billboards were relics of the past, reserved for Cracker Barrels and gas station exits. Today, they’re one of the fastest-growing ad commodities on the market.
I was in a band until my early 30s. But my real passion in music was composing, and so I started writing film scores. And writing film scores, it’s a very particular kind of discipline where you sort of deconstruct music and you first try to figure out what a film director wants for a movie, which is part of the art of being a film composer.
Americans spend $48B a year on plants. But there are few direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers that do $10m+ a year in sales.