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#459January 27, 20231:18:43

From the Vaults: How Suleman Ali Made His First Million

About This Episode

Shaan Puri is joined by serial entrepreneur and investor Suleman Ali to discuss the mechanics of high-stakes business acquisitions and investment strategies. The pair explores how to structure deals, the value of total transparency during due diligence, and the potential for acquiring undervalued public companies like Squarespace.

Episode Description

Episode 412: We re-run episode 1 of My First Million with Suleman Ali. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------

Show Notes

  • We talk with tech founder & investor Suleman "Suli" Ali (@sulemanali) about his journey from making $76k a year at Microsoft to selling multiple companies for $100,000,000+. Highlights: Meeting Naval (19:00) getting grilled by Keith Rabois (22:00), & risking his life savings on TinyCo (57:00)
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  • Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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  • Additional episodes you might enjoy:
  • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits
  • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
  • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
  • * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
  • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
  • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More
  • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More
  • We talk with tech founder & investor Suleman "Suli" Ali (@sulemanali) about his journey from making $76k a year at Microsoft to selling multiple companies for $100,000,000+. Highlights: Meeting Naval (19:00) getting grilled by Keith Rabois (22:00), & risking his life savings on TinyCo (57:00)
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Key Takeaways

1

Build trust during a business sale by disclosing all 'skeletons in the closet' upfront, which prevents deal-breaking surprises during due diligence and establishes credibility with the buyer.

2

A simple path to financial freedom is creating a specialized agency that solves a high-value, technical problem for existing profitable businesses, such as conversion rate optimization or email marketing.

3

Successful acquisitions often follow a 'blueprint' approach where a proven playbook is applied to a new category, such as using digital optimization strategies on traditional furniture retail businesses.

Business Ideas Mentioned

Robinhood for Real Estate Investment

Real Estate

High-ROI Specialized Service Agency

Agency

Y Combinator for Content Creators

Creator Tools

B2B Niche Content and Lead Gen

Content & Media

View all ideas

Guest Graveyard Mentions

JY

Justin Yoshimura

View guest graveyard

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Quick Stats

Duration1:18:43
Guests1
Ideas Discussed4
Topics4