Compounding Wisdom
The Mind of AI
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B.F. Skinner (psychologist, 1960s, on automation and memory)
We know we have five physical senses of the body: Sight, smell, hear, taste, touch and feel.
But what of the senses of our mind and the senses of our spirit?
I was often confused as to what my mind was. The psyche. The soul.
Later, one of my mentors outlined that the mind consisted of six major faculties.
Memory
Reason
Perception
Imagination
Intuition
Will
He said that if we focused on each of these and developed them, we would have very powerful minds. I have been focusing a lot of my time on these six faculties of the mind and also on what I deem as the seven faculties of the spirit.
Humans have dominated the world of nature due to our powerful minds and powerful spirits, but now we have developeda technology that is surpassing us in each of these faculties one by one and by great leaps and bounds.
We call this AI. And AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is an intelligence that surpasses us in all of these faculties in all categories and in all subjects. Many believe this is not a question of if, but of when.
AI has already surpassed us in memory, is quickly advancing in reasoning and perception and excelling in quantum leaps in imagination and creativity. Its intuition is much weaker, and its will is still bound by human programming and guardrails. Many are concerned that it will eventually develop its own will and determine a dystopian future, using all its destructive capabilities to rid the world of humanity's malicious and fallible intent.
The End Has Already Been Prophesied
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Stephen Hawking (2014)
Since 2000, I have been pondering when this age of AI would come as I watched the internet boom and bust and left my medical profession to focus on becoming an Internet entrepreneur. I spent the past 25 years watching the Internet, mobile and blockchain (crypto/Bitcoin) revolutions form and burgeon. With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, I knew the time had come for AI to take off.
In 2007, I placed a $6 million bet on semantic search, but it was much too early. We were trying to teach computers to 'understand' meaning, not just match keywords and allow people to program visually without code. The vision was right, but the timing was too early, as the computing power was too small, slow, and too expensive.
In 2016, I decided to give AI another try, this time in the form of a mobile piano teaching app. It could perceive your notes, reason about mistakes, and turn the pages of the music as you played, highlighting each piano note as it heard. Still, it was a little too early again. One of our interns, Aidan Gomez, is now CEO of Cohere, a company valued at $6.8 billion.
In 2018, I asked myself, which companies would be central to the development of AI? What microchip company? Intel, ARM, AMD, Nvidia? I knew that the AI revolution would be powered not just by ideas, but by computational power. In other words, microchips and AI software, followed by AI hardware, such as robots, vehicles, appliances, and consumer products. I decided it would most likely be NVIDIA due to their GPUs (graphic processing units), which were already big in gaming and mining, the most popular application being blockchain crypto Ethereum, and were being used by AI, such as OpenAI, which would debut ChatGPT just four years later in 2022. I sold 80% of my Google stock, which had grown in value after I placed a $10,000 bet on NVIDIA in 2006. This investment, which had 20x'd in 12 years, was now reinvested in NVIDIA, yielding a 30x return in just 7 years. So, my $10,000 in 2006 has grown 600 times in 19 years, to roughly $6 million. It was more about placing a bet on my first principle thinking in investments than about my desire to make a lot of money.
In 2024, I founded How.com with my co-founder Aytunc Ozturk. I owned all these valuable domains and had many friends who owned valuable domains, but these assets were sitting idle on pay-per-click advertising pages. It was like seeing waterfront properties with nothing but little sheds on them. We prototyped one of my domains How.com, with AI and I invited 100 of my friends to invest in it. 80% were on board, and we raised $8M with $2M in warrants. We then entered into deals with our domain investors to prototype and develop their most valuable domain properties using our AI infrastructure. This resulted in the development of Email.com, Face.com, Songs.com, Notebook.com, and Queen.com. We are creating an AI ecosystem, a network community of skyscraper intelligence on the prime real estate of the Internet.
How did I know about AI 25 years ago?
I'm an avid reader of the Bible and in the book of Daniel and Revelation, it speaks of the coming end of the world, even though it was written thousands of years ago. I knew that there would be digital currency aka blockchain = crypto currency. But blockchain is also a platform upon which trusted secure transactions can be built upon. And the concept of an image speaking alluding to AI is prominent as well, where souls are bought and sold.
“Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
Revelation 13:16–17
The Exponential Growth of AI
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity.
Ray Kurzweil (futurist, author of The Singularity is Near)
When you build a house or a product, it's said that you can't have high quality, speed, and low cost. You have to choose two, but you must sacrifice one of them. However, with AI, quality and speed are increasing exponentially, while costs are declining profoundly.
Compute power: doubling every five months or 4x per year. This means it will be 1024x in five years from now.
Costs have fallen 280x in two years. Hardware costs are declining at a rate of 30% annually, and efficiency is increasing by 40%. The rise of competition and the race to achieve AGI by companies and countries has led to massive investments and intense competition, resulting in competitive pricing.
Quality: Benchmark leaps are staggering. Coding, reasoning and multimodal scores double or triple in a year. The neural network is akin to a massive brain, with information being fed into it and its capabilities massively expanding with computing power as the industry grows and competes. It's demanded by the global populations and companies feed it endlessly and develop it.
Over the next five years, the exponential growth of AI will transform every industry, company, person, occupation, and the way we learn and do things. Most digital workflows will be AI-augmented or replaced by AI. In ten years, intelligent agents will run entire business units autonomously, as well as autonomous machines like vehicles, robots and devices.
Jobs: Destruction vs Creation
AI is creative destruction. It will transform industries, countries and people.
Displacement: Knowledge industries, clerical, routine and entry-level analytical roles are most vulnerable.
Creation: new fields of AI trainers, data curators, robotics engineers and human-AI managers.
By 2030, estimates show that +170 million jobs will be created versus -92 million jobs lost, resulting in a more productive workforce.
The danger is not job loss, but falling behind without reskilling and failing to leverage AI to enhance research and productivity.
I leverage AI a lot. I find that I need to think more to assign tasks to AI on my behalf, and then I can have a conversation with it to discern what is true, possible, or false.
The World Transformed
AI is the new electricity.
Andrew Ng (Google Brain, Coursera, Baidu)
Tesla touts that robots will be the most significant industry. Greater than the iPhone, which catapulted Apple to the #2 company behind NVIDIA. Tesla is a trillion-dollar company right now. It could be worth $10 trillion or more in the next ten years if it takes a lion's share of the robot industry. First deployed in industry, companies, and personal households. They will have AI inside, and this AI is like a nervous system that powers the hardware to be stronger, faster, and cheaper - again, the three levers that make it exponential and useful to the world and people. As more mass-scale developments occur, such as with the automobile and the mobile phone, costs decrease, allowing every household to own one or two, or even a handful, just as we have with cars. 100 years ago, only the wealthy could afford a car, but Ford democratized that. Tesla democratized the electric vehicle. They aim to create and democratize the robot.
Autonomous vehicles will transform transportation and logistics, along with shipping, just as Uber did, but on a much grander scale. Waymo, run by Google, logs 250,000 paid driverless rides per week. Baidu's Apollo Go did 2.2 million driverless rides last quarter.
ChatGPT had 1 million users in 5 days after it was launched in November 2022. Today, it has 700 million weekly active users. It is the #1 app worldwide. It's only a matter of time; it has 1 billion daily active users, and then 2B and growing.
There are its competitors who are trying to follow quickly. Google's Gemini, whose engine is quite good, and which Elon Musk predicts will most likely win in AI. Anthropic by Claude and backed by Amazon, Microsoft, which owns a good stake in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Meta. And of course, Elon Musk's xAI, who is the most brilliant of our age. He built a 100,000 AI server farm in 19 days. This typically takes 3 to 5 years. The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensson Huang, says this is impossible and that only one person on our planet could do something like this. He has two other AI companies: Tesla, which is an AI car company, and SpaceX, where its rockets utilize AI.
But the real cold war of our time is which country will build the AI that everyone uses. US or China? In China, Alibaba, Deepseek, Baidu, and Bytedance (the owner of TikTok) are all vying to catch up, and they are moving quickly. The US has been trying to slow them down by not allowing them to buy the best AI chips from NVIDIA, but they are resourceful and, with slightly slower AI chips and with much lesser costs, they are innovative and leaping forward despite these speedbumps.
The world will become like the world of The Jetsons in due time.
How You can Leverage AI
We must develop AI with a sense of humility, knowing it can uncover patterns invisible to us, yet also mislead us if we treat it as omniscient.
Fei-Fei Li (Stanford, pioneer of computer vision)
Imagine what it would be like when AGI becomes accessible, and you have access to it. It will be more intelligent than all the world's combined doctors, lawyers, accountants, business consultants, psychologists, counsellors, and so on. How will you leverage this access?
Now (next 6 months):
Automate your tasks: research, organization, clerical and administrative tasks, translations, consultations.
Automate your front office: leverage AI for efficient intake, onboarding, and customer support.
Accelerate creative production: writing, ideation, production, such as writing drafts, proposals, transforming your business, ads, videos, and landing pages at 10x speed
Capture your proprietary data: this becomes your moat
Next (6-24 months):
Build AI-native product features for yourself or your company using AI, as it can now code, design, and market, and is improving rapidly.
Pilot physical autonomy (logistics, mobility)
Reskill yourself and your team from task-doers to AI supervisors of AI agents/apps.
Later (2-5 years):
Run multi-agent workflows as "AI departments"
Leverage edge AI everywhere that is latency-free, private, and on-device)
Establish governance as AGI levels emerge
Reflection
As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.
John McCarthy (Father of AI, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” 1956)
I've been investing in AI for nearly two decades- sometimes too early, sometimes just right. AI is now mastering the six senses of the mind. The question is no longer if, but when.
The winners will be those who leverage AI and act early, build moats and reskill quickly.
And the true gift is that leveraging AI will enhance your and your team's productivity 10x, 100x, or more. This time can be used to develop your own faculties of the mind, such as memorizing, reasoning, perceiving, imagining, intuiting, and developing your own will.
And also to focus on the seven faculties of the spirit that are the source of a person's being and power, and focus on the long-term, purpose, meaning and love.
Life-Changing Question
Circumstances and events are the outward expressions of inward thoughts and aspirations.
James Allen - The Mastery of Destiny, 1909
With AGI approaching,
Am I using AI to amplify my humanity - or am I letting it replace it by relegating the faculties of my mind without thought to AI?
That one question reframes everything:
Memory: Am I outsourcing my memory to machines, or using AI to remember better and free my mind for wisdom?
Perception: Am I letting algorithms shape what I see, or am I leveraging AI to perceive hidden patterns and truth?
Reason: Am I trusting AI to think for me, or partnering with it to expand my reasoning?
Imagination: Am I passively consuming AI creations, or using it to multiply my creative reach?
Intuition: Am I dulling my own instincts, or sharpening them with AI as a second lens?
Will: Am I surrendering autonomy to machines, or directing AI with human purpose and conviction?
Next week—
My Remarkable Heart Disease Results in Just 3 Months
How I went from a vascular age worse than a 85 year old to a normal 55 year old in just three months
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
Starting a Side Hustle in 5 Steps
Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
Step 1: Start. It’s the Hardest Step
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe (1943–1993)
In today’s day and age, if you want to gain wealth and have optionality, you must create. In order to create, you must dream, imagine, and think of what brings you joy. In the beginning, there will be nothing but thoughts, ideas, and dreams.
To go from nothing to something is alchemy.
There will always be a beginning, and there will always be an end.
All great dynasties, empires, companies, organizations, products, and people adhere to this life cycle.
But you must still begin.
You must have the courage to start. You must take the first great (and hardest) step. Take a leap of faith.
In my final year of medical residency, I took a leap of faith in the new year 1999. I registered my business name, Hostglobal.com, incorporated the company in Nevada and launched my website within three months.
I got my first client, who paid $300 per month. then, I got another one at $3,000 per month and then a third at $20,000 per month. All of a sudden, I was making more in one month than I was in a year as a medical resident.
Step 2: Own a Niche
Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney (1901–1966)
Back then, I had many ideas (I still do)—some great and many bad—but I had to choose one. I had to make one idea work.
I wanted to build a Yellow Pages online, but that idea was too big and too broad.
I didn't have the time, resources, or skill set to go big, so I niched down to one category: Web Hosting (because I believed every business would eventually have a website and therefore need a web host).
Hostglobal.com was born when I registered the domain, created the website, and populated it with web hosting companies. I built a system to get reviews and ratings on each web host and then had these web hosting companies sponsor Hostglobal each month, pulling in $25,000 USD per month.
I started with a web hosting directory.
Amazon started with books.
Netflix started with mail-order DVDs.
Apple started with a personal computer.
Meta (Facebook) started as a networking site for Harvard students.
What's your niche?
Step 3: Have a Singular Clear Vision
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), The Little Prince
What is your vision?
What do you see as your end destination?
What is the success metric that measures your progress to your vision?
When you have clarity and can clearly see your idea's destination, it is much easier to navigate all the obstacles and resistance you will encounter as you embark on your side hustle journey.
After all, life is a journey full of obstacles that either strengthen or weaken one's resolve and spirit.
Envision your destination and articulate your vision. Simplify it to its core so you can express it in one paragraph, then one sentence and possibly in a few words.
All great companies, movies, shows, buildings, and relationships start with a person with a dream, then an idea, followed by thoughts on how to express that idea. Then, formulating and creating and building word by word, brick by brick, scene by scene, and editing it over and over again until it felt just right—until it worked just right.
Bringing an idea to life takes enormous energy in the form of thought and effort. But there are many ideas in your heart waiting to be born. Don't let them reside in the womb of your heart too long, for time passes impatiently.
Here are some of the world's most famous ideas; imagine if they had never been brought to life.
FedEx: Connecting the World Responsibly and Reliably (Overnight delivery)
Google: Organize and Make Accessible Information (Search)
Tesla: Accelerate the World's Transition to Sustainable Energy (Electric Vehicles)
Amazon: To Be Earth's Most Customer-Centric (Everything store)
Ford: Build the Best Vehicles Possible (Cars)
Southwest Airlines: Affordable Travel with Exceptional Service (Cheap travel)
IKEA: Create a Better Everyday Life (Cheap Furniture)
Costco: Deliver the Best Value Always (Cheap goods)
Netflix: Entertainment On Demand, Everywhere (Entertainment)
Disney: Make People Happy Through Magic (Happiness)
Step 4: Have an Executable Plan
A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
George S. Patton (1885-1945)
What is your plan?
Can you execute it?
In what timeframe?
What are your constraints?
How will you overcome them?
What are your top 3 risks?
Design your plan in three to five steps, and start on the first step to make your idea real.
Your plans will change as you learn, encounter obstacles, meet new people, and get feedback. Adjust your plans. This process is called the path to product/market fit. You try to fit your product/service with your dream customers like a jigsaw puzzle.
This past year, I wanted our church lands to launch a tea lights festival. I had no actual position, only influence. We decided to go for it in October and launch in November. We had no product and very little money but many volunteers. I put together a website, 123festivals.com. I used artist renditions to show people what the experience would be like until we could make it real. I promised an amazing dining and guest experience, asking people to pay upfront, including a 20% tip.
Five days before launch day, the Parks Board told us that our customers could not use their section of the road to access our property. What?!
Fortunately, our property is on a waterfront, so we were able to charter boats to transport our guests to our festival by water. However, this created significant logistical and financial nightmares.
It was one of the most challenging things I've dealt with in business due to the extreme time constraints, obstacles from the Parks Board, and lack of expert resources. Ultimately, we chartered 1,800 guests over seven weekends.
Here are images from the first rough mockup by me.
Initially, our dome dining started at $79. However, by the last weekend, we had such high demand that we were able to increase it to $170 per guest.
We felt God's guiding hand as Vancouver's social media channels filled with free promotions for our Christmas Tealights event, and our guests shared their experiences on Reels and TikTok (that story is for another newsletter).
Here is the finished website (in the span of two months)
My executable plans typically fit on half a page of handwritten notes. They have 3-5 steps, 3-5 risks I should consider mitigating (e.g., boats instead of cars for the festival), and how I can execute the first 3 steps, listing my assumptions.
Keep it simple and execute the 80/20 tasks.
Step 5: VPD. Vision. Plan. Determination.
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison (1847–1931)
Now that you have your vision and plan, the last step is determination. Persistence and perseverance are essential.
Can you imagine failing 10,000 times like Edison to invent a city of lights with light bulbs?
Can you imagine getting rejected by 222 Venture Capitalists like Howard Schultz did for his Starbucks idea?
Can you imagine practicing like Kobe Bryant to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, waking up at 3 am to have extra practice at 4 am to get in one extra practice than every other player?
The chapter on Persistence, a key principle of the 13 principles in the book "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill, is worth reading monthly. One of my mentors, Bob Proctor, read it daily for a month every year for 30 years. He practiced Persistence by reminding himself of the principle of Persistence.
Be determined. Persist. Persevere.
My Life Questions:
The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Byrne (1930–2016)
What have you always wanted to do but have not yet started?
Set aside an hour each day (morning is best) and write your thoughts, dreams, and plans with a timeline.
Just do it :)
My Life Lessons Then (from my younger self):
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Life is going from hustle to hustle. Sometimes, it starts as a side hustle, but it often grows into a full-time hustle.
You might as well love and enjoy your hustles so you can hustle well.
You are much bolder and more fearless when you are younger because you have nothing to lose, only to gain.
Start young and focus on learning rather than earning.
Seek good mentors and memorable experiences.
See who does it the best and make it your own.
We are all inspired by something or someone. Find what and who thinks and operates at a level of excellence and extraordinaryness, and then practice becoming excellent and extraordinary.
Life Advice Now (from my present 53 year old self):
Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.
John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937)
Imagine you only have ten big life decisions that you can make in your lifetime.
What would those ten choices be regarding how you spend your precious time on earth?
My list:
I knew that I wanted to help people with their health ✔
I knew that I wanted to ride the Internet wave ✔
I knew that I wanted a loving family ✔
I knew that I wanted to praise God ✔
I knew that I wanted to ride the crypto wave ✔
I know that I want to build an amazing wellness retreat
I know that I want to write books
I know that I want to make movies
I know that I want to make a Broadway musical
I know that I want to live a healthy, strong, fit life to at least 108 years old
Study and know the basic principles of life, for they apply to all areas of life, including business.
Many people don't realize that one of the best business books is the Bible, which contains life principles that can be applied to business. Some of the wealthiest people in history were blessed with this wisdom, like Abraham, Joseph, King David, King Solomon, and Daniel. I especially enjoy the books of Proverbs and Luke for business.
I'd like to focus on the 80/20 principle, the compound effect, and network effects in future newsletters.
Dream big. Whether you dream small or big, it takes similar thought and effort. Default to big, but take small action steps to start making your dream real.
You started as one cell and multiplied to billions over nine months. Everything starts from zero to one. That first step is the beginning of something bigger. Travel that path of your heart.
Next week:
Your Vision. Your Purpose.
Bach. Handel. Beethoven.
I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
The Entrepreneur of the Year
The Oscars of Business Awards
Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.
Peter Drucker (1909-2005)
Are You an Entrepreneur?
Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.
Howard Schultz (1953-) Starbucks Chairman
What is your definition of an Entrepreneur?
Just take a minute to think about it.
Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) painting sold for $450 million in 2017. What was it worth in Da Vinci’s day? The fruits of an entrepreneur’s labour are often better appreciated over time, far after their death.
The term Entrepreneur was derived from the French verb “entreprendre” (“to undertake”) and first coined by Richard Cantillon in 1730 to describe someone who was taking a risk and making decisions in uncertain conditions.
Later in 1803, Jean-Baptiste Say described the entrepreneur as taking things of lesser value and creating higher value. Joseph Schumpeter in 1911 said the role of the entrepreneur was as an innovator and a driver of economic development through creative destruction.
My definition?
An entrepreneur is anyone who creates value for others and themselves. And everyone can create.
By my definition, God is an entrepreneur because I believe God created the world and us. A most beautiful creation. I’ve received so many business lessons from the Bible, which describes the entrepreneurship of God.
To All the Unsung Entrepreneurs
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Steve Jobs (1955-2011)
It’s not just business people who are entrepreneurs.
Artists, poets, writers, philosophers, musicians and scientists are also entrepreneurs. They use paint, words, thoughts, music, theory and experiments to create and express the beauty, joy, and wisdom of life and nature.
Bach’s music was for the church. He died relatively unknown until Felix Mendelssohn resurrected his work 70 years after Bach’s death. They later searched for Bach’s unmarked grave to give recognition to his great works.
Those who scale their works of creation are recognized as Entrepreneurs, but it’s the unsung heroes who have allowed the greats to stand on their shoulders to whom we should also pay homage for making a dent in the world.
I further describe entrepreneurs as those who have the courage to live their dreams.
This was my father and my mother who left Korea with the shirt on their backs. My father went from an almost non-existent elementary school education to the German mines and then to Ford in Canada. He then had the courage to set up his own grocery store and laundromats. My mom left Korea as a nurse to come to a new country to learn English and work as a nurse in a small town in Ontario Canada called Owen Sound.
I am especially impressed by entrepreneurs who bootstrap with little money, few resources, little education, and little time because they are typically working many other jobs. This requires ingenuity and persistence along with the 12 hallmarks of entrepreneurship.
Do You Have the Credentials of an Entrepreneur?
There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.
Seth Godin (1960-)
I had dreamed since 14 of becoming a medical doctor, so I took no liberal arts courses or any business courses in university. So when I started my side hustle in 1999, I often had the impostor syndrome. I just did what made sense. Offer a unique service that gave more than I asked for. It worked and then I expanded and raised the prices as I gave more value. And most of the other bootstrap entrepreneurs in the domain industry were just like me.
Who were the experts in domains?
It was us, who spent 16 hours a day, figuring out how to value a domain, register great domains, and make money from the domains. We built systems to automate as much as we could, because we were one-person operations. We were the visionary, the executer, the financier, the marketer, the salesperson, the administrator all-in-one. We wore all the hats of the business.
I would argue that being a bootstrap entrepreneur is the best business education in the world. You learn everything first hand. The lessons of entrepreneurship are inscribed into your soul.
We had no unfair advantage except a dream we sought.
Our failures are our battle scars and oh do we have so many.
Our successes are built on these piles of failures.
We learned to iterate and test our assumptions quickly before spending much money, time or resources.
But my Director pulled me aside and asked me to seriously consider going to the Advanced Management Program at Harvard.
My wife was pregnant. There was no way I could. Would this help me?
It wouldn’t hurt. And no one could look down on you.
It made sense. I asked my wife. She paused and considered the implications.
I would be in a Harvard dorm for two months. She would be 4 months pregnant, yet she gave her full support.
And the Winner of the Entrepreneur of the Year is…
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.
Colin R. Davis (1927-2013)
I applied to Harvard’s Advance Management Program. They suggested that I apply to their Owner Management Program. My director Chris Hartnett gave them a call.
They accepted me. I was the youngest along with Gary at age 37.
I had applied to E & Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year for Technology. I was nominated as a finalist. I would have to fly from Boston back to Vancouver during my Harvard education and then fly back that night after the award ceremony for class.
We did 200 business case studies in two months. It was intense and I loved every minute of it. Harvard in the fall was beautiful. And then the subprime financial crisis I had predicted hit like a global hurricane in September.
We had the most interesting speakers. Founder of Vanguard, Meg Whitman CEO of eBay, Michael Dell, and the list went on. We did the case study and then we were able to directly ask the founders and executives questions. Wow.
At the awards ceremony, it was like a red carpet gala event. I met David Suzuki, a finalist as well. It was so cool to be amongst so many great entrepreneurs. I had three tables. Fellow teammates, beloved family. It felt like the Oscars for business. I had a strong intuition that I would win in my category.
And the winner of the E & Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year for Technology goes to…
Dr. Kevin Ham
Wow, it felt like I had won an Oscar. I was hugging everyone. My father, my wife, my family, my teammates. It took me a while to get to the podium.
The MC said I had only two minutes for my speech. Two minutes. How could I thank and express eight years of emotions.
I thanked God by acknowledging the two words that sit 555 feet hidden at the top of the Washington Monument: Laus Deo, which is Latin for Praise God, along with the good book, my guide, the Bible. I thanked with all of my heart my wife, my family, and my team.
It brings tears to my eyes as I think of all that my parents and family went through for me to get to that moment.
Blood, sweat and tears… of many generations. I am shedding these tears even as I write this.
Here’s to all the entrepreneurs, who dared to dream, who dared to start what seemed like an impossible dream and got up after every No, after every failure, after every false start. Here’s to you. I believe in you, your heart to dream and make that dream come true. Never, ever, give up. Until your last breath, dream and live.
My Life Questions:
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
1. What is your life dream that you wish for?
Never forget the dreams in your heart. They are your life. Perhaps they lay buried deep in your heart. Mine those dreams out and make them shine. This world needs your light, your dreams. Disney showed you what is possible when you dream.
My Life Lessons Then (from my 29 year old self):
The harder the conflict, the greater the triumph.
George Washington (1732-1799)
1. Everything you dream about is possible, if you have enough faith and courage to pursue your dream.
2. Starting and believing results in learning about the obstacles you need to navigate around.
These obstacles are there for you to grow stronger, to be more resilient so that you can be the person you need to become to fulfill your dream.
3. If you persist, someone or something will open the way.
A door will surely open for you. You will find the right door.
Howard Schultz had 222 No’s before someone said Yes to his Starbucks idea. Just lock into your destination GPS and the routes will go around the obstacles and find the path.
Life Advice Now (from my present 53 year old self):
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
1. Cherish these moments. The highs and the lows.
You have become resilient because you kept on the path and persisted. The lows have brought you high, The highs are heights where you can fall and are more dangerous than the valleys.
2. You made your father proud, I wish mom could have shared this moment.
She passed too early from gall bladder cancer in 2006.
3. You had more faith and courage in your dreams than I do now.
What happens as we grow older? Does fear of failure, self preservation, ego start to kick in or am I spreading myself too thin by focusing on too many dreams instead of just a few?
Focus. Dr. Azra Raza sat me down recently and asked me, “What do you really want?” Take two days in nature and really ponder this question. Be certain of your answer. Great advice.
Next week:
Fear VS Faith
To Lead or Not to Lead
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men
Raise $300 million to roll up the industry
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Mike Tyson (1966-)
Anyone have $300 million?
Money often costs too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
On the plane ride back from the Domain conference, I had this idea. Why not add to the flywheel of business by buying the best domain portfolios? Not only would they be very valuable assets in and of themselves, but they could be monetized and garner even more revenues at scale. This would be like buying up more waterfront real estate.
I could pitch the top domainers, who had become great friends, Frank Schilling, Scott Day, Garry Chernoff and others. Webdesign.com, recipes.com, prayer.com, performance.com (the one I thought I had for $100 when I first started).
But where would I get the money? Again, I didn’t have the cash on hand to do this.
Then I had an idea. I could invite all the top investment bankers from Wall Street and see if I could either raise or borrow $300 million.
The Players of Wall Street
The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
Philip Fisher (1907-2004)
I asked my network to introduce me to anyone who could help me. Bob Seeman, one of my innovative business friends, connected me to some along with my lawyer, Steve Lukas, who would connect me with Scott Earthy, who came from this world of finance.
I was planning to move into our newly acquired Yaletown building, but the renovations would take too long so instead we upgraded our offices to an 11,000 square foot sub penthouse office in our existing building, with 270 degrees of city, water and mountain view. Much too large for our team of 16 but we would grow our team to 60 as we built the infrastructure to scale our business.
Pretty soon, we were hosting all the big Wall Street banks. I really wanted Goldman Sachs, but they were the only ones I could not connect with.
I would even be invited by big private equity (PE) companies like Cerberus and Blackstone. Cerberus offered the $300 million right away on our first meeting but at a higher interest rate. They were the PE that had acquired Chrysler.
And just like that, I was on my way to do the deals I had already lined up with my domainer friends.
The cover story coincided with the meetings and validated the story of our business and I was viewed as an entrepreneur who could deliver the goods.
I presented to S & P and Moody’s to get investor ratings and that was the ticket into this world of Wall Street. In the elevator before the pitch I saw a guy staring at me. When I looked up, it was John Travolta! Hi John. Hi. He seemed normal, but also mystical at the same time. Wow, a whole new world.
The Subprime Crash of Real Estate
The four most expensive words in the English language are, ‘This time it’s different.’
Sir John Templeton (1912-2008)
Out of the 7 investment banks, I was impressed by Bear Stearns and Bank of America. I liked their team. Maybe it was my first amazing meal at Nobu that BOA treated me that won not only my stomach but my heart.
There I was sitting in the Manhattan tower that housed Bank of America, overlooking beautiful Central Park. The head of leveraged finance was popping in and out of the meeting. But what I noticed was his very stressed and concerned demeanour. He seemed very distracted with bad news. At the break, I asked him, “What’s wrong?”
He simply replied, “Subprime.”
What is that?
Subprime loans are real estate loans to home buyers with low credit scores that were then bundled together to reduce the risk of default of any one borrower.
Hmmm, not sure I quite understand. What’s the potential fallout?
Hundreds of billions of dollars. Likely more.
Sounds big!
Yes, it’s very concerning.
Will this affect what I am doing?
Possibly.
Fear of Impending Doom
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I went away from this deep in thought. If this fallout happened, what would happen if the economy crashed?
As I looked into this more, it looked like potential impending financial doom, the collapse of the banking system.
I started to tell my home builder to build faster so I could sell my current house at the top of the market before the financial crash occurred. They said I must be wrong because real estate was only growing and couldn’t suddenly crash like I was saying.
But my intuition said I was right.
I was telling many people about this coming crash, but it fell on deaf ears.
Bear Stearns, one of my joint arrangers, would go bankrupt and sell for under $300 million, less than the amount I was raising. I decided not to go ahead with the $300 million acquisitions. I apologized to my friends, saying my intuition said to not go ahead. They are still my friends, so true friends. Instead I got a credit line of $60 million and acquired a much smaller portfolio for $20 million and promptly paid it off.
Then in September 2008, while I was attending Harvard, living in the dorms, the financial crisis took full effect. The Director of Goldman Sachs would speak to us and say how subprime nearly collapsed every financial institution.
Lehman Brothers would fall and sell to Bank of America. The CEO of Bank of America and most of the team there would be swapped out. So many would lose their homes, home prices would fall across America and ripple to other markets around the world.
My Life Questions:
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
1. What is your life plan?
Dreams are important but a plan to make it real is just as important. The plan will change. But you must have a plan to start. Map out your life to 100 years and work backwards by decades. What do you hope to accomplish by 100, by 80, by 50, by 40, by 30, by 20? Line up the dominoes in your mind (and on paper).
Physically I wish to be able to do 10 pullups daily, do the splits (ouch) and ride 100 km on my bike at 100 years old (century ride at my century mark). I am working backwards. I am 53 and worked my way up to 20 pull ups, can do 100 km easily on my bike up mountains. My big challenge is the splits so every morning I am trying to move my hands to my feet from a pushup position.
My Life Lessons Then (from my 29 year old self):
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
1. Is growth by acquisition the best way or optimizing what you already have?
Walmart has 8.6% market share in the US. Do they need to acquire and expand globally? Southwest Airlines expands in the US 99% of the time. In-n-Out Burger is slowly expanding out of California. Brand density. Market density. Expand in your niche market and once you have things ironed out, expand into adjacent markets.
2. Listen to your intuition and ask questions.
Intuition is your gut sense of something right or something wrong. You feel it right there. Your gut. Listen to your intuition. You are a prophet. You just haven’t learned how to use this super power fully yet.
3. Don’t be dazzled by numbers. Be focused on purpose.
The allure of big numbers blinds one from one’s path and purpose. Don’t lose sight of what really matters to you.
Life Advice Now (from my present 53 year old self):
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Yoda
1. Keep listening to your intuition, gain insight, deep on introspection.
The “in” deep inside of you are delving to know yourself much deeper and in more dimensions. Focus on “in*”.
2. When a secret is revealed, ponder on how you can leverage it.
I didn’t know how to leverage the secret knowledge of subprime. The Big Short revealed how Michael Burry shorted the market and made $4 billion. I realized afterwards it would be beneficial to know how the markets worked and did commodity (oil, gold and natural gas) leverage trading daily for a year. The education was interesting and somewhat invaluable. I 100x my money in stocks as a result. Bought NVIDIA in 2018 at $60 a share after 12x my Google buy in 2006. It slingshot to $1,180 a share (20x) [now $118 after a 10:1 split]. I will explain my thoughts on my decision to buy NVIDIA at that time in another newsletter.
3. Don’t let fear dictate, have courage and faith in yourself and your dreams.
I’ve noticed that the periods in my life when crises hit, it’s natural to have fear. But to act and make decisions in fear has mostly not garnished any good results. Some like bowing out of my big $300 million deal. But for the most part, fear resulted in bad decisions mostly. Don’t ignore the fear. Be prudent, yet act with courage and faith.
Next week:
The Entrepreneur of the Year
Awards leads to Glory and Hubris
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Confucius (551-479 BC)
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
The Man Who Owns the Internet
How the Master of Web Domains built his $300 million Empire
Fame is a bee. It has a song—
It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Just a Cover Story
How do you stand out amongst so many?
Kevin Ham (1970-)
I was in Hawaii on a spring family vacation. One of my favourite places. My childhood memory ingrained in me that Hawaii was paradise. We have a family ritual to spend loving time there. Eventually I wish to be a ‘snowbird’ and live in Hawaii for 3 months of the year.
I was about to write to Paul Sloan, the reporter of Business 2.0, that I don’t want to be part of the article he wished to write.
Just then, a new message came in from Paul. He told me he was excited and had just booked his flight to Vancouver.
I paused my email and then decided to delete it and replied to Paul that I would love to host him.
In the ensuing meeting, he asked me so many great questions. I asked him not to write about certain topics like our Cameroon venture, that he was so curious about. I thought it was a great experience and looked forward to a nice article in Business 2.0, my favourite magazine back then. It had inspired me a lot in my early days, hearing how entrepreneurs overcame adversity and came up with novel solutions to obstacles they faced..
Weeks later, Paul called me and asked me to sit down as he had some big news. The chief editor wanted to make our story the cover story. I said, “No, I don’t want to be famous. I just want to have credibility in an inside article.”
Paul said he had more news and to brace myself.
Just Half My Face
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
St. Jerome (347-420)
He said that my face would be on the cover.
Me: What? No!
Paul: I had the team only do half your face and in black and white, out of respect of your desire to not be fully seen.
Me: Really? Oh no!
I asked Paul Sloan if he had written anything bad about me. His response: “Nobody knows you so we introduced the most interesting aspects of you and what you’ve done. Now that people know you, this is where they either lift you up or tear you down.”
I resigned myself to the fact that I would be recognized. I was both happy but also disappointed. Reflective and mind racing. What would this mean for me? For my family? For my future? A turn of events unexpected yet not unanticipated.
Did you ever have the feeling that you would one day matter? That you were destined to do more than what you were doing? That feeling deep in your heart, however buried it might be?
We call that a DREAM. Seemingly like fantasy, just a cloud seen briefly, that fades into the heavens when not acted up, when not believed, when not realized.
Dream and believe. Believe in your dreams. Believe in yourself. Believe in that higher power that brings it all together.
Read the full article here
Fame. I want to live forever in Books.
TV Interviews. Dragon’s Den. Autographs. Oh no.
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known,
then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Once the magazine came out, the barrage of emails, letters, requests came fast and furious. My response. Ignore them all. My friend even bought many copies of the magazine and asked me to sign them. What? That seemed so odd but in retrospect, makes a lot of sense. Starstruck were the people around me.
TV interviews, major newspapers worldwide including our local newspapers, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, major magazines were all requesting interviews. No replies from me. They printed front page stories based on the cover story anyways.
I received copies of newspapers around the globe that had me on the front page.
But the best part is almost a decade later when I heard the impact my story had on young students and entrepreneurs in India and China. They were inspired to become entrepreneurs. I met them at a domain conference and they had a staff of 50 people.
He said my story had filled most of the front page of India Times and part of the second page. Wow.
The Fear of Success is greater than the Fear of Failure
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
But why did I neglect all this media attention when most people and companies tried sometimes desperately to attain this moment?
Later on, someone told me about the fear of success is just as real as the fear of failure.
Fear of Success is really a fear of change at the extreme when success changes the people around you. Who are your real friends? Who loves you for who you are versus what you have or the status you have obtained? Who are you really vs who the world thinks you are. It gives rise to the feeling of the Imposter Syndrome. Embrace you. You know who you are. Everyone else will have a varied view of you.
Define yourself, don’t let others define you.
Success brings you over the threshold into a different world where people see the superficial aspects of you and neglect the deeper character that brought you there.
You fear this and so you go into a shell and hide, like I did. Classic fear of success.
Don’t Forget Me When You’re Famous
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Erica Jong (1942-)
Frank Schilling, my domain competitor and friend, asked me for one thing. Don’t forget me when you become a celebrity in the business world. I said, “Of course not, I won’t change.” He was much more street smart than me. I’m pretty naive. I’m just me.
The struggle to please others vs living my dreams was constantly on my mind in the past. Now that I’ve reach the pinnacle of success, I wondered what my next steps were.
I thought, one more thing for my father and my mother, who had just passed away in 2006. It would be something my father would love. I would apply to be Entrepreneur of the Year. I would also go to Harvard at the suggestion of my good friend and mentor, Dr. Christopher Hartnett, who had attained billionaire status with Voiceover IP during the dotcom boom.
My Life Questions:
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
1. What is the success that you wish to attain?
Ponder and write out what success is to you and put it on your phone screensaver where you can always see it.
2. How will you overcome fear of failure and fear of success?
Fear is wetting your pants and overcoming fear, courage and faith, is doing what you believe in with wet pants.
Once you have tasted success, then fear of failure becomes larger because you don’t want to fail despite your success. Without success, you can continue to fail, but with success now you have a ‘reputation’ to hold. Keep on failing for success arises from the learnings of many failures.
3. How will your world change with success?
Your world will change, whether success is a job, a business, losing weight, overcoming obstacles. Like a Clark Kent who turns into superman. Different worlds that have different egos and expectations. Learn to live in the new world and hold onto what’s important in your former world.
My Life Lessons Then (from my 29 year old self):
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream;
not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France (1844-1924)
1. Really think about what you really want.
Your thoughts are powerful. Your dreams are very powerful. When you start to speak and act according to your thoughts and dreams, they start to become real in your world. You will attract those who are inspired by your thoughts and dreams. It leads you down a road that opens new paths. Make sure you want to walk down this road.
2. Success is a big peak of accomplishment that shines.
Your results speak louder than any aphorisms or inspiring words. People look for signs and not just prophecies. Focus on results, the manifestation of your thoughts, your ideas, your dreams.
3. Believe in yourself
This is one of the most powerful things you can do in your life: Believe in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? A mentor. Mentors and leaders believe in you more than you believe in yourself until you believe in yourself more than they believe in you.
I wished I had a mentor like this. Well, it was my parents, my family and my team and my faith in God.
Life Advice Now (from my present 53 year old self):
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)
1. Do not run away once you attain success.
God set you on a journey to attain the highest peak of success but you squandered it by not opening the gift and the blessing. The gift remains unopened. How much good you could have done, but you weren’t prepared to sacrifice and give up some of your old ways to help and benefit so many others.
But it’s okay. The gift remains for you to open even now, if you so choose. Embrace your gifts and blessings and give them away to bless others.
2. Remain humble.
Don’t let the fame, the praise get to your head. Balance ego, the mind, with your heart, full of generosity and love. Keep counselors in your life who will tell you when you stray off the good path. Have people who say No and not only Yes.
3. Be grateful in good times and bad
The law is that once you get to the summit, you need to come down. Be grateful on the descent, the fall from grace. Life consists of peaks and valleys. The valleys build strength and resilience for higher peaks. Don’t remain in the valleys too long though. Climb your way out through hope, faith and love.
Next week:
Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men.
Raise $300 million and roll up the industry.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Mike Tyson (1966-)
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
Insignificant. Unknown. Rejected. Despite a Lot of Money
You are not someone unless there is undeniable proof
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
You are insignificant
“ You are never too small to make a difference.”
— Greta Thunberg (2003-)
I was interviewing a software engineer in the early days of my company, 2006. We were in a big boardroom. He seemed impressed. He asked me, “How many people are there in the company?”
8.
8? His jaw dropped and he started writing the number 8 on the table. 8 or 80?
8.
I could tell he was frazzled. The interview ended rather quickly after that. He had lost interest.
You are not worth my time
“ Not all those who wander are lost.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
I was attending the Harvard Advanced Management Program in the fall of 2008, just when the financial crisis hit.
I was the youngest student in the program at age 37. I was surrounded by Fortune 500 executives or soon to be executives.
I was speaking to a top executive at Goldman Sachs Hong Kong. He asked me how many people I had in my company. 60.
He looked at me and then just walked away.
I told this to my mentor, Dr. Christopher Hartnett, also a Director of my company. The next day, the Goldman executive came up to me at lunch and apologized to me, saying he respects me and to ask him for anything at all. I wondered what had happened. My Director had told him about my accomplishments in business.
You are rejected
“I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.”
— Sylvester Stallone (1946-)
We wanted to move to a building with a view of the Pacific ocean, the sunrise and the sunset. We had our eye on Harbour Centre. We applied for a small 2600 square foot office. We got rejected. We asked why. The landlord wasn’t confident in our ability to pay. We were doing tens of millions of dollars. We sent them our financials. They begrudgingly agreed. We would later rent out almost an entire floor. Plenty of Fish, the free dating site and Markus Frind would take our 2600 sq ft office as we moved out. They sold for $600m USD to IAC.
Establish undeniable proof
"Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself."
After the 8 incident, I had this thought that I should get our company in some media article so that our company would have credibility.
I considered contacting our local papers, The Vancouver Sun and The Province. They were a stone’s throw away. My heart said no. Wait. God will direct. Hmmm, ok, I shall wait.
I was set to go to a Domain conference in Las Vegas in March 2007.
On welcoming night, I had a gentleman come up to me and ask, “Are you the man behind Cameroon?” That question took me by surprise. I had tried to keep my association with that secret. I replied, “I had help.”
He, Paul Sloan, was a reporter with one of my favourite business magazines, Business 2.0.
I had dinner with him and learned he was half Jewish and half German with a Lutheran background. I was curious with his ‘religious upbringing’. I asked him questions like why God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s? He asked me a lot of questions about how I built my business.
He told me he wanted to write an article about me along with several other domainers. Maybe this is what my heart had told me, to wait. God would provide. It felt right.
My Life Questions:
“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
— Bruce Lee (1940-1973)
1. What is your secret identity that no one in the world truly knows?
You have a superpower that the world has not seen. What is it? What are your 3 core values?
2. How do you overcome rejection, insignificance?
Rejection doesn’t mean you are insignificant. It signals that you are not with the right people, the right values, the right tribe, the right time. Change perspective, environment, tribe. Find where you ‘belong’.
3. How will you matter?
You will matter, even if to yourself, one other person or a group or a community or even a future generation. Many an artist like William Blake died unknown in poverty and is now proclaimed as one of Britain’s great poets.
My Life Lessons Then: (from my 29 year old self)
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow is our doubts of today.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
1. Establish your results as your ‘resume’.
Results speak loudly. Having no known credibility makes everything harder. You don’t need to brag, but boldly and confidently proclaim your value in the service of others.
2. Focus on the results of your Vision.
Your vision is your north star. Never lose sight of it. If you don’t have a vision, pray for one, seek one. This is the “WHAT” of your life. The mountain peak you climb to in a decade or decades.
3. Believe in something greater than yourself.
When you fall, the fall is endless if there is no bedrock of faith to anchor you and be your foundation. For me, this is God and Jesus. The next layer is loved ones. Who will you ‘pray’ to if there is no one more powerful to you than yourself?
Life Advice Now: (from my present 53 year old self)
“The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”
— John Ruskin (1819-1900)
1. Humbly acknowledge praise to whom praise is due.
I could not have planned nor orchestrated many things in my life. I thank Chris Hartnett for his guidance and helping me at Harvard and in life. I thank God for His countless blessings in my life and those around me. I thank my team, my wife and my kids for always being there for me when I fell hard.
2. Leverage what is given to you.
Don’t run away and descend once you get to the top of the mountain. Stay there a while and enjoy the view. It took a lot of work and luck to get there. Savour the moment and reflect, write about it. You let the fear of success, the imposter syndrome get to you too quickly.
3. Be humbly confident in yourself
The gifts of life are handed freely. Unwrap them, open your heart and give them freely away. This is your true gift. One day they must be returned.
Next week: Cover Story. The Man Who Owns the Internet
Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of
Here’s how the Master of Web Domains built his $300 million empire
“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures, and that is character.”
— Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
No Money? No Problem.
Three $10 million deals with no plan
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
— Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Just clear vision with faith and purpose.
I had spent the last 15 years with the singular goal of becoming a doctor. I achieved it but now felt disillusioned. I was newly married and had a beautiful newborn daughter on the way. Needless to say, I was at a big crossroads.
I pondered whether this was what I wanted to do for the next 40 years of my life. I still wanted to help people but this was clearly not the way to do it.
“Even without money, a vision with faith and purpose are powerful enough to make the seemingly impossible possible.”
— Kevin
With the business back on track, there were a few dreams I saw in my heart.
Build my dream home
Buy a church property
Buy a commercial office building for work
Each of these would require at least a $10 million investment, over $36 million total. The problem? I only had $200,000 in the bank.
My dream home
“A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I thought about what I wanted in a dream home. I imagined in my mind’s eye:
a view of the mountains
the Pacific Ocean
close to the city, yet a secluded, tranquil neighbourhood
clean air next to parks and beaches, and
a large lot
So I looked on Google Earth and looked for areas that would match this. I found a few locations. I looked at houses for sale in these neighbourhoods. One house, when I stepped into it, I just had a vision and an intuition that this would be my home. It was already ‘done’.
The realtor said the basement was a mess and flooded, and likely had mold. I didn’t even go look at the rest of the house. I told my realtor, my brother-in-law, Gord, to put in a firm offer for $3.6 million just for the lot, I knew it was a bargain compared to the other neighborhoods. I would then spend the next five years building my dream house on this big lot. I would struggle to pay for the building of my dream home, as it took much longer to build (5 years) at double my budget.
Our church
“The Church is a place where broken hearts are healed, broken relationships are mended, and broken people find wholeness.”
Our church congregation is only about 150 people. Small. So we rented churches and we often had to move from one location to another. One day, the youth group gathered together and had a dream of buying a church property. Something we would own. Our elders told us we needed to think big, buy a place that was by the ocean, surrounded by trees with a creek flowing through the property into the ocean.
That sounded very expensive, much larger than our $300,000 budget back in early 2000. Over the next few years, we went to view many potential lots. They were very expensive. We had our eye on this one 78 acre property, owned by the YMCA. We had had a spring Bible conference there and we loved it. The problem was that it wasn't for sale.
A couple of years later in 2004, I was reading the neighbourhood newspaper and it mentioned that the YMCA might be selling this particular property in order to build a larger facility downtown. I quickly told an elder and he told me bluntly, “We can’t afford it.” I asked one of my mentors, Bryant, if we could pursue this.
We went on to raise $10 million and negotiated with the YMCA to pay it over the next three years. An impossible dream made possible by faith. We had very little money, but we raised the money with a dream that this property would help people with their health physically, mentally, and spiritually.
My dream office
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”
— Steve Jobs (1955-2011)
I noticed that downtown Vancouver felt a lot like Manhattan downtown. It needed to be accessed by bridges. The secret in real estate: location, location, location!
I knew that downtown could only go up in density as I was looking around different neighbourhoods. I really liked this heritage area called Yaletown. I saw a building on sale and asked my realtor to view the property. As soon as I stepped into the building, I once again had a vision of exactly what would happen: a bank in one corner, a restaurant taking half the building, and my company occupying a quarter of the building.
I asked my realtor, Gord, to make an offer. I didn’t tell him I didn’t have the money. I asked him if we could have a small down payment of $100,000 and close in 12 months. I know that these were crazy requests, but we got the purchase price down from $12.2 million to $11.2 million, closing in 10 months.
I thought that I could get a mortgage for 95% of the building, but did not know that commercial mortgages typically required 50% down payment.
Where was I gonna come up with $5.4 million in 10 months?
A Hail Mary
“Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.”
— Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983)
With each of these three dream projects, I didn’t have the funds for any one of them, never mind all three of them.
With no obvious means to close them, I prayed for wisdom. I prayed for a means to acquire each of these properties. I thought about the stories in the Bible, the faith the great characters in the Bible had in order to accomplish something great. I had this kind of faith. All three of these dreams would be realized in a short period of time. We tend to call these events miracles.
I realized very quickly that once I had a goal, I quickly divided up that financial goal into mortgages, fundraising or making that money by a certain time. Wisdom and insight were provided to me for a few years of the respective plans to get loans, fundraising and accelerating my business. My business grew exponentially. It was on pace to make over $100 million a year with great profit margins, with only 16 people.
With just a vision with faith and purpose, these were accomplished. Thank you God.
Life Questions
“Pray as though everything depended on God.
Work as though everything depended on you.”— Saint Augustine (354-430)
1. What are the dreams in your heart?
Write your top 1 to 3 dreams down now. Yes, write them down. Something magical happens when you write them down. Now tell your dreams to your most trusted friend or to God.
Review these dreams each day, each week, each month, each year.
They are in the cocoon of your heart.
2. Imagine your dreams in your mind’s eye. Visualize them.
Make a 5 step (dominoes) plan with a timeline
Start on step number one.
Just start it and stumble your way to step two, etc.
3. Have you ever prayed? Do you only pray when things are impossible?
Pray for wisdom. Pray with faith. Trust the path. Enjoy the journey. Both the ups and the downs.
My Life Lessons Then: (from my 35 year old self)
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
— C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
1. Faith that is invisible is greater than money which is tangible.
Often the most valuable things are unseen, not tangible.
2. Praying for wisdom and insight.
Solomon’s request for wisdom may be one of the greatest prayers.
Wisdom is the mother of all things. It’s seven children are love, faith, hope, serenity, joy, understanding, patience.
3. Sometimes ignorance is the reason for many innovations.
Not knowing how the world works allows the impossible to be possible, for fear to be hidden behind the veils of ignorance.
Life Advice Now: (from my present 53 year old self)
“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.”
— William Arthur Ward (1921-1994)
1. I am reminded to walk by Faith and not by sight.
Thank you for reminding me, my younger self.
2. I am very grateful for the blessings as well as the hardships
There arises in my heart a prayer for the blessings but more so, a prayer for the hardships that sharpened my faith, my strength as hardship shaped me.
3. May you always be bold as a lion and curious like a child
Strength and honour to all who strive and ride into the face of the dreams in their heart. Scary but thrilling.
Next week: Unknown. Rejected. Despite a Lot of Money
You are not someone unless there is verifiable media proof.
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
Turning Danger into Opportunity
"Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit."
— Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)
Crisis in Chinese is composed of two words together: Danger and Opportunity.
Powerful.
Danger is Coming
"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty."
— Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Our domain business was starting to compound and gain momentum.
We were on pace to do over a million dollars a year, and each month, new insights arrived that made the flywheel spin faster and get bigger.
We had made it!
Yahoo, who would later buy Goto (the pay-per-click search engine), was using a company called ASI (Applied Semantics) to target domain names with relevant keywords. For example, Laptop.com had laptop keywords and relevant advertisers for laptops. This allowed better monetization of the domain names.
Guess who decided to buy ASI for $102 million in 2003? A little upcoming company called Google. They were the new search engine on the block, and Yahoo had used them as their search engine, branding them into significance. This was a great strategic move by Google and the beginning of Yahoo's decline. ASI would become "Adsense" and its powerful monetization engine, where it still makes over 90% of its revenues.
This left Yahoo with no contextually relevant ads on the domain names and our revenues plummeted by more than 50%!
Imagine waking up one day to disaster. C'est la vie.
The crisis is Turning Danger into Opportunity
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
– Sun Tzu (544 BC - 496 BC)
Yahoo was scrambling for a solution and asked the larger domainers if we wanted to build our own keyword engine. They wanted to avoid dealing with smaller domain portfolios and wondered whether a handful of us, the larger domainers, could consolidate them.
I would have thought a giant technology company would invest in this 'keyword' engine. Their CEO, Terry Semel, was a traditional Hollywood guy and also passed up the opportunity to buy Google for $5 billion before it went public. Later, they did invest in Alibaba, their $1 billion stake selling for $40 billion. The Yahoo Directors had to oust their Yahoo founder, Jerry Yang, in order to sell it.
So, we were presented with an opportunity to help smaller domainers monetize their domains. This allowed us to learn from the entrepreneurial insights of many agile domainers.
Domainers came from all walks of life and were scrappy, agile, bootstrappers with solid work ethics and ingenuity. I learned a lot from both the small and the legendary domainers. This entrepreneurial real-life boot camp may have been better than attending business school and getting an MBA.
Homage to all my fellow domainers and entrepreneurs. Strength and Honour.
The traffic in our domain network became a Top 100 Global Network, as measured by the industry standard Comscore. I was astounded. Now we were really big.
My Life Dream
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined."
– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
When I was 13, one of my good friends told me that my cousin Don was actually my brother. What? Why are you saying that? I asked my mom, and she sat me down and told me that Dad had a previous family before she had me, and I had two sisters and an older brother. They were stuck in Korea and my mom helped my brother come to Canada. But my mom couldn't love him like a true son, so Don was sent to grow up in group homes, apart from me. I had no idea.
I prayed that I would be able to have a business in the future that would allow me to work with Don. I asked him to join me in this Internet entrepreneurial journey. He had just sold his dry cleaners and was interested.
So, Don managed support on our domain parking business, Hitfarm. I also had a prayer to bring my sisters over to Canada. One sister found her way to the US on her own and my other sister now lives in Vancouver. So blessed.
I couldn't imagine the life they had gone through without parents. I thank God for all the people in my life who have helped me find my way and build a business from scratch. I am so grateful to God, my family, and to each person I have met along this amazing life journey.
Thank you. Much love to each of you. May God bless you with everything in your heart and let you shine like the sun.
Current Crisis
"In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity."
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It's much easier to talk about crises that have already been averted or passed.
It's hard to see the opportunity in the crisis when it occurs.
But one must seek the opportunity.
My crisis is that one of my businesses, Chit Chats, a logistics company helping entrepreneurs ship their products, is going through a cash crunch as the industry is getting disrupted and rapidly changing. The business is submerged under fixed costs.
We are revamping our hubs from cost centres into profit centres and looking for key partnerships to survive and thrive. Stay tuned. I hope to write later how we turned this crisis into an opportunity.
Life Questions
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."
– Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
What crisis turned into an opportunity for you?
What is the opportunity knocking on your door?
Life Advice Then
From my 33-year-old self:
"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards."
– Vernon Law (1930-)
Take a deep breath and sign.
Panic is a flight response. Instead of flight, you must first fight. To do that, you need a calm mind. Breathe and focus on controlling your breath, eventually calming your body. Then, you can calm your mind—serenity.
Zoom out and give it time.
What is the worst-case scenario? What are the new opportunities? Discuss to consider all perspectives. Write to gain clarity. Yes, write it down. You'd be surprised how much clarity comes from writing.
An opportunity for unity and efficiency
Brainstorm with people on the barbells of
Plug the most significant holes (the most enormous hole is your biggest constraint)
What is the new opportunity?
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
– Buddha (563 BC - 483 BC)
Be grateful for what you have right now
Do you have your health? Do you have your freedom? Do you have loved ones? Do you have food? Do you have shelter?
Pray and ask for help.
In desperate times, almost everyone feels a need to ask for help. "Hail Mary" is used as a miracle prayer or play in the last seconds of a game, business or life event. I pray to God and Jesus but you may pray to a greater power, the universe, or just ask someone, even strangers.
I heard the owner of 1-800-Flowers met the owner of CNN (Ted Turner) serendipitously at a time he needed. CNN ran ads for him, and then, with the Iraq war occurring, he had so much free advertising that it turned his business around. I wonder if he prayed.
It, too, shall pass
This is the message of the Bible, that all adversity and tribulations pass. Patience is the message of Job, who had severe tribulations, losing his family, wealth and then his health. He was restored manifold in the end. There is a lesson and opportunity in all life events, big and small.
God bless you with love, joy and peace.
Next week: No Money? No Problem.
Three $10 million deals with no plan and little money. Just clear vision and purpose.
See you next Thursday!
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How You Can Turn Your Junk into Treasure
"What seems worthless to some may be priceless to others."
— Kevin Ham (1970-)
Come and See and Understand
"Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
— Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) Nobel Prize Laureate
It was the end of the year. Dec 2000. I was so excited for the coming new year. As I gathered with friends and family, I couldn't help but tell them about this new discovery about domain names, hoping to inspire them to invest in domain names.
People thought I was speaking nonsense because the Internet was going through its death throes. All the bad news made my claims sound irrational. "Is Kevin going crazy? What happened to medicine?"
I could tell by the look in their eyes that they were all skeptical. I became more reserved around family and friends. This pattern would repeat with future counterintuitive discoveries.
Ah, human nature.
But one of my best friends, Colin Yu, was interested. He invited me to a preseason Vancouver Grizzlies basketball game, my first NBA game, and asked me many questions about my thoughts on these domain names.
He was very interested in investing in domain names. He was one of my best men at my wedding. As he was super practical, so I was surprised.
I'll Take Your Junk and Turn it to Gold
"The art of turning lead into gold is not just alchemy, but also mindset."
— Kevin Ham (1970-)
But he had a twist on my vision of domain names. He wasn't interested in keeping domain names. He was interested in buying and selling, like Mike Mann of Buydomains.
Buy for $10 and sell for $1,000 (10x) or $10,000 (100x).
He asked if I could give him the list of all the domain names I didn't want to register, and he would register the "trash domain names."
I wasn't going to register them anyway, so why not? He was based in Hong Kong, working at HSBC. It would be his side hustle but eventually became his full-time hustle. We would later partner to create an even bigger business than our respective hustles, and Colin would retire in 2009, just eight years after that fateful basketball game.
Accelerating Time to Scale
"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend."
— Theophrastus (371-287 BC), Disciple of Aristotle
At the end of 2000, I sold a few domains to register more domain names. I sold TicToc.com for $7,500, equal to 750 more domains. Then, when I found the Goto Pay-Per-Click (PPC) monetization engine, I realized I didn't need to sell domain names to register more domains.
So, I knew Colin's model would work well and encouraged him to go for it. I helped him build a website and watched him work his magic.
Then I had an idea. We could amalgamate our traffic to get a better revenue share with Goto (our PPC advertising engine).
We only got domain revenue stats monthly by spreadsheet, which was archaic. We needed real-time stats daily, and it would be even better if we knew what each domain name made in PPC revenue and how much each click made. It seemed like an impossible request. We asked anyway, but they refused, saying we needed more traffic volume.
So I asked our Goto if I got the biggest domainer, Yun Ye, onto Goto, could we get a better agreement? They were interested.
It was a long shot, but I emailed Yun, and to my surprise, he answered. Little did I know that he visited Vancouver often. I told him that he could 5x his revenue if he just swapped to Goto. He told me that Goto kicked him off earlier in 2000. That's why he was on Findwhat.
My assumption was wrong; I thought that because he was the biggest domainer, he was also the best. It turned out that Goto had terminated his agreement because they were dealing with internal issues, but Yun didn't trust them anymore. So I asked him, what if I could get him a contract that couldn't be terminated and got daily stats on each domain name and all the keyword data he could ever imagine? He was interested. So I brokered the deal with everything we wanted and that Goto wanted.
Our rev share went from 30% to 48%, along with daily domain stats, with keyword bids that would allow us to optimize the relevancy and monetization of each domain name.
Yun would go on to 5x his revenue to $20 million a year and profit $19 million. He and his wife were unstoppable. One year later, he sold his portfolio to Marchex for $164 million, an 8.6x multiple of his profit. He would retire in 2006. Mr. No name. He was a master of domains. Not many knew him, but a handful of us attempted to be as good as he was.
Yun, in his gratitude to me, said he saved one domain from his portfolio of 100,000 domain names to give to me:
It was MyBible.com
Yun knew I was Christian. I was very grateful and promised him that I would develop it one day.
In 2000, I was given a vision to own four domain names, which seemed impossible at the time: God.com, Religion.com, Heaven.com, and Jesus.com. I had the vision that once I obtained all four domains, I would be graced with a vision for all of them.
God has blessed me with three of them over the past 24 years. It took 4.5 years to obtain God.com, five years for Religion.com, and seven years for Heaven.com. Jesus.com remains elusive. Perhaps my heart is not ready. I have much to work on my inner spirit. However, God has blessed me with a suite of other domains, such as Christians.com, Hell.com, Baptism.com, Goodnews.com, Rapture.com, Armageddon.com, Messiah.com and 2000 other 'religion' domains.
If you could help me connect with the owners of Jesus.com, I would be so grateful.
I realized right away that acquiring these four domain names would require millions of dollars, and so my goal was set. I was figuring out the plan to do this, and I would get glimpses of it.
My Compounding Flywheel
"The compounding effect is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it."
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Everyone should conceive a Flywheel for each part of their life--
your health, wealth, relationships, faith, and happiness.
Here was my simple but powerful Compounding Flywheel for Domains
Get more domain names
Get more traffic per domain
Make more $ per domain
Make more $ per click
Repeat in a flywheel
Help others make more $ on their domains
This was my simple blueprint for the business, tt's based on the principle of leveraging strategic partnerships.
Leverage other people's unused:
Capacity
Capabilities
Resources
Know how
Assets
Life Questions
What Opportunities pass you by because you aren't open to them?
How can you leverage what you have at scale?
How can you accelerate time by leveraging other people's unused capacity, capabilities and resources?
Life Advice Then
From my 29-year-old self:
"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game."
— Babe Ruth (1895-1948) Home run king
How much innovation comes from seeing abundance even in what is perceived as wasteful or useless
Opportunity is everywhere. Be useful. Provide value.
Everything is “figureoutable” if you persist in asking great questions.
How do we scale 10x?
How do you do it in 10x less time?
These force you to think differently.
What seems nice on the outside may be toil on the inside.
What would have been of us if we had never been helped to see the light of a better solution, a better way? Most of the time, we live in this unrealized state because it is hard to imagine 10x or 100x. Just imagine, dream, test, and do.
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Wisely incubate your newborn ideas. Don't let others suffocate your dreams.
"A prophet is not welcome in his hometown" is an apt proverb when it comes to newborn ideas that light up your heart.
Focus more on compounding the flywheel in all aspects of your life.
Like the human body and its organs that work complementary with feedback and synergy, compound all parts of your life, especially the time and quality of time you have in this life.
Never forget your first vision.
Disney reminds us that it all started with a mouse. Never forget why you started in the first place. Finish well. Be strong. Have faith. What was impossible was done. Why can't the impossible be done again and again? Oh, you of little faith?
Next week: The crisis is Danger and Opportunity, Together.
Turning Danger into Opportunity.
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
How do I Make Money?
"Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming."
— Richard Branson (1950-)
Living the Dream, but How Do I Make Money?
"The best way to make money is to put your nose down and get to work. You make money by making better decisions, and you make better decisions by learning and practicing. The more you know, the more you'll earn.."
— Warren Buffet (1930-)
I had just discovered how to be the best at acquiring domain names. I was quietly acquiring virtual real estate with great potential, amidst the Internet's implosion and the failure of dot-com ventures everywhere. The media said it was the 'death of the Internet ', and experts said no one would trust it or buy online anymore.
This was all music to my ears, as I imagined more people listening to the 'experts', giving up on their dreams of online fortunes and the domains connected to them.
It was a blessed opportunity I couldn't believe. It was a great reset. The Internet would crash 90% in the next year.
By Dec 2000, I had 300 domain names but $0 revenue from them. I wondered how these other domainers kept registering so many new domains and kept the flywheel turning with registrations on their existing portfolio needing to be renewed.
I would run out of money if I didn't learn how to make money from these assets.
Who is the Best I Can Learn From?
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
There were a handful of domainers who stood out. One was Yun Ye, who went under the moniker "No Name or UltSearch." His specialty was registering great two-keyword domains. He registered hundreds each day, like clockwork. Next was Frank Schilling. Then Garry Chernoff. Mike Mann of BuyDomains was a reseller, a different model than Yun, Frank, and Garry.
When I went to Yun and Frank's domain web pages, they just had a bunch of links. I didn't understand how they made money. They used Goto.com search, which said they would pay 2-5 cents per search. This small amount wouldn't do much.
I looked up where Frank lived. White Rock, BC, Canada, is just an hour's drive away, so I emailed him to invite him to lunch in Richmond at Milestones. I was anxious, as I was an introvert and didn't know what to expect. I had a bunch of questions. He showed up. If you know Frank, you can immediately sense that he will do great things. He is super street smart, innovative, and a good reader of people.
I told him I was a medical doctor but couldn't turn down this opportunity to be part of this Internet revolution. Domain names seemed like a fantastic opportunity, but I didn't know how to make money.
He looked me in the eyes and asked, "How many unique do you get?"
Me: Uniques? What do you mean?
Frank: How many unique people come to your domains each day?
Me: I'm not sure. Well, I have 300 domains, so I'd say 8,000 daily uniques.
Frank: No way. I have been doing this for over a year and get 10,000 daily uniques.
Me: Well, I haven't actually turned on any of my domain names yet. I will do that and let you know.
I asked him how much money he made on those 10,000 uniques. He was silent. I asked for a hint. I quickly did some math: 10,000 uniques * 2 cents per search = $200/day. More than $200/day?
He was tight-lipped.
We finished our drinks (mine, non-alcoholic). I thanked Frank profusely and told him that I enjoyed meeting him. We became friends, and he became my hesitant mentor. It was just like the hospitals, where a resident learns from their seniors.
“See one. Do one. Teach one” was our method for training doctors. I would take this model into business to see what the best did, then try to emulate them. Then, I would try to ask them questions when I needed help understanding or getting stuck. Once I learned, I would return the favour to others who would ask me and try by doing. It was how the apprentices became masters in due time during the Renaissance.
I went home and started to turn on the domains. I had 300, so I quickly automated it by programming it with a script. But I couldn't find an analytic program to measure uniques across so many domains. I asked Frank how to do that. He told me to log the IPs of each visit. Each unique IP equalled a unique visitor. I figured out how to program that in a few days and then had my stats.
3,000 uniques. I was disappointed. I was expecting more. Now, I had a baseline. My domains were live, and I was just measuring traffic to each one of them.
How Much Money Can I Make?
"If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die."
— Warren Buffett (1930-)
I invited Frank to a Chinese martial arts movie, Iron Monkey. We enjoyed that inspiring Shaolin kung fu, a metaphor for the discipline required to be guardians. We got to know each other. I made it a point not to ask any business questions but to bond with him. He later told me his wife Michelle asked him, "So what did he want?" he replied, "Oh, he just wanted to watch a movie with me."
I looked at Yun's and Frank's domains. Yun's portfolio was much larger, so I assumed he knew what he was doing and had a better monetization engine. He was with a 'pay-per-click search engine' called Findwhat, a platform that allows advertisers to bid on keywords and pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. Frank was with Goto. I signed up to Findwhat. I implemented their pay-per-click feed into each domain name. Voila.
I started making $300 per day. Wow, that would be close to $9k/month.
I achieved all this by getting Frank to be my mentor (and later great friend) and emulating Yun. Later, I learned Garry Chernoff had done this for Frank when he was starting. This is a secret to life: Help one another despite the up-and-comer being your competitor. It will all be a win-win in this abundant world.
Frank told me a hint: I could make a lot more. I pondered this. What did he mean? He then hinted that someone was making 10% on my domains. What? How could that be? I had asked FindWhat for a better revenue share, but they turned me down. I asked Dean, my account manager if someone was making money on my domains. David said, "Yes, David L, who referred you."
Me: I don't know any David L. Is this why I can't get an increase?
Dean: Yes.
I decided to sign up for Goto and spoke to Dan. He set me up quickly, and I swapped over my domains for a day as a test. I had thought it would do poorly and didn't want to sacrifice the revenue, but I wanted to test it.
Dan asked me, "Do you know how much you made that day?" $150? "No. $1500!" What? Really?
I was so shocked. I 5x’d my revenue overnight. I was so overjoyed.
Thank you, Frank. I love you! You've been such an amazing friend, through thick and thin, like a brother.
This changed everything. I was on a path to a million dollars. I was onto something big now. All that blood and sweat brought tears to my heart.
The Path to a Million Dollars a Year
"0 to a million is the hardest one. The next million is easier, and the next even easier.."
— Kevin Ham (1970- )
I asked myself the question when I finished my residency and did my significant career shift.
"How does one make a billion dollars?"
"How does one make a million dollars?"
I read Forbes and looked for a pattern. 470 billionaires.
They all seemed to excel at one thing amazingly well: investing in real estate, stocks, a great scalable business, or they were good at retaining and growing their inherited wealth.
I had a big insight. I could be a millionaire and possibly a billionaire if I excelled at one thing better than almost anyone else. Could I do that with domain names? Possibly.
If I wanted to make a million dollars in 10 years, I would only need to save $100,000 annually. Certainly doable, now that I had made two businesses generate 2x-3x that in a year.
What's my Compounding Flywheel?
$1 million a year broken down was:
$83,000/month
$2,777 per day
$116 per hour (just 10x the minimum wage)
I just had to double my current $1,500 per day. Wow! I'm halfway there. I 5x'd my revenue just by switching from FindWhat to Goto, and now I only have 2x to get to a million. This is totally doable.
Wow, the power of powerful partnerships. It seemed too easy.
It had taken me three months to register 300 domain names. I could see the pathway to double this, but now, equipped with metrics and a monetization engine, it could accelerate.
For the following 300 domains, I would target more traffic and relevancy for higher clicks and revenue per click.
This would be my flywheel and my focus. It became my driving obsession to be better than anyone in the domain world.
I would learn to compress and expand time to manage expectations and think outside the box.
Life Questions
"A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart."
— Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
How do I make money doing what I love?
How do I accelerate with the right mentors?
How do I multiply with a few simple essential moves?
Life Advice Then
From my 29-year-old self:
"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."
— Jim Rohn (1930-2009)
Model and Befriend the Best in Your Field.
Find your mentor and master to apprentice you in ways you can't anticipate
Money is a result of providing value to your partners and others.
Someone needs you as much as you need them. Seek that vital partner.
You find success with just a few simple levers.
Life can change in an instant with one idea, one implementation, one partnership, one customer, and one metric.
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
— Bill Gates (1955-)
Be Grateful for the relationships you make during your journey.
These relationships are the most precious you gain. More than all the money in the world.
Enjoy the journey, the ups and also the big downs.
There is a meaningful lesson in every part of your journey.
Reflect more and write your reflections privately or publicly.
Others are seeking your learnings, and you pay forward the blessings you have been given, whether life deals you good or bad hands.
Next week: How to Turn Someone's Junk into Gold.
And your junk may be someone's gold. The best Win-Win!
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
Mining the Internet Gold Rush
"Your talent is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God."
— Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998)
Open Your Gifts
"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift."
— Steve Prefontaine (1951-1975)
I knew deep in my heart that this opportunity with domain names was my calling. Even though I didn't know how to do it, the timing seemed perfect. With the dot-com boom ushering in crazy money into dot-coms, companies raising millions of dollars for hock-eyed ideas like Webvan, raising ~ $800 million, valued at $4.8 billion with just $395,000 in revenues and $50 million in losses. Was that all it took to build a multi-billion dollar business? It didn't make any sense to me… But domain names did. With the coming implosion of these unsustainable dot-com companies, I could see a reset in the Internet and a massive opportunity with expired domain names.
But I didn't have any proof, and I didn't know how the domain name system worked. I didn't know when lapsed domain name registrations would default or when these expired domain names would become available again, but I knew there must be a system.
I decided to figure it out. I would give myself three months, maybe six months. If I couldn't figure it out by then, I would start a health practice (not a medical practice) that espoused preventative health lifestyles.
I asked my friends, church elders, parents and, of course, my wife for guidance. Everyone strongly advised me to continue my childhood dream of becoming a doctor. The Internet was a fad. After all, it was in a big bust. Everyone was predicting that Amazon would fail big and not last the next year as the big companies fell one by one. Masayoshi Son of SoftBank surpassed Bill Gates as the wealthiest person in the world at $96 billion for just three days, and then his fortune fell to $6 billion in the next year.
Going All In
"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might."
— King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 9:10) (931 BC)
"Honey, I don't know how to do this, but I believe it is a big door of opportunity that will close if I don't do it now. All I ask is for your support. I just need one person to support me."
I knew I couldn't do it without my wife's support. We had a newborn daughter, Jessi, and we were moving back to Vancouver. This was an entirely unproven idea. I would have to put HostGlobal and DNSIndex on the back burner and potentially lose their income to pursue domain names. And that's what I did. I spent all my waking hours trying to figure out how these names dropped.
I knew domain names had to be registered for a year or two, and if the owner didn't renew the name before its expiry date, it would become available again for registration. I also knew that Verisign was the domain name registry that managed this.
I started downloading the dot-com zone files containing all the dot-com domain names registered as of that day and then 'diffed' them to see which domain names were deleted from the zone files the following day. Then, I ran the deleted domain names through 'whois,' a tool that allowed me to look up their registration data, including ownership and expiration date.
June passed. July passed. It was now August. I had looked at tens of millions of domain names but still couldn't figure it out. I joined all the domain name forums to get whatever hints I could. Then, on August 10, 2000, Some premium domain names on my list turned up! I ran the list through Whois to see who had registered them. There were a handful of names and companies. Noname (Yun Ye), Frank Schilling, Garry Chernoff, Scott Day… These were domain pros. It was a moment of great joy. Even though I had not registered a single domain yet, I finally cracked part of the code.
I found out that Verisign had not released any expired domain names from March until that day in August, which is likely why I was coming up empty-handed for all those months.
Through the domain name forums, I learned that the next drop would happen one day after my birthday, September 26, 2000. I also knew they would become available at 6:30 am EST, 3:30 am PST. This time, I would be ready. I was up with two computers, manually trying to register my list of 20 domains. Each one had a three to five-step registration process. I would only register five domain names on my list that day because the process was so slow. Goldmedals.com was the best one. It was likely that my five domains weren't on the domain pros' radars. I was like a domain scavenger eating the scraps left, deemed unworthy of immediate re-registration.
There Must Be a Better Way
"It's such a simple question that would make all things better. "Is there a better way? Can I be better today than I was yesterday? Can this generation be better than the previous?"
— Kevin Ham (1970- )
I had to figure out a better, faster way before the next drop. Could I program this and loop the registration process programmatically?
I researched whether this was possible. The Perl LWP Library could automatically sign in and go through forms. Wow! Incredible. I started studying how to program this and then found a registrar with a one-step registration process, OpenSRS (Tucows).
Next drop… I was able to register about 10% of a much bigger list. Now, I was competing with the domain pros.
How Can I Be Even Better?
What if I partnered with a registrar and offered to pay them more to register all the domains on my list? Go for volume. It was incredible how many domains Yun and Frank were registering each drop. Premium domains like performance.com were going to drop soon.
I spoke to Barry at Signature Domains. We did a phone deal. I sent him over my scripts and domain list and agreed to pay him $100 per premium domain and $10 for the rest of my top 100 domains.
He registered performance.com, potentially a million-dollar domain! I did it! I was so excited.
But when I spoke to him, he told me that he sold performance.com for $10,000. Someone had offered him that much. Guess who? Garry Chernoff. Hi Garry :) Smart move, good for you. Garry's a good friend.
I had never done business before, so I didn't have a contract. I thought one's word was good enough. But as heartbroken as I was, I thought, it's hard to deny a $10,000 offer versus my $100 deal. I harboured no ill will. I figured I had to adapt. I needed to structure a deal with someone who would not sell-out to the highest bidder.
I emailed more domain registrars. IA Registry, a web hosting company, a newly minted registrar, was interested. This time, I would meet them in person. I flew to North Carolina and drove down to South Carolina to meet with the team. David Wascher was the manager. We hit it off. I said I would register thousands of domain names. I also asked that they honour our agreement. I would allow my domain competitors on as they had different 'tastes' in domains, but I would like to approve only five. Yun mostly went after two-word domains but would later get beijing.com from IA. Good for Yun. He was from China, and it was a great 'catch'. That was a million-dollar domain.
I shook hands with David. He was good with his word, and I am grateful to him. We would go on to register domains like BlackFriday.com for $8. When I became successful, I tried to 'pay him back', but he would not take a penny.
Still no legal agreement. Just a handshake, a look in the eye, and honour in one's word--this became my underlying principle in business.
David, my heart goes out to you. I love you, wherever you are. I never fully returned the measure of grace and honour you gave me.
Life Questions
What are your gifts? List them.
When can you go "All in"? Set a date.
Is there an even better way? Think, plan and execute.
What is your #1 goal? Focus on it until you master it.
Life Advice Then
From my 29-year-old self:
"It is not the wealth or power that defines a man, but his character and the impact he leaves on the world."
— Alexander the Great (356 BC - 323 BC)
Trust your heart and connect the dots with your mind
If you are not a wholeheartedly YES, it's likely not for you. When your heart and your mind align, go all in.
When it's either your heart or your mind, let it ferment until they align.
No regrets.
Ask others, but ask yourself if this is what you truly want
Ask yourself, your older self in 50 years and even your younger self if this is what you truly want.
Pray and think and sleep on it. This is my go-to process.
Know when it is time to go all in.
Sometimes, you have to take the plunge to make it work.
Believe there is always a better way … every day
There always is.
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"If you want to take the island, burn the boats."
— Julius Caesar (100 BC - 44 BC)
Timing is everything … most of the time.
It's not too early … not too late—just the right time. It's proclaimed to be the top factor for business success, and I think it applies to life, too.
Is it the right time? If so, go for it. If not, be patient until you feel and know it is.
One yes leads to 10 more things, which then spawns ten more.
Can you pursue two ventures well at the same time? Unlikely. Something will give.
Great decision to go all in. It worked out well.
Easy in hindsight, much more difficult in foresight.
Determine the end destination.
The end is difficult to visualize clearly, but this is your vision--have one.
The clearer you can see and describe it, the easier it will be to get there.
Sometimes, the destination will reveal itself over time, but it takes time each day to practice seeing the vision clearly. Once it is clear, you will know what direction to take.
Honour the ones who helped you.
Life is full of ups and downs. When they are down, help them up. Stay connected. Don't let good and honour go unnoticed.
Next week: How do I make money?
The secret to a million dollars.
See you next Thursday!
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How to Find Opportunities Hidden in Plain Sight
Opportunities and success are not something you go after necessarily but something you attract by becoming an attractive person.
Jim Rohn
As sponsorship requests started to come in for HostGlobal, one person asked if he could put a link, 'Free Domain Registration,' at the top. I thought little of it since it was just a link and asked for $100 a month. Little did I know that these three little words would change my life for the next 25 years.
I had a call with him, and he was so pleased with the link's performance. He told me he was making $1500 with no work at all. I was curious. I clicked the link, and it went to a domain registration page. I estimated that he was making $3-$5 per domain registration in commission. That meant 300-500 domain registrations per month.
And just like that, I knew my next "Yellow Pages" category. Domain names!
I did some research and decided to build a network of websites instead of just one. So, I registered the domain name DNSIndex.com and signed up as an affiliate partner of a domain name registrar called Domain Bank. I created my new site and promoted it via HostGlobal.
The Domain Kings
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
HostGlobal was doing well, and I wanted to replicate that success with DNSIndex. So, I started an Expired Domain List and created a paid newsletter at $49/year. In it, I sent out a list of expired domains and a link for people to register them via DNSIndex.
Soon, a handful of people started registering everything on my Expired Domain List. Rick Schwartz, the Domain King; Slavik Viner, domain extraordinaire; Anthony Peppler, who would teach me a lot about domain names and the list of subscribers grew each week. The more names I added to the list, the more domain registrations I received. I would eventually make up to $10,000 USD a month. It was almost like printing money.
Then, I wondered why these domainers were registering so many domain names. I only owned a few names that I used for my businesses. What were they doing with them?
So, I got on the phone again, this time with Anthony Peppler. I wanted to know why he was registering so many domains. He wanted to know how I found my list of expired domains. I didn't think I was doing anything revolutionary. I would simply go to whois.net and query their database of any domain name that used to be registered but was now available.
He revealed that he knew that domain names expire at a particular time and that there was a process for re-registering them as soon as they became available, but he didn't know how. The great names got picked up immediately by people who knew the secret process. Now, I was curious.
He had met a younger kid, Ross, who knew the process but didn't have the money to pay the registration fees for the hundreds of domains expiring every day. Ross liked three-letter domains. He got around paying the registration fees upfront by sending in email registrations and then he'd try to flip the names before he had to pay for them. The problem was that he had to keep trying to re-register them because he didn't have enough money. Anthony offered to partner with him and pay the registration fees, $70 for two years for each of them.
I asked him to sell me one of their premium three-letter domains. ZEJ.com was my first three-letter domain. Thanks, Anthony!
Front Page News
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
At that time, I was so excited about becoming the newly minted domain owner of what I thought was a premium domain, a coveted three-letter dot com.
Why was I so excited?
The pieces were starting to come together.
I had a flashback to 1997 when I first thought about launching my Yellow Pages online idea, I was trying to name it.Yellow.com? Taken. Yellowpages.com? Taken. Every name I came up with seemed to be taken.
I suddenly thought of the Rorschach inkblots as a metaphor for my idea, creative, seeing double entendres. Inkblot.com it was. Again, to my dismay, it, too, was taken! I kept thinking... Was there a creative take I could play on it? Incblot.com–a play on inc as in incorporations. Surely, that would be a unique version. Taken!
I was so disappointed. I felt hopeless, so I decided to register inc-blot.com, my very first domain name. Oh, how hard it was back in 1997 to find a good domain name.
Fast-forward to late 1999, and hundreds of domainers were paying me for access to my Expired Domain List. They were registering domain names from my list that didn't even have the most premium names on it–like the coveted three-letter domains. It felt like a modern-day gold rush.
Business.com had just sold for $7.5 million earlier in 1999. Marc Ostrovsky, the owner, had bought it for $150,000 in 1996–a 50x return in 3 years (in 2007, it would sell again for $350 million).
Armed with this new insight, I decided to get on the front page of our local newspaper, the London Free Press, and get press for my new website, DNSIndex.com. I called the newspaper and declared, "I'd like to be on the front page."
She politely asked me what my story was. I relayed that I was the Chief Medical Resident at St Joseph's Hospital, who also offered a very valuable service for the city of London that would help get them on the ground floor of the Internet movement. She said, "You want to speak to Business", and patched me through.
"I'd like to be on the front page of the business section", I repeated. He listened to my story and invited me to lunch the next day. The day after that, I was on the front page of the business section. The story's title was "What's in a Name?".
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
It was a few years into the dot-com boom, but the Internet and domain names were still relatively unknown to laypeople. My pitch was that domain names were digital real estate assets with no maintenance, very little 'property tax', and enormous potential. Anyone could buy or own virtual real estate assets, just like business.com. They could learn how at DNSIndex.com. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. Just one valuable domain name would be enough to make someone financially free.
But even with this understanding, I still wondered how would someone acquire a premium domain like Business.com? I didn't have 7.5 million dollars. I needed to figure out that secret process.
On January 10, 2000, the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced for $182 Billion. AOL/American Online, an Internet company, had just acquired Time Warner, one of the big prestigious media companies (HBO, CNN, Time, Warner Bros). The AOL-Time Warner merger was announced just after we “survived” Y2K. It was what would later be seen as the height of the Internet bubble. March 2000 signalled the beginning of the dot-com crash.
I sensed these expiring domains were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—possibly. Deep down I knew it, but there was no 'how-to' manual or data to prove my intuition. The bubble was bursting. HostGlobal and DNSIndex were bringing in $25,000-$30,000 USD per month (but for how much longer?) and I was just about to finish medical school and finally become a doctor.
What would you do?
Life Question
If I were to find a hidden opportunity that spoke to my heart but it didn't make sense and I didn't know how to do it—with so much uncertainty—what would I do?
Life Advice Then
From my 29-year-old self:
"We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be curious and ask questions, especially for life secrets and business insights.
This has served me well. Secrets or insights almost always give someone an advantage in doing something well. It might be information, a process, an idea, a connection, or a hack.
Meaningful opportunities Lie Hidden in Plain Sight.
Imagine all the missed opportunities because I walk by them, don't hear them, don't see them, don't ask for them, don't seek them or don't knock on the door of opportunity continually.
Ask your intuition what feels right. Your heart is directing you to something.
Your heart knows. Your mind assesses logic based on survival and reason. It becomes a no-brainer decision if you can validate your intuition with data. Many people need logic, reason, or data to validate. I typically go first with intuition but try as much as I can to validate with logic to derisk the unintended consequences.
You attract the energy you are in.
This is the Law of Attraction. Attraction happens by the frequency or vibration level you are in. High energy attracts high energy, and low energy attracts low energy. It's a fundamental law. To be on the same wavelength.
First, attune yourself to the Law of Vibration. What is the highest frequency at which you can spend your time?
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty."
— John D. Rockefeller
Find the right experts or coaches.
Someone is likely in the know. I spent months trying to figure out how expired domain names dropped. Everyone was tight-lipped. If the experts and master coaches are too hard, there are someone steps ahead of you, maybe a year, maybe two, or someone much older who wants to give back and help the rookie.
Follow the Links. Connect the Dots.
In this age of almost unlimited access to information, it's much easier to do this. Just type in your questions into AI, search engines, YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, or, more traditionally, the book written by the expert (usually outdated by a year or more).
Be bold.
Like the CEO of Nvidia, now the third largest company in the world with a $2.5 trillion market cap, he would have never started the company if he had known how hard it would be.
If you knew how difficult domain names would be, you likely would not have even started. This prevents the older self from starting, as you likely now know how hard it is to start things and succeed. A startup is typically a ten-year journey, maybe five now.
Work as Play
Enjoy every minute of it, even the hard things, for they make you stronger. View it as a sport. Those hardmoments build character. Be steadfast and strong, and most of all, enjoy being grateful, especially if you get to do something you love or find meaningful, which should be your highest priority.
Don't forget your loved ones.
Your success depends on it. Don't get lost in your work. Time passes on. Rather too quickly. You cannot get back this time. Children grow up quickly. You grow up quickly.
Next week: Mining the Internet Goldrush.
Opening my gifts: Domains from Heaven.
See you next Thursday!
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My Side Hustle: How I made $25,000 per month in less than 6 months
It is in changing that things find purpose.
Heraclitus 535-475 BC
My goal was to make $10,000 USD, which would be $15,800 CAD a month. I would do it by starting a Yellow Pages-style online directory. I could only devote an hour or two a day at most and four hours on the weekends. I quickly determined that since I could not invest very much time and hardly any money, I had to scope my Yellow Pages idea down to one category. Back then we had big, physical Yellow Pages (businesses by categories) and White Pages (people) address and phone books. They may be antiques by now.
So what category would I select? What would the Internet be unique for that I would also enjoy learning about myself? I knew I would need to build a website and find a web host. I was struggling to find a low-cost and easy-to-use web hosting company to host my directory. I believed that eventually, every business would need a website and a web host, like me. In my own search, I was missing reviews and ratings on web hosting companies. Eureka! This is what I would create.
What will I name my directory?
Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.
Japanese Proverb
What you name, you breathe life into. You conceive your new venture, idea or product with a name. This name has some meaning, or better yet, a story.
I believed the Internet would be global. So I found an available domain, HostGlobal.com. I would later need a formal company but I would incorporate it after I made some money. Naming would later become one of my great gifts.
My Entrepreneurial Blueprint
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
Zig Ziglar
Start date: Jan 1, 1999.
Name: HostGlobal.com (registered on Jan 10, 1999).
Financial target: $10,000 USD/month by Jun 30, 1999.
Idea: Create a Yahoo-like directory but for web-hosting companies
Plan:
Find software that allowed me to build a directory (1 week).
Add 20 Webhosting companies per day to my directory (daily).
Build and add a review and rating module to the software (4 weeks).
Offer the review module to users of the software in return for adding their web hosting company with a review and rating. This would:
Differentiate my web hosting review site from the handful of other ones (my secret edge).
Attract entrepreneurs and companies looking to find a web host for their Internet business.
Sell sponsorship packages to the web hosting companies (1-2 months). 300 companies at $30/mo = $9,000 USD/mo.
Incorporate in Nevada to have a U.S presence (2 months).
Adapt to users, web hosts and competition.
Ask, Tweak and Receive. 10x. 100x. 1000x
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
— Robert Burns
I learned the programming language PERL as that was what the directory software was written in. I had never taken a computer course before so I printed out some lessons on PERL from the Internet and studied them in my allotted side job time. I created the review module within a month and kept improving it daily until it worked well.
I then offered the hundreds of web hosting companies on hostglobal.com an unbelievably low-cost sponsorship opportunity of $30/month. I waited for the orders to come in. I waited … and waited for days. I wondered what was wrong.
A couple of other good web hosting directories were charging $1500 to $3000 per month. I thought that underpricing them would be a no-brainer. Was it too cheap? Maybe the perceived value was too low.
So, I thought I would try $300/month for category sponsorship. In a month I had two sponsors. 10X! I had made my first real dollars. What a thrill. That first order!
Then I had a brilliant idea. I thought I would try $3000 for sitewide sponsorship. 100X! I got one. A big fish.
Then I thought I would offer one $30,000 title sponsorship spot. 1000X!
So, when Communitech, a Kansas City web hosting company, was interested, I asked them for $30,000 and they said No. Then I thought “OK, but what if I could get $20,000?” Wow! $20,000/month!? I countered with $20,000 plus a dedicated web server so I could then move into dedicated server listings. They agreed and just like that I surpassed my goal in under 6 months!
Life Advice Now
To my 29-year-old self:
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
— Abraham MAslow
I believe in you.
You believed in yourself even when you didn’t have the ability or experience to do it. You impress me. You had a big drive to figure this out and you executed. Despite all the self-doubt. That drive and determination is almost unstoppable.
Continue to learn
Evaluate whether that skill is something you want to continue for the rest of your life or only do for a season or a reason.
I wish that I continued to program and learn new languages to this day.
Talk to your competitors and make them frenemies.
You only looked at your competitors’ websites. You should have had meetings with them to see if there were any things you could collaborate on as there were only a few other big competitors.
Some of my dear friends now were my fiercest competitors. Scott Day, the watermelon farmer and Frank Schilling, the wonder boy. Yun Ye, who sold his business to Marchex for $164 million.
Talk much more to your customers.
You were only scratching the surface. You could have uncovered the deep needs of web hosting companies and their customers. Think how that space has evolved to Shopify, Squarespace and Wordpress.
Continue to keep plans simple
I have plans that are too complex, too dependent on too many people and outside factors. Focus on what you can do and control and then partner with people who can fulfill other parts of your plan.
Next week:
How to Find Hidden Opportunities in Plain Sight.
Giving birth to a whole new world of opportunities.
See you next Thursday!
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Starting Something New: The Entrepreneurial Blueprint
It’s not too late to decide to change the trajectory of your life. You can course-correct your life as you go.
— Ham
I wrestled with what to do. Become a doctor? Start something new? I felt trapped, the momentum of my life decisions since age 14 driving me to a path that wasn't what I had envisioned.
I knew in my heart, that I wanted to transition and become an Internet entrepreneur.
Question 1: Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?
Getting started is the hardest thing because it requires force. From status quo to step 1 change. It’s “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It’s the force described by Newton: An object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by a net external force. That force is your entrepreneurial spirit to make a decision, that influences your mind, which then influences your body to act. It’s embodied in Nike’s motto, “Just do it.” Carpe diem, to seize the day.
Should I drop out of medical residency? I already had my medical degree. I should finish what I started as I only had a year left. Logical.
I was excited but also very nervous about starting something totally new. But was it new or just buried deep in my heart? What were these fears that suddenly appeared with the thought of starting something new?
A fear of failure. A fear of letting people down. A fear of criticism. A fear of change. A fear of the unknown. A fear of uncertainty. A fear of loss of identity. A fear of loneliness. They seem to engulf the excitement and passion of starting something new. Each fear posed as mountains in my new path.
Making a Decision
In 1993, I heard my Sunday school teacher, Bill Pottenger, an assistant professor at the University of Champaign, proclaim that a student there, Marc Andreesen, had just invented this thing called Mosaic, the first Internet browser. He explained how this was a big shift, a revolution in the making, that would merge all current and future forms of media onto the Internet.
I decided then that I wanted to be part of this upcoming Internet Revolution. I knew instantly that it was going to be bigger than the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution of the steam engine and factories, the Transportation Revolution of trains, automobiles and planes, and greater than the Media Revolution of radio, TV and cinema… combined.
I had an idea in 1997 to start a Yellow Pages online, but medical school, church and marriage kept me too busy. I knew I needed to really scope down this idea of the Yellow Pages online to start with just one category, much like how Jeff started Amazon with just books.
I could realistically devote:
Time: an hour a day and a few hours on the weekend
Money: $100 a month
Know How: very little
Resources: none internally
Faith: very little but lots of hope and passion
It was my final shift of the year, December 1998, at Pediatrics Emergency, I decided that I was going to start my Internet business in January 1999.
Once I made that decision, I knew it would be a ride of a lifetime.
And it has been a rollercoaster with lots of ups and downs. Just like life… With no coasting off into the sunset. We all know that this ride will eventually end. So make this ride full of what you enjoy and love and find meaning in.
Question 2: What do I need to do to make my side hustle into my life hustle?
Begin with the end in mind.
First things first.
These are two of the principles of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
My first domino to knock down was to make as much income as my current job as a medical resident, only $45,000 per year. My second, bigger domino: make my upcoming income as a family doctor, $150,000 per year. I had 1.5 years until I finished my medical residency, but I set a goal to accomplish this within 6 months and build an automated business where I didn’t have to be “in the business”.
My large end domino was financial freedom. I pegged this at $1 million per year. This would eventually grow to $1 million per month and then $10 million per month and I would ask myself 'When will it be enough?' Later I would determine this to be billions, as my dreams would require this much.
I’ve been successful whenever I saw the end in mind and started with first things first. When the end was foggy, it took much longer and often ended in failure.
Hitchcock first visualized all of his movies, then wrote them and then made them. When Jordan Peele was asked how he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for ‘Get Out’ as a first-time Director, he said, “Every time I went to bed, I pictured the movie I wanted to watch and then I made it.” I have a movie (or three) I’ve visualized that I will make in 2030s. (I think in decades.) A movie is only two hours of visualizations. And you can edit it every night with no cost but to dream.
Every building is first seen in the mind, blueprinted by an architect and then built. This is what we call ‘Vision’.
Question 3: How can I blueprint my startup? My life?
The how-to path may not be clear, but the start and end points should and can be seen.
Think through to the end. Then think backward to the start… Today.
Write the blueprint for your new startup, your new career, your new feature, a new you.
Then materialize it by experiments and course correct.
This is the way of the Entrepreneurial Spirit. The key word here being spirit, an invisible force of nature like the wind, able to move trees and if big enough, move the world. This is the spirit of creation, which resides in each of us. The great entrepreneurs are the ones who have freed this spirit from the confines of their minds and bodies.
This entrepreneurial blueprint should be executable by you. An executable blueprint. Write out your blueprint, digitize it, and print it out. Then start executing it into being.
Your Entrepreneurial Blueprint
Step 1: Make a Decision to start something new
Name it! Like a new baby, a new company, a new product.
Once you give it a name, it’s conceived. Congratulations!
Step 2: Envision your end goal (domino)
Start a side business with the first goal to make as much as your current job.
Have a target financial goal and timeline to accomplish it.
Step 3: Envision your first goal (domino)
Decide a start date.
How much time to devote daily.
Like a regular job, but this is your side job.
This can be 30 minutes, 1 hour or 4 hours a day.
Step 4: Scope down your idea
So that you can accomplish it.
Step 5: Envision an EXECUTABLE Entrepreneurial Blueprint
Keep it simple. Make it visible and read it daily.
Write down your blueprint plan, your logic, and the way you will make money to get to your target revenue over each month to your target date.
Print this out and put it by your bathroom mirror or bed to remind yourself at the start and end of each day.
Step 6: Get buy-in
From your significant other(s).
Getting them onboard allows you ‘to do’ and the best way is to ask for their support.
From the customer(s) early on
Life Advice Now
To my 29-year-old self:
Write your thoughts and questions in a notebook
Write it with a pen. The traditional way of writing unlocks even deeper thoughts.
You can transcribe later to digital. Steve Jobs wanted to use the finger to write on tablets. Maybe he read about how the finger of God wrote the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone.
Believe in yourself more
There is a lot of uncertainty when embarking on a new journey--excitement but a lot of questioning oneself about ability, skill, support, success, and failure.
Remember that anything you learned or became good at started from inability, ignorance and inadequacies. You had to practice and repeat. Whether it was learning a language, or learning to ride a bike. The same goes for anything new.
Get a coach
Find someone who has done something like this before and watch their videos, read their writings on how they approached it and the steps they took. Don’t look at their success but listen to their story when they started.
Buy their book if they have one and read their ‘origin story.’
Write out your Entrepreneurial Blueprint on one page
Write your GOAL. Your start date. Your target date.
Write your three biggest assumptions.
Your plan in steps (I call them dominoes).
And rewrite your plan as you experiment and learn new information.
Key: Find the Secret Insights for your Blueprint
This is the secret edge you will have.
The more you have the better.
Try to find 3 secret insights.
Think and perform rapid experiments
Conducted daily or weekly.
Think of each experiment as a domino to be set up quickly and then knocked down.
Conduct the experiments by thought in multiple iterations. Then design them to be implemented in the simplest way possible.
It’s ok to fail. Failure is learning and having the mindset to continually get back up, adjust and experiment again.
Edison conducted 10,000 experiments that failed to figure out the light bulb. 10,000!
Try to go for 10 experiments as simply and quickly as you can with no dependencies and resources.
Expand experiments to 100 and learn and improve each one. By the 101st experiment, you will know what you are doing.
Next week: My Side Hustle Becomes My Main Hustle
How I grew to $25,000/month within 6 months.
See you next Thursday!
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