Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates | My First Million #218

About this video

Sam and Shaan explore emerging trends in real estate Twitter, where anonymous founders are building massive audiences by sharing insights about ‘boring’ real estate businesses like strip malls, multifamily units, and storage facilities—attracting significant investor capital. Shaan also discusses his ‘crypto week’ immersion experiment, sharing what he’s learned about NFTs, DeFi tools, and the infrastructure plays emerging in Web3, drawing parallels to how he initially misunderstood Bitcoin before recognizing cryptocurrency’s value through social agreement.

Key takeaways

• Shaan identifies an emerging trend of real estate entrepreneurs (strip mall guy, Moses Kagan, Keith Wasserman, Nick Huber) building massive Twitter followings by transparently sharing deal-making processes in typically opaque industries, with some raising $40M+ from their audiences
• The opportunity to build an audience in ‘boring’ industries is larger than in saturated niches like tech—the less common it is for people in an industry to be publicly sharing, the greater the opportunity to dominate that space
• Shaan’s crypto immersion week revealed rapid infrastructure development in Web3 (similar to Twilio and Stripe in the internet era), with picks-and-shovels tools like Rarity Tools experiencing hockey-stick growth as the NFT market expands
• Shaan’s evolving perspective on NFTs: initially dismissing them like he did Bitcoin, he now sees art’s value as based on social agreement rather than intrinsic properties—the same mechanism that made the Mona Lisa or Picasso paintings valuable
• Learning by immersion (a concept from Bill Gates’ ’think weeks’) combined with learning by doing—having a knowledgeable guide hold your hand through crypto tools and transactions—proved far more effective than courses or videos

Episode details: published September 15, 2021 · 11K views · 1:22:05 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. The business ideas, figures and results discussed are the hosts’ and guests’ own claims, shared as brainstorming and entertainment — not verified facts and not investment advice.

← Previous: Why Direct-to-Consumer Companies Are Awesome to Own | My First Million #217 · Next: How to Make Billions with a DTC Niche Clothing Line | My First Million #219 →

All My First Million videos · My First Million profile · My First Million (official site)