Zuck Is Underestimated

How I got here…

21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Closed down 6th gym. Lost everything.
26 yrs old: Got back to launching gyms (launched 33). Then, lost everything for a 2nd time.
26 yrs old: In desperation, started licensing model as a hail mary. It worked.
27 yrs old: "Gym Launch" does $3M profit the next 6 months. Then $17M profit next 12 months.
28 yrs old: Started Prestige Labs. $20M the first year.
29 yrs old: Launched ALAN, a software company for agencies to work leads for customers. Scaled to $1.7mmo within 6 months.
31 yrs old: Sold 75% of UseAlan to a strategic buyer in an all stock deal.
31 yrs old: Sold 66% of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs at $46.2M valuation in all-cash deal to American Pacific Group. (you can google it)
32 yrs old: Started making free content showing how we grow companies to make real business education accessible to everyone (and) to attract business owners to invest or scale their businesses.

Today: Our portfolio now does $200M/yr between 10 companies. The largest doing $100M/yr the smallest doing $5M per year. Our ownership varies between 20% and 100% ownership of the companies. Many of them we invested in early and helped grow (which is how we make our money - not youtube videos).

To all the gladiators in the arena, we’re all in the middle of writing our own stories. The worse the monsters, the more epic the story.

You either get an epic outcome or an epic story. Both mean you win.

Keep crushing. May your desires be greater than your obstacles.

Never quit,

Alex

*FULL DISCLOSURE*
I make content to make money - just - on a longer time horizon than most. I want to build trust with business owners so we can find the best ones and help them scale. And if they’re awesome, write them a check and go all the way as partners.

[check]

True, and even if Zuck had never innovated anything in his life, his point would still stand.

[oyinwilliams]

Either way, he’s not wrong about Apple. They haven’t innovated in a long while.

[katrinabeethechange]

I appreciate your deeper look into situations to shine light.
many times as I understand take what already exists and make it your own.

[ikercodes]

Totally agree. He’s been a master on envisioning the projection and capabilities of new tech or products and bought before anyone else. Even Facebook he saw the potential before anyone else and went all in

[mweiss]

Alex is giving context, not just content.

Also, large market cap companies are in the VC biz at the highest level.

A billion dollar purchase that gives +600x ROE..

[gregroyclark]

To Facebook's credit, they did invent several tools that have driven software development forward in major ways.

[arnoldmorewizeemorentwa]

On a positive thought, he wants to see them innovate... Simple 🙏

[kylevasulka]

Plus he has been one of the biggest players in the R&D of the next generation of smart glasses. So he has build in him too

[vornamenachname]

He said apple hadnot innovated "in a while" and this is just true.

[acelvl]

Like always so accurate thanks for the valuable content alex

[chicagonorthsider]

Facebook created REACT! It's now running the web!

[preciousnwaoha]

Every real techie know that Meta has giving more open valuable code to the world that any other big tech

[Leon]

The fact he didn't think of Llama 3 is crazy probly the most innovative thing meta has.

[welon]

There are two types of losers.

Those who lost by playing.
And those who didn't even play.

[TCT]

Idk man.. they are also constantly innovating with their dev platforms/frameworks.. and also burning billions in VR/AR which imo is a pretty dope tech

[abdulmartinez]

There are 10, I recommend the book Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

[edmanning]

But it’s still true… that is their model and always has been.

For the past decade it’s been copy rather than buy.

Zuck created the ‘best’ social network at one point, and won the battle due to audience dominance.

As someone who works in ‘innovation’, when I buy an innovative company, I don’t think of myself as innovative…

[abhideepdas]

What about the m series chips in macbook ? Its literally underrated.... Before those chips, video editing was a pain since it consumes a lot of ram and cpu, however, an ipad or macbook air does it at cosmic speeds that intels can dream of with even 16-32 gigs of ram....

[JazDeVer]

Not to mention they are primo at diversifying cheap labor in strategic locations...

[juancisneros]

facebook/meta has been innovating a lot on open sourse ai models for the last few years though