Show notes
I tore up my Wharton MBA on camera a couple of months ago, so I was curious what Joshua Lindsey would say about his. He was making 50 thousand dollars a week at 25, had already helped put close to 30,000 ATMs across the Western United States, and then went back and paid his own way through an Ivy League executive program at 28. He hung the paper on the wall and told me he still isn't sure it did anything for him beyond letting him tell his friends he'd done something too. We get into how he went zero to 12 million in his first year on his own, what it cost him when his partners went rogue, and why he thinks a first-time entrepreneur is better off buying a business than starting one. If you're weighing a degree against a few years of actually doing the work, start here.
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Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction: what a kick in the teeth teaches you
01:42 - Furniture stores and a feast-or-famine childhood
02:12 - Selling Scout-O-Rama tickets door to door
03:34 - The fitness sales mentor who taught him to ask questions
04:30 - Why he still loves sitting through a timeshare pitch
07:22 - The promise he made himself at 26 about predatory selling
09:43 - Value systems, ethical shortcuts and top-line pressure
12:16 - The reverse merger he says he only half earned
13:12 - 30,000 ATMs across the Western United States
14:06 - Tearing up a Wharton MBA on camera
14:48 - The Cornell executive program and the paper on the wall
17:41 - Begging his daughter not to go to college
18:16 - Fifty thousand to travel or two hundred thousand in Bitcoin
20:17 - Informational interviewing and the dietitian test
22:55 - The 17-year-old AI CEO and the cop who asked for a job
25:48 - Whether the alumni network is still worth anything
28:11 - Why 75 percent of his developer hires are self-taught
30:45 - Zero to 12 million in the first year
34:10 - Fifty thousand a week at 25 and the partners who went rogue
39:20 - Telling a real friendship from a positioning one
42:20 - The two founders who insisted on giving him equity
48:33 - Buying a business versus starting one from scratch
52:44 - True equity for every employee, four-year vesting, one-year cliff
55:17 - The businesses under 20 million with no budget at all
57:44 - The advice three billionaires gave instead of a business plan
1:02:20 - The blind spot successful men share
1:05:10 - Ten years without an unkind word
1:07:32 - Why he enjoys conflict in conversation
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