In this podcast, serial entrepreneur, Suli Ali opens up on a conversation with Jess Mah and I.
Here are some topics that we talked about:
- Money and Success Mindset – Suli discusses his relationship with wealth as an immigrant’s child, calling it “toxic” at times. He explains his evolution from hoarding wealth to using it to enhance life experiences, influenced by reading “Die With Zero” and joining Tiger 21 (a group for wealthy individuals). He shares how his perspective changed from focusing solely on “creating shareholder value” to finding meaning and helping others become successful.
- Status and Identity – We explore how status symbols change with context (angel investing in Silicon Valley versus luxury goods elsewhere). Suli reflects on his embarrassment about working at his family’s gas station as a teenager, yet acknowledges how that experience built his work ethic and business skills. He discusses how success creates optionality, particularly in dating and relationships.
- Family and Legacy – Suli shares insights about his immigrant family’s journey, working with his brother, and concerns about wealth’s impact on future generations. There’s significant discussion about the challenges wealthy people face with their children, with Suli noting that Tiger 21 members worry about their privileged children “starting on third base” but potentially moving backward. The podcast also covers Suli’s changing life priorities as he enters his 40s, shifting from career focus to desiring family and meaningful impact.
- And many more!
Table of Contents
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Full Transcript
Suli Ali: I probably feel like a failure 75% of the time and success only 25% of the time. As you have business success, you become more desirable, and that gives you a lot more optionality, gives you more time to be able to wait before committing, and gives you more of a shelf life to be able to date younger people even as you get older. I worked at a gas station in high school, and it was just something that I was so embarrassed about. Like, I didn’t want anyone that I went to school with to know that, oh yeah, every Saturday, I spent 12 hours working at a gas station. They had a hot dog eating contest where you didn’t eat the hot dogs with your mouth.
Jess Mah: Awesome. Welcome to the pod.
Suli Ali: Thanks for having me. So excited.
Jess Mah: Yeah, tell everybody really quickly what makes you awesome from a business perspective. Just a quick bio in 30 seconds.
Suli Ali: I studied computer science in undergrad, worked at Microsoft for three and a half years, and have been an entrepreneur for the last 16 years. Started a company called TinyCo that made mobile games, raised a bunch of venture capital, sold it in 2016, and then somewhere along the way started investing. So, invested in 100 startups, 30 or 40 venture funds, about $60 or $70 million of real estate, and a bunch of private equity funds.
Noah Berkson: Or north of that; those numbers are adding up.
Jess Mah: North of 100. North of a billion, or you can’t say?
Suli Ali: Not north of a billion.
Noah Berkson: You went to Burning Man. Was this your first time?
Suli Ali: Yep.
Noah Berkson: What was your experience?
Suli Ali: I thought it was amazing. I saw more boobs and penises than I needed to see. I saw so many that I never need to see boobs or penises ever again in my lifetime, and maybe five lifetimes’ worth, which was actually kind of amazing. The thing I love about Burning Man is that, as a society, we don’t restructure society at all. Like, San Francisco, Louisiana, New York—they’re very different. San Francisco, you care about ambition and building things. New York, you care about money and finance. Louisiana, you care about having a great quality of life, sunshine, the outdoors, and maybe Hollywood, but they’re like 95% the same. When you go to Burning Man, it’s like someone has said, we’re questioning all of society and doing something completely different. And that’s the best part about it. I’m so surprised that we don’t do that more. Donald Trump actually said this thing that I thought was cool, which is, “I want to take 0.1% of federal land, which is nothing, and build 10 new cities that are like models of the future.” I think that’s a dope idea. We just don’t do stuff like that, weirdly, as a society. So, when you go to Burning Man, there’s no money. People are trying to give more than they take. You’re not wearing the same clothes that we’re wearing here today. You’re either half-naked or wearing stuff that you’d wear in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max place. You’re making art. Art is what’s of value, not status. Status doesn’t come from money or looks or these other things. It comes from art and being weird. That’s an awesome society. So yeah, I don’t know why we don’t do more societal experiments.
Noah Berkson: Is that kind of like what’s going on outside of San Francisco, like that proposed new property?
Suli Ali: I doubt it. I think they’re probably just like, “We’re going to build a great business opportunity, buy land outside of San Francisco, and build a cool master-planned community.” Maybe they do stuff like Waymos are everywhere, there are no cars outside of Waymos, and people use bicycles. But I think it’s more of a financial endeavor than a societal one. They’re not going to rebuild the way schools work. They’re not going to rebuild the values of suburbs or the way that people rank status or money. Any of that stuff’s all going to be the same.
Noah Berkson: So, maybe to just—
Suli Ali: By the way, one of the crazy things about Burning Man that I did not expect is when you enter, there are all these toll booths, and you pull up to a toll booth, and there are three people who are so excited to see you. They’re jumping up and down with excitement that you’ve come to Burning Man, and they make you get out of your RV and talk to them, and then you hug them for like five minutes each or something like that, and they’re completely butt-ass naked the whole time. Then they make you do snow angels in the sand. So, you immediately feel like, oh, whatever societal values I was used to five minutes ago, they’re gone. I’m in a different world right now. That’s great. Super dope.
Jess Mah: I love it.
Noah Berkson: Jess has hosted a Burning Man camp for how long now?
Jess Mah: Yeah, this is my eighth Burn.
Suli Ali: Nice. What’s your favorite part about it?
Jess Mah: I love the community aspect and having a camp.
Suli Ali: Yep.
Jess Mah: I met so many great people there. I’ve dated a bunch of guys I met at the Burn. Got a lot of business value out of the Burn. I’ve hired people, raised money. And, of course, the art, the naked people, lots of psychedelics, and great stuff.
Suli Ali: There’s stuff that you just see there that you would never see, and you cannot unsee. A good example is they have a hot dog eating contest where you don’t eat the hot dogs with your mouth, and I don’t know where they go, but the hot dogs just disappear. It’s nuts.
Jess Mah: So, you shoved them up your ass?
Suli Ali: Put them everywhere else.
Noah Berkson: You can imagine every orifice.
Suli Ali: Yes. It’s pretty nuts.
Noah Berkson: Did you participate?
Suli Ali: I walked in, and there was a woman lying on a table, butt-ass naked. Everyone was screaming her name. There were a hundred people just shouting her name: “Maddie! Maddie! Maddie!” Then the hot dogs came out, and I saw what they did with them, and I was like, I can’t be here. I left immediately because this was beyond my threshold of things I can see.
Noah Berkson: Did this change the relationship between you and your girlfriend, experiencing this together?
Suli Ali: I think we’re really good about, like, let’s try new things as much as humanly possible. So, I don’t think it changed our relationship, but it was a great time. One of the things—there are a lot of friends I have that are guys who have a really hard time committing to being in a relationship. Actually, my brother is one of them. A friend of mine once said to me, “I keep going on vacations with boyfriends that I’m dating, and I end up with kind of a new boyfriend every year or two. So, I can never talk to my current boyfriend about the last trip I went on because I went with a different boyfriend. He knows that, and he doesn’t want to hear about that stuff.” She was like, “I love having a partner where we have the same memories. So, I can talk about, oh yeah, five years ago when we went on that trip, this thing happened. What we’re doing right now reminds me of that.” I love having that with my girlfriend, where I know that eight years from now, when we’ve done our eighth Burn, we’re going to be able to talk about the first Burn and what it was like.
Jess Mah: Your brother is also very successful. Do you think commitment challenges for men correlate with business success?
Suli Ali: I think there’s a correlation, for sure. That’s because as you have business success, you become more desirable, and that gives you a lot more optionality, gives you more time to be able to wait before committing, and gives you more of a shelf life to be able to date younger people even as you get older. But I think for a lot of people, they undervalue commitment and overvalue optionality.
Jess Mah: Because if you have a commitment challenge, then by definition, you haven’t committed. So, you don’t know the value of that and all the benefits that you’re explaining. You’re like, alright, well, optionality is all I know. So, there’s some fear of the unknown as well, perhaps.
Suli Ali: Yeah. It’s such a different thing that happens when you meet somebody and date them for the first time. There’s this awesome period where you’re getting to know them, and all of the jokes that they’re telling you, all their stories, you’ve never heard them before, so it’s awesome. Then after that, you go out on double dates with people, and they start the story with one word, and you know what the next three minutes is going to sound like because you’ve already heard that story. There’s something in the human condition, or in modern society, that makes you think, oh, I don’t want to hear that same story again. It’s like going to a comedian and hearing the same jokes over and over. You’re like, this is stale. I think that’s one example where people are like, this is telling me I’ve been in this relationship too long. I need new experiences with a new person.
Jess Mah: How about money? Does the fear of having to do a prenup and split finances with a committed partner—this is from your brother’s, your successful brother’s perspective—is he worried about that? Is he also worried about women liking him just for his money? Was this a problem you had? What would be your advice for all the successful men and women out there listening to this?
Suli Ali: Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s a lot to it.
Jess Mah: Because women don’t understand this phenomenon. I talk to my successful guy friends all the time about it, and they’re always worried about the gold diggers. I just want to demystify that for everybody.
Suli Ali: My brother said this to one of our friends when he sold his business: “There’s an island that’s only for rich people, and I think I got my ticket. How do I get on there? Where is it? Tell me, let’s go.” You know, there is no such island, as far as I know. I don’t think Necker Island is it. For a little while, I think he was stuck on Gold Digger Island. He found his way to Gold Digger Island and was just stuck there. Hot women who wouldn’t have chased him in high school or college were now chasing him. So, I think he was like, I gotta experience this. I gotta see what this is like. He did a bunch of that. The weird thing he does—I can’t believe I’m saying this—is he’ll kind of fall in love with whoever he’s dating and be like, this person is amazing. For example, he was dating this girl, and he was like, this is the most beautiful woman in the world. I was like, this girl is objectively not even close to that. I don’t know what kind of rose-colored glasses you have on right now, but no, absolutely not. He does get really into it and wants to go deep with people. So, he was on Gold Digger Island, had a lot of fun, and now he’s trying to find his way off of Gold Digger Island. I think he’s going to be fine and do it.
Jess Mah: How about for you? Did you worry about this gold digger phenomenon?
Suli Ali: I thought it was so obvious when people were into that. For example, he dated this girl who was like, “Oh, you don’t really like me.” He’s like, “No, I like you. What are you talking about?” She’s like, “My last boyfriend used to pay for my Ubers. You don’t do that.” He’s like, “Oh, your Ubers to see him and go back home?” She’s like, “No, all my Ubers, wherever I want to go, with him, without him, wherever I’m going.” That’s just so obvious what you’re saying there.
Noah Berkson: Did you succumb to any of this?
Suli Ali: I think not as much as he did. For whatever reason, I haven’t been as into status things as he has been. For example, he was really focused for a little while on getting the Amex Black Card, and he got one. For a while, he would use it all the time. He gave me one because you can give a companion an Amex Black. Even though he gave me one, I’ve used it maybe five times in my life because I use my Bank of America credit card since it has better points than the Amex does. He was just more into that stuff for some reason than I was. I don’t know why.
Noah Berkson: What’s the biggest thing that you do for status now?
Suli Ali: That I do for status now? So many things. Where to start? I lived in San Francisco for a long time, and status there isn’t about Rolexes, fancy cars, or that stuff. It’s about angel investing. I spent probably 10 years angel investing, and at the end of it, I was like, am I just doing this for status? I think I was probably at least 50% doing it for status versus something else.
Jess Mah: Wow.
Noah Berkson: That might be the most expensive hobby for status to possibly do unless it returns.
Jess Mah: Well, yeah, it’s a comparable hobby.
Suli Ali: Yeah, I think it’s actually a great hobby because you learn, you have fun, and you invest in assets that generate more wealth.
Noah Berkson: Has that made you a lot of money?
Suli Ali: Yeah, I’ve made a bunch of money from angel investing.
Noah Berkson: How many companies have you invested in?
Suli Ali: I’m not sure, probably around 100. It’s funny because I don’t even know how much money I’ve invested in angel investing or what the returns are.
Jess Mah: You don’t track it on a spreadsheet, batch it into proposed vintages, then benchmark yourself relative to—
Suli Ali: No, I don’t do that. I probably should, actually. I met this guy; I joined this thing called Tiger 21.
Jess Mah: Yeah, I’m familiar.
Suli Ali: Yeah, it’s like—
Jess Mah: You like Tiger 21?
Suli Ali: I love it.
Jess Mah: Really?
Suli Ali: It’s like YPO for older people and, generally, you know, rich.
Jess Mah: Could you explain to people what Tiger 21 is?
Suli Ali: Yeah, Tiger 21 is a group where you pay $36,000 a year to join. You do 10 in-person meetings. There are local chapters with about 10 people in each chapter, so you meet with those 10 people all the time. You have to have a minimum net worth of, like, $30 million or something to get in.
Jess Mah: So, you’re telling us you’re worth at least $30 million?
Suli Ali: I lied and told them that I was worth at least $30 million. Yeah, that’s what I can tell them. They think I’m worth $30 million.
Jess Mah: Perfect. Okay, so you’re supposedly worth $30 million, you have $36,000 a year to spend, you go to all 10 meetings a year, and what do you get out of the meetings?
Suli Ali: What I love about it is that it’s people who are older than me, so they’re generally in their 50s or older. They have such a different perspective on life than I do. They’re kind of past the money-making phase and are like, okay, what am I doing with my life to make it as high quality as possible, as interesting as possible? They’re really worried about their own health and their kids. Ninety percent of what they care about is, are my kids doing okay?
Jess Mah: It’s not even about money and investing. It’s about how to manage your life in a holistic sense.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Noah Berkson: Yeah.
Suli Ali: I thought it would be like, oh, cool, I’m going to find new investment opportunities and make more money by doing this. One of the things you do in it is what they call portfolio defense. Every time you meet, one person comes in and writes a bio about themselves that’s, like, 20 pages long—their entire life story. Then they show you their entire net worth, where all their money is, what their annual expenses are, and what their annual income is.
Jess Mah: That sounds like a really good habit that everyone should do, yet nobody does for some reason.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Jess Mah: Do you do this yet?
Noah Berkson: No, even with your friends? That would be super bad.
Jess Mah: Let’s do it together.
Noah Berkson: Maybe this is—yeah.
Suli Ali: I think people should do this with their friends because I have a ton of friends. I have some sense of what kind of wealth they have, but not at this level of specificity. It would be so much more interesting to share that stuff with friends. But, you know, it’s so weird to be like, hey, on Saturday, let me show you how much money—
Jess Mah: Let’s go through our balance sheet.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Noah Berkson: You say you appreciate Tiger 21 because of this. You have older people who aren’t so focused on money, maybe the next step of what I want out of my life or happiness or things like that. But you’re still money-motivated, is that correct?
Suli Ali: Yeah, I would say that I have had a toxic relationship with money my entire life.
Jess Mah: Like most people.
Suli Ali: Yeah, probably like most people. My parents were immigrants to the United States, so they came with a real scarcity mindset. Even to this day, my mom will be like, every time we go to a restaurant as a family—which we do such a small number of times per year—when the bill comes around, she’s like, let me see the bill, I want to know how much it costs. Then she does the math, like, okay, it was $30 per person, and we had six people. Alright, maybe if we didn’t have—maybe if your sister didn’t come, it would have been $30 less. She’s doing some weird math in her head like that. When the menu comes out, she’s definitely looking at the prices first before she’s like, what’s the dish that corresponds to? I think I just had a bunch of that stuff. Even my brother, to this day, is more worried about running out of money than he is about dying with a giant pile of money. Denzel Washington says this, which is, a hearse doesn’t have a U-Haul behind it. So, whatever you do in the world, whatever stuff or money you have, it all goes to nothing when you die. Maybe some of it goes to your kids. Maybe that’s good for them, maybe that’s really bad for them—who knows? Through Tiger 21, I was like, oh yeah, I’m more focused on saving money and growing this pile of money than I am on using money to make my quality of life better. I’ve been really reluctant to buy Lambos, watches, nice houses, and even go to fancy restaurants sometimes.
Jess Mah: Still, for a guy who’s worth over $30 million?
Suli Ali: Yeah. Even last year, since I started doing Tiger 21, for sure, it’s been great because I see—I hang out with those guys, and I’m like, you’re just blowing money on stupid stuff, but screw it, I’ll do it too. It just makes money matter less, actually. I think that’s been super helpful.
Jess Mah: Do you have money goals still, or are you at the point where that’s no longer a goal? Your goal is to get married, have children, and perhaps other things?
Suli Ali: Yeah, I think I still have money goals.
Jess Mah: Can we ask what they are?
Suli Ali: It’s not a specific number, actually. A good way to put it would be, my brother and I say this to each other: we were put on this earth to create shareholder value, which is such a—you know, I thought it was so fun and awesome.
Jess Mah: So funny.
Suli Ali: Yeah. I used to think it was so clever.
Jess Mah: I’ve never heard that before, that your life purpose is to increase shareholder value.
Suli Ali: Yeah, it’s a little bit snarky. About five years ago, I think we were like, yeah, that’s, like, 60% or 70% true. I’m trying to dial it back so that that’s not what I wake up thinking about.
Noah Berkson: Shareholder value, though, is you and your brother because you’re not taking outside money to invest. This is you and your family.
Suli Ali: Yeah, and it’s just to create value, create business value in the world, I guess, is the way to think about it.
Noah Berkson: Where do you want your money to go?
Suli Ali: Like, when I die?
Noah Berkson: Yeah.
Suli Ali: The way that I was raised is kind of like you have a big pile of money as a family, and then you use that to make your family’s life better. I think we were at a place growing up where we just didn’t have enough money. My parents immigrated to the United States when I was seven. They had a business that was selling textiles. They would import textiles and sell them in the U.S. That business stopped working because they were getting textiles from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and then textiles just got cheaper, made in China. So, they got out of the loop; they couldn’t do that. My dad spent three years trying to find a new business. If you’re a Pakistani or Indian immigrant to the U.S. in that era, of that age, there were kind of three opportunities: hotel, Dunkin’ Donuts, or gas station. Those were the three things. My father basically spent two or three years trying to take the money that he had and say, okay, I’m going to use this capital to invest in one of these three things. He ended up in this analysis paralysis phase for three years where he couldn’t pull the trigger on buying something. He went to an auction where they were auctioning off closed gas stations. It started in the morning; in the afternoon, he was just like, what am I doing? I’m not making any progress; I’m just listening to these people. So, he was like, I’m just going to bid on the next thing that comes up. Something came up, and he just bid on it. Just like all the previous properties, he thought, I’m the first bid; whoever’s the first bid doesn’t win it. There’s going to be a second, third, fourth bid. He bids on it, and nobody else bids. They say, congratulations, you are now the owner of this closed gas station. He’s like, I’ve never seen it. I don’t even know what city that’s in. What did I just do? That’s all the money I actually have. So, he buys this closed gas station. We, as a family, moved to that neighborhood, to that city, actually, and it’s closed. We didn’t even know anything about the gas station business. We, as a family, basically opened up that gas station and started turning it into a business. It’s so funny thinking back because we didn’t know what we were doing at all. A core part of gas stations is selling cigarettes. You have to have cigarette inventory to sell it. We would go to buy cigarette inventory and be like, give us one Marlboro and one Camel, because those were the two brands that we knew. Marlboro and Camel come in, like, 30 varieties. We’re like, no, we’ll just take one of each. We take that and try to sell it, and people are like, no, I don’t want this Marlboro, I want that other one. We’re like, oh, we gotta go spend all this money and buy all of the different varieties. My parents did this for 20 years, actually. They ran gas stations. My brother and I would work at the gas station in high school. It was just something that I was so embarrassed about. I didn’t want anyone I went to school with to know that, yeah, every Saturday, I spent 12 hours working at a gas station. Sometimes during the week, if I didn’t have much schoolwork, my parents would be like, okay, you’re not doing schoolwork, come to the store and work here tonight. For a really long time, I was super embarrassed about that. Now, it’s so funny because I feel like my brother and I would not be who we are, would not be successful, without having gone through that experience.
Jess Mah: Why? What did it teach you?
Suli Ali: It got us really comfortable talking to people who would come in the door. It got us really comfortable understanding what people want to buy and how to sell something to them. It also got us really comfortable working super hard. Doing a 16-hour shift at a gas station was just something that we thought was normal and that you have to do as a kid growing up in America as an immigrant. It got us super comfortable being like, yeah, I can outwork anyone at any problem, period.
Jess Mah: It also seems like that experience taught you how to work with family and your brother since you still work with your brother a lot right now.
Suli Ali: Yeah, I think it did also teach us the value of family, that you can collaborate and build stuff together, for sure.
Jess Mah: Did you have to learn how to fight properly with your family and argue and then repair, or was it just harmonious the entire time?
Suli Ali: No, I think there was a lot of constant arguing about stuff, and I think it’s great because you don’t hold something in, bottle it up, and then explode on the other person. You’re constantly being like, hey, this sucks, you’re bothering me right now, get out of here. You just get comfortable saying stuff like that to each other.
Jess Mah: Say that to your mom?
Suli Ali: Yeah, in a kind way, for sure.
Noah Berkson: Do you and your brother pool resources now and invest together in everything, or is it quite separated?
Suli Ali: We do a little bit of pooled stuff, but probably most of it is separated.
Jess Mah: So, going back to legacy and what you do with your money, there are two trains of thought. One is you should actually spend as much of it as possible while you’re still alive because then you can direct it, versus waiting until you’re dead, and then you’ve accumulated and compounded, but you can’t be the administrator. How do you think about that?
Suli Ali: I recently read Die with Zero, and I thought it was super cool.
Jess Mah: I love that book.
Suli Ali: Yeah, it’s so good. It’s amazing because when you read it, you don’t realize Bill Perkins is really rich and a billionaire. You just think he’s a normal person. That was super impactful in realizing that, yeah, I should be using money to make my life better immediately, and I shouldn’t just be trying to—historically, the way I was raised, I’ve had the mindset of, yeah, you make money so that you can invest it, which will make more money so that you can invest more.
Jess Mah: We never taught this hoarding mentality as a society for some reason. I think it made more sense after the Great Depression. If you’re an immigrant, you’re starting with such a small base that, even if you accumulate, you’re still only a millionaire. They haven’t taught you what happens when you’re over $30 million or $100 million. Then the rules change considerably.
Suli Ali: Yeah. In fact, I still don’t know what the rules are, so you have to tell me how the rules have changed. You get to a place where you’re like, okay, making more money is not going to change my quality of life, period. I should figure out how to use the money I have to improve my quality of life. I’ve definitely gotten a lot more aggressive about anytime I’m like, this would be fun, I’m like, let’s go do it. My girlfriend will be like, oh, we should invite these two people. I’m like, great, let’s invite them, let’s pay for everything, and just tell them we’re going to pick you up at this time and just show up. You don’t have to do anything. That concept was so bizarre and insane to me three years ago. Now it feels so stupid that I wasn’t doing that this whole time.
Jess Mah: Super insightful.
Suli Ali: The other thing I’ve learned from Tiger 21 is that I always assumed having money would help your kids because that would give them an opportunity to start life out on second base or third base or whatever it is. But everyone in Tiger 21 is so worried that their kids are going to start out on third base and never go anywhere. In fact, they might go backwards. They might not even know which direction to run in and end up at first base. They’re kind of pissed at their kids about that and also pissed at themselves for giving their kids such a luxurious life.
Jess Mah: So, what is the best practice then from Tiger 21? Is it to give them more privilege and access and a trust fund and tell them about it, or is that not the best practice? Or is there no best practice?
Suli Ali: I think there is no clear answer. One of the guys will do trips for Christmas every year. They’ll do a trip to somewhere like the Philippines or India, and they’re doing service for a community as a family. So, instead of exchanging gifts and celebrating by saying, I just bought you a brand-new car because you turned 16, they’re trying to see what the rest of the world lives like and give them a different perspective. But I think it’s super hard, especially in L.A. I think where I grew up was a small suburb in Florida, and even though a lot of people were rich, it wasn’t opulent and gluttonous like it is in L.A., where when you turn 16, you get a BMW. There, it was like you turned 16, and you got a used, beat-up Camaro. I think the world is a little bit different now, and social media has changed the whole optics of trying to keep up with your friends who are posting stuff on Instagram in high school.
Noah Berkson: It seems, too, in some super-affluent communities that if all of your kids’ friends have money, and their parents are buying them the BMW, you’re almost giving your kid a disadvantage by not giving them that in a way. Because then it’s like, well, I don’t fit in with the core group that I want to fit in with because I have this beat-up Honda, and they’re going to school in their BMW. But I feel like it’s so important to have a chip on your shoulder. It feels like the people who are the most successful have a chip, but then there’s a difference in chips. There’s the chip on your shoulder because you come from nothing, people tell you you won’t be successful, no one expects you to be successful. Then there’s the chip of, my family’s really wealthy, so people aren’t going to think I earned it. I think they’re very different, and the first is where you see the most successful people come out of.
Suli Ali: Yeah, for sure. Like, Tom Brady will talk about the chip on his shoulder, and he still has it despite all the success he’s had. So many entrepreneurs I meet who are incredibly successful have success amnesia and are just worried about the next thing they’re working on. They don’t care about the previous success they’ve had, like how happy they are or how confident they are or how good they’re feeling professionally—it has to do with their current thing, not the stuff they’ve done before. I don’t know what the chip on the shoulder looks like when everyone else is super rich, and you’re just normal rich. I don’t know what that looks like. I remember when I was a kid, people would wear brand-name clothing, and I’d be like, let’s go buy brand-name clothing. My mom would be like, no, we can’t afford it. I remember being like, when I get older, I’m gonna make money so I can buy brand-name clothing, and no one’s gonna get in my way, and no one’s gonna say no.
Jess Mah: You have no logos anywhere.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Jess Mah: Now you seem very humble and modest.
Suli Ali: Now that I can, I don’t care about any of that stuff.
Jess Mah: It’s so funny how that works, isn’t it?
Suli Ali: Yeah. In fact, I’ll wear the same shirt for weeks at a time, and my friends will be like, didn’t you wear that shirt the last time I saw you? I’m like, yeah, I did.
Jess Mah: It’s like you got pride now.
Suli Ali: It’s not that I’ve gone the other way. It’s actually that I’m apathetic. I just don’t care. I’m not trying to prove to myself or others that I can afford X or Y; it just doesn’t matter.
Noah Berkson: What’s the biggest misconception about you that people have? Maybe I’d break this down into people who don’t know you or know you from afar—they know you from the success you’ve had or Twitter or some of those places—and then the people who are close to you.
Suli Ali: I got on a call with this guy last week, and we were talking about doing some business thing together. He was like, all I’ve seen you do is have a Midas touch, so I just want to find a way to make the terms of this deal work for you and for me so we can get into business together. He kind of assumed that things I touched were successful. I was like, you have no idea. The things you think about as success are 1% of the things I’ve attempted. There’s 99% failure and pain. If you got five minutes, I can make you sob with pain stories of the entrepreneurial pain I’ve experienced and the trauma I have from it. He was like, okay, I don’t want to hear that in this context. So, I think people from the outside just think that I’m successful, and my own mindset is not that I’m successful. I’m kind of like, actually, I haven’t achieved what I aspire to achieve. I would say I probably feel like a failure 75% of the time and success only 25% of the time. The people who know me most—what do they not know? I think a lot of the people I know I met when I was in my 30s, and now I’m 42. I think life—and they’re still in their 30s—so all of the things I care about after turning 40, my life perspective changed a lot. I feel like life is so much more fragile. When you’re in your 30s, you’re like, life is infinite, and I’ve got so much time ahead of me. In my 40s, I feel like time is finite, I can see the finish line, and I’m constantly thinking about that. I feel like I’m in the third or fourth quarter of my life. It just feels so different. I’m a lot more afraid of things than I’ve ever been, and I’m a lot more risk-averse in a lot of aspects of my life, which I would have thought would be different. I thought, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve got more resources, so even if I lose some of those resources or lose some time, I’ll still be okay, so it would make me more willing to take risks. But it’s actually moving in the other direction.
Jess Mah: What are you most risk-averse to?
Suli Ali: I’m most risk-averse to death, so just any health stuff—like anybody I know and love having health problems, myself having health problems. For example, my girlfriend and I—she wants to buy a car, and I’m like, cool, let’s just start with the safest car and optimize for safety. I don’t care if it looks like a World War II tank that you have to drive, as long as you cannot be hurt in it. Let’s get that. Just trying to optimize for safety is different than I expected.
Jess Mah: How about business or financially? Are you risk-averse there in a way that you weren’t before?
Suli Ali: Yeah, I have this friend, Keith Wasserman, a real estate guy here in L.A. He’s bought billions of dollars of real estate and raised a bunch of outside capital to do that. He started a venture fund at some point where he was like, okay, I’m going to do a $5 million venture fund, and I’m going to raise money from the same people I’ve raised it from. Those people have invested hundreds of millions of dollars with me; surely, raising $5 million, I can do with a single email. He found it incredibly hard to raise $5 million for a venture fund because a lot of his investors are in their 60s and 70s, and they’re like, Keith, if I invest in this, I’m not going to see that money back for 10 years, and I might not be alive in 10 years. So, I don’t think like that. What I love about real estate is I’m investing now, and you’re going to send me a check every month or every quarter for five years. I’ve not gone that far where I’m like, I’m going to use capital to clip coupons, but I’ve definitely been more like, I want to find ways to invest that are more predictable and steady than angel investing, lottery tickets, and startups.
Jess Mah: What percentage of your current allocation is into illiquid private investments, such as venture funds and companies, versus, say, real estate or private credit?
Suli Ali: Yeah, so startups and venture funds that are managed by other people versus businesses that I own.
Jess Mah: Yeah, from a dollar amount perspective, percentage-wise, is it 50-50, or is it now 100% liquid that you could cash out immediately?
Suli Ali: Yeah, probably like 5% of my net worth is in startups and venture funds, something like that. When I first started making money, it was like 80%. I was living in Silicon Valley, started this company, we raised a Series A, and I did a $3.3 million secondary in that Series A. I took that money and put it all in startups. Actually, I gave half of it to my dad; he put it in real estate, and then the other half I kept and just put it in startups. That percentage has been declining. The percent of net worth in startups has declined over time as opposed to remaining steady or growing.
Jess Mah: Interesting. Cool.
Noah Berkson: How much at this stage do you want to help other people be successful who are around you? I hear you have a spreadsheet of people you’ve made millionaires, and you keep track of this.
Suli Ali: Yeah, Ray Dalio in Principles—I read maybe half of it, and the thing that was most impactful was in the foreword. He says, I’m at the stage of life where I want success for others more than I want more success for myself. That really hit me like a lightning bolt around the way to think about my life and the good I could do in the world. I constantly look for opportunities now where I’m like, oh, this person is special, and they’re an expert in this specific thing. Can I structure something with them or give them what they need to be able to go run at that thing much harder and be more successful and become a millionaire or get $10 million or more? I find myself generally leaning more and more in that direction over time. One of the things I admire most in the world is Mark Cuban has done this thing called Cost Plus Drugs. He’s taken the pharmaceutical business model and turned it on its head, where he’s like, okay, instead of making so much money selling drugs like pharmacies do, I’m going to run it at break-even and think of it as a public service and public good. I’m doing good in the world. I’d love to find something like that, that is a business, but where I’m not trying to create shareholder value, I’m trying to create good in the world because I think that’s super meaningful. I’m surprised there aren’t more entrepreneurs who are post-economic who do that type of thing.
Jess Mah: Why do you think that is? Why do post-economic entrepreneurs prefer to chill out?
Suli Ali: I understand why they prefer to chill out. They have this PTSD from their entrepreneurial experience, and they’re like, cool, let me not do that. I feel like, personally, I over-indexed on work in my 20s and 30s, and that’s why I’m not married and don’t have any kids. I really want to spend the next 10 years being like, cool, let me learn how to be a good husband, let me learn how to be a good dad, and let me not work as much as I had historically. I understand why people chill. I don’t understand why, when people start new endeavors, they’re not like, let me do good in the world. A friend of mine started a company, sold it, got to financial independence, and he was like, everyone who starts a new company, I feel like, is building a prison for themselves, and they’re only doing it because that’s the only thing they know how to do and the only thing they know that makes them feel good.
Jess Mah: I see that all the time with people.
Suli Ali: Yeah, where do you see that? Tell me more.
Jess Mah: Well, they start a company, sell it, make a lot of money, and then decide to start another company because it’s all they know, and they want to make more money. Then they’re miserable a year in and think, oh my God, I’m stuck here. I raised all this money, I hired all these people, and they aren’t willing to let go of the shackles and say, you know what, this company CEO job thing is not actually what I want to do. I think I want to do it, but I’m not actually into it. They put out this front where they pretend to love the job, but they secretly hate it. I’m sure you see this all the time.
Suli Ali: Yeah, I’m hearing more and more of my friends who are in that situation. Sometimes you just can’t get out of it because you’re like, well, I gotta see this through. Or, for myself, I bet my ego on this thing, and I want it to deliver. I think that is super common. It’s something that people talk about in private rooms, but not otherwise. It makes me respect people like Bryan Johnson even more, where he’s like, I’m going in this totally other direction that nobody else thinks about, and I’m going to be a lunatic in this one specific way. It’s great. There’s this concept of, you climb a mountain, and then there’s this book called The Second Mountain, where you’re like, okay, I got to the peak of this mountain. What’s the next mountain I’m going to climb? People just keep going in the direction they’ve already been going instead of looking around and seeing what other mountains I haven’t even attempted to climb. Let me go see what those are like. Bryan just created a brand-new mountain no one even knew existed.
Jess Mah: It’s brilliant.
Noah Berkson: Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, as people get more successful, they become more closed off. They don’t go to all the events, do the things, and try to meet new people. If they are going to meet new people, it’s like, I want a direct introduction to meet that person. You are not one of those people. I feel like you’re extremely open. We met originally because of a Twitter breakfast you threw out in Newport Beach. I think it was, maybe it was a Friday night or something at, like, 6 p.m., and you’re like, anyone around for breakfast at 7 a.m. tomorrow in Newport?
Jess Mah: You posted that on Twitter?
Suli Ali: Really?
Noah Berkson: On Twitter, to random people.
Suli Ali: What?
Jess Mah: That’s so cool.
Suli Ali: I was like, I saw it.
Noah Berkson: I was like, oh, I’m going to do that in the morning. Sweet. I met a great group of people there. Where else have you done that? Why do you do that? What got you started?
Suli Ali: I think it came from the Silicon Valley ethos, which is, anytime you meet somebody, you’re like, this could be the next Mark Zuckerberg; the world just doesn’t know it yet. I approach life thinking that, which is, I’m meeting these people, their stock is low, and their stock is going to skyrocket. I’m going to be like, I knew you when you were nobody, and how awesome was that? I’ve known a bunch of people now who started out with some idea, and I met them, and I was like, this idea is terrible, and you’re terrible. Then they’ve gone on to be way more successful, way more thoughtful, way more articulate than I ever have been. It’s humbling and inspiring, and it’s great. Even people who have worked for me—a bunch of them have gone on to be super successful. It’s awesome to see how many—
Jess Mah: Millionaires are on the spreadsheet?
Suli Ali: Probably, like, I don’t remember offhand, but something like 15 to 20.
Jess Mah: That’s a ton.
Noah Berkson: That’s a lot of millionaires.
Jess Mah: What’s the path they took to become millionaires?
Suli Ali: Some of them worked for me at TinyCo. Some of them, I saw this opportunity where I could buy a business, and they could run it, and did that. One of them was just like, I have this business idea; nobody will invest in it because it’s not a classic startup fundable idea. I was like, cool, how about I’ll own 49%, you own 51%, and that’s what makes the economics and investment work. Stuff like that.
Jess Mah: Wow.
Suli Ali: There’s sort of venture capital and private equity, and the world has been weirdly super separated between those two things, where private equity is on the East Coast, and venture is on the West Coast, and the two shall never meet. Now I think there’s a lot of gray area where people are like, I made money doing venture, but I’m going to try to invest in small businesses in a private equity style way, where the likelihood of success is high. Instead of putting a $50,000 check in and owning 2%, I’m going to put in a $250,000 check and own 25% or whatever it is. I think that’s cool, and we’re going to see more of that.
Noah Berkson: Our mutual friend Ben Levy said I have to ask you about Dory, which I have no idea what that means. Can you tell me about this?
Suli Ali: Yeah, I can tell you about it. I was on Amazon one day trying to buy a product, and I saw this brand that I’d never heard of before. I was like, I wonder who owns this? I went on LinkedIn and saw it was owned by this woman, and she was connected to this person I met one time at some random event. I had that guy’s email, so I emailed him and said, who’s this? What’s this brand? Tell me the story. He was like, I don’t know, but here’s an intro, and just introduced me to her immediately. I got on the phone with her the next day and was like, tell me about this business and how you started it. She told me about it; she started it 10 years earlier. I was like, is this something you’d ever want to sell? She was like, actually, yes, I would totally sell this business. I was like, cool, how much do you want for it? I think she was like, $10 million or something like that. I was like, $10 million is insane, but I would buy it for $5 million. She was like, okay.
Noah Berkson: Knowing nothing really about the business, maybe, like, top-line revenue?
Suli Ali: Yeah, she was like, here’s the top line, and here’s the bottom line. So, I was like, here’s the ballpark. Okay, cool, let’s see if this works. I’d never bought a business.
Jess Mah: What’s the multiple you offered? Do you recall?
Suli Ali: Yeah, it was, like, a 10x multiple.
Jess Mah: 10x EBITDA?
Suli Ali: Yeah, 10x.
Jess Mah: Wow, that’s rich.
Suli Ali: Yeah, it was super rich.
Jess Mah: So, this is doing $500,000 in really seller discretionary earnings because it’s a tiny business. You offered 10x?
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Jess Mah: Why?
Suli Ali: Well, I didn’t know anything about buying businesses, so I wasn’t—I didn’t know any better. I was too stupid to know that that was a crazy number.
Jess Mah: Wow, great deal for her.
Suli Ali: Yeah, well, let me tell you—a great deal for me too.
Jess Mah: Great deal for you too.
Suli Ali: So, then we get into this due diligence process that’s super light. She sends me her financials, and I look through them. I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. She’s like, oh, we actually double-counted revenue here, so EBITDA is not $500,000; it’s actually $350,000.
Jess Mah: Oh, no.
Suli Ali: I’m like, oh, well, this is valued on an EBITDA basis; that means the price has to go down. She’s like, no, $5 million is my number. I don’t care about what these numbers say; give me $5 million bucks, or there’s no deal. I was like, forget it, I’m out. Then I waited three weeks, and I was like, there’s some percent chance she’s going to come back and be like, alright, let’s do the deal. She didn’t come back. After three weeks, I went to her and said, okay, fine, let’s just do the deal at that price. Every time I called her, she was, like, busy during that diligence process. She was like, I’m in the car; I’m on my way to take my kid to a soccer game. Oh, you have this question about the business? I don’t really know anything about that; ask this guy. I would talk to that guy, and that guy was dumb as a rock, just completely incompetent, so bad at what he did. I was like, oh, there is nobody at the helm of this ship. This is completely absentee; there is no management; nobody is paying attention to any of this. That means this deal is even better than I thought because if you put a warm body there, the business will perform better. The business had been growing every year for the last five years despite the lack of active management. They’d also spent no money on marketing. I was like, oh, if you just put a warm body and spend money on marketing, this business will grow. I also wanted to see, can I have success without paying for it in my own blood and tears and that of others, in hers, in that she spent 10 years building this business? Could I get somebody who would never start a business on their own because they didn’t want to take that zero-to-one risk, but given a business in a box, they would be incredible at operating, optimizing, growing, and making it better every day? It’s been a real win-win-win for everyone involved. Win for her because she got paid and didn’t have to run it anymore. I told her, the only thing better than running your own business is not running your own business. I keep in good contact with her, and she’s so happy not running the business and living her best life. Win for her. My definition of win was, I don’t lose money, and I don’t have to do any work—so I’ve done no work. Win for the guy who became the CEO in that he got to be CEO of a business, he’s got to grow it, he’s enjoyed that process a lot. He has made a bunch of money through that process—way more money than I thought he would make. It’s been really fun and makes me want to find other ways to do that because it’s so cool. The way I think about it is, if I were to die tomorrow, I’m not sure who’s going to show up at my funeral, but I know that guy who’s the CEO of this business will show up at my funeral because I’ve changed the trajectory of his life, period.
Jess Mah: Wow. What were the terms of your CEO’s offer?
Suli Ali: I probably don’t want to share it publicly, but the way I structured it is he gets a percentage of EBITDA that the business generates. Basically, what’s happened is the EBITDA has just grown astronomically, so his comp is insane.
Jess Mah: So, he got a base salary and then a percentage of EBITDA once it passed a hurdle?
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Jess Mah: Did it stair-step, so he got a bigger percentage of EBITDA as it passed hurdles? Were you that creative, or just, like, straight line—you get X percent of EBITDA?
Suli Ali: Yeah, it’s X percent of EBITDA; it’s uncapped. I think I was really stupid in the way I structured it.
Jess Mah: How would you have structured it in hindsight?
Suli Ali: I would probably change the floor. The business needs to continue to grow its EBITDA to make massive amounts.
Jess Mah: It’s like, you have to get X percentage of EBITDA subject to the growth rate being at least Y percent a year.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Jess Mah: So, if the growth rate has gone down to no growth, then you’re back to your base or some other normalized—
Suli Ali: Yeah, the way I structured it was, oh, you were making this much money in your current job? Okay, in your first year, you’re going to make this much through a combination of base and EBITDA. I would probably do something like, in year three, you don’t get credit for the EBITDA that—let’s say the business generated $2 million in EBITDA last year—you’re not going to get full EBITDA for that $2 million in year three. You’re going to get some smaller percentage of that $2 million, and you’re going to get a larger percentage of the EBITDA above $2 million.
Jess Mah: Okay, so there’s, like, a declining tail, essentially.
Suli Ali: Yeah.
Noah Berkson: This has been awesome. We really appreciate you coming here.
Suli Ali: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Noah Berkson: You are our first guest ever.
Suli Ali: Love it.
Jess Mah: Yeah, thank you.
Suli Ali: So excited. You guys are gonna be so good at this. The tag-team pair is always such a good model for this.
Noah Berkson: Really appreciate you. Let’s hang again soon.
Suli Ali: Can’t wait.