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Hey, this is Sharon Trivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I did something crazy. My team asked me to write down kind of like a walk down memory lane of all the lessons that I learned in the last 25 years. And essentially they wanted it because they wanted me to break down all my learning so they could help me build various pieces of content. But then I realized I was like, wait a minute, this actually is something amazing that I can share with all of you because my story and your story are very similar. I didn't have a lot of starting out, and we built it all from the ground up. And I want to share that with you, with the lessons learned with you. And specifically, I walked down this entire path of the timeline of exactly what happened and the eight lessons learned. I've never shared this anywhere else. This is my personal share to you. And you don't have to listen to this for me. Listen to this for you. Because I hope that as I share these things, it will allow you to see the magic that you have missed out upon this world as well. So I'm going to break this all down step by step, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatha, and welcome to Business School. There's a great quote by Steve Jobs where he says, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. Like, that's crazy. Only crazy people say stuff like that. You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future. And the reason I'm recording this episode is because my team asked me to put something together. They asked me to think about and write down kind of like a timeline of events. And the reason they asked me to do that was because when you write a timeline of events, like what you've done, quote, in your life, the mistakes that you've made, the challenges that you've had, etcetera, it allows for a lot of vectors of content creation. And since, as I wrote, all of those, I Was like, wait a minute, I probably have not shared this with you. And the reason I'm sharing this with you is not like, oh, look at me, I did these dumb things. No, not at all. I wanted share this with you so that you can realize this exact thing, which is you have to trust the dots will somehow connect to the future. I'm sharing this with you so that you realize that my story is not dissimilar to yours. And even though I have the highlight reel, it's. There's a lot of pain in between all of these. I'm going to kind of break this down for you. And the thing about building something also from nothing is that having nothing gives you a very different relationship with risk. Because the person who has nothing has nothing really to lose. And the crazy part is when you have lost everything already, lost everything once, or you start with nothing to even begin with, you understand that survival is the only way. And I really believe that that knowledge, that feeling, that strength gives you a very different way to make decisions for the future. So I'm sharing this timeline not because, clearly, not because my story matters or anything like that, but because you may see a pattern in your own journey. So let me kind of break down a very quick session for you because I have eight lessons at the end that I learned from writing this that I want to share with you. And we'll go by pretty quickly. So if I've never told you the story, here it is. I wrote down this timeline, so I'm just gonna like, hit the timeline for you. Around 20 years old, I joined my first startup as a early engineer. I was a computer science and math major in college. And I just loved building things. It the computer science stuff, coding. I was a code monkey. Came very naturally to me. And while I did this, quote, work experience while I was still in college, I thought I was getting real work experience. Honestly, it was learning that all these extraordinary outcomes just are done by ordinary people. That's it. Ordinary people who make extraordinary commitments get extraordinary outcomes. Just think about how crazy that is. Ordinary people, just like you and me, make extraordinary commitments, which means they're willing to sacrifice insane number of things and they get extraordinary results. Right? Pretty cool. That was my end. 2021, we sold. We ended up doing all of that. We sold our first company. I was convinced that I somehow had this mystical success code. I was. I was invincible doing my first thing. And I also believed that, hey, man, if I can do this, I can do anything. And the universe will just keep giving me wins Because I figured out the game early. Just so you know. The universe had different plans and I had to figure it out. So what I did next year, I took my newfound little small pot of gold, which is not a lot, and became a world traveling tennis pro. And honestly to search for the meaning of life. Like I just did not want to be in a cubicle anymore. And so I spent time in the Caribbean, in upstate New York, in Dubai and on Maui. I got a chance to teach tennis to Bill and Melinda Gates to or well, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, the Sultan of Brunei, Alan Alda, some pretty crazy Michael J. Fox crazy personalities. The best part about all of this was like, yeah, I got to talk to these people. But was all that happened on, on and off the court, right? Like when I was having a drink with them between in changeovers, like during the tennis lesson. Those were the most coveted conversations and that was insane. And I got a pretty cool 10 in that process, which was awesome. Then when I was 24, I moved to Maui and never lived in Hawaii before the. And I was teaching tennis at Kapalua, if you know where that is. Beautiful resort on the west side of Maui. Every golfer knows where Kapalua is, by the way. I got free golf for three years and I didn't play once. So you can, you can be mad at me if you're a golfer. So what happened was for a tennis pro you have to be able to teach and play if. And if it rains, you don't get any income. So I just realized that that west side of Maui had insane number of island showers. So all my, a lot of my tennis lessons would get ringed out. And so I, I realized I was like, well, this is crazy. I just need to figure out another way to make money. So I came up with this idea of video analysis where I would, you know, essentially indoors or on the racquetball courts or in a conference, in a ballroom, I would get people to hit volleys or serve or whatever I would take. I had a video camera and I like got this set up and I would video and I do an analysis for them. And this did not require me to even hit a tennis ball. I actually made more money off the court in a leveraged way doing coaching without actually hitting a tennis ball, all with video analysis. That was literally where everything clicked. Like that was the foundation for so many remote education based business models that I had done. And it, I like, I made all this money as a teaching pro without hitting a tennis ball. It was awesome. Well then this Brings me to the, to the next phase, which is my mentor told me that hey, no one was going to hire a tennis pro and he recommended that I go to business school. And by the way, that's what business school is for. When you don't know what to do, you make this massive switch and pay a lot of money and go to business school and then you can shift and switch to anything ever. Well, the reason I went to business school mainly was I realized that I traveled the world. I'd met so many successful people and every single one of them told me one thing. They said, hey Sharon, with your engineering background and already having, you know, got a chance to build and sell a business, you will benefit a lot from understanding capital markets. And so I based, I essentially went to business school with one and one sole goal in mind was to go to Wall Street. And so I went to Vanderbilt to get my MBA and I then went to, went to be a banker at Wall Street. The crazy part about being at Vanderbilt was I met my now wife there which was so cool. And a lot of people don't know this but when we got married we had I think less than $3,000 together in our joint bank accounts. And yes, we had came out of business school with jobs, et cetera, but we didn't have a lot of money. And sometimes having nothing creates really the perfect conditions for building everything. My wife has been with me through thick and thin. We built it all all together and I owe it all to her, which is so awesome. Talk to you about going to Wall Street. So the next phase was I, I went to Goldman Sachs during this is by the way, during the 2008 financial crisis. Just imagine being a newly minted MBA at the number one bank in the world. And I actually was the only student in my class to make it through 39 one on one interviews to get hired at Goldman this year. I'm talking about 39 one on one scheduled in person interviews. This is not including informational interview including dinners, coffees, et cetera. 39 individual 11 interviews just with Goldman. I did, I interviewed with all the other banks too at that time. So I probably did a hundred plus interviews in like a two month, two and a half, three month period. You get really good at the, at those things. And by the way, we, let me just be very clear, I was not super smart. I am not super smart. I wasn't, didn't know high, high finance in any way. I had never worked on Wall Street, I'd never traded a bond like I Didn't know anything about anything. I knew nothing about financial markets. But I was all in on just, hey, I'm going to learn and I'm going to show that I'm good. And I was just hoping that someone would see the human side of me, someone would see my, I always call it my diligence, my patience, my persistence. I just wanted somebody to see that. And I'm thankful that somebody took a chance on me. And that's what gave me a chance to be a banker in New York at Goldman during the financial crisis which by the way was insane. I thought I was going to lose my job every single day. I'd never felt more stress in my life. I think I got my first gray hair right then because I was like, this is insane. I can't, there's this distress in a normal environment at Goldman is crazy. The, the level and caliber of the people that you're with is insane. And by the way, we have a bunch of influencers out there who like worked at Goldman. They didn't do anything like they were analysts. Like I'm not saying being an analyst at Goldman's bad like it is, it is a grunt work. It is like you make DAX and you run models. That is not like what this job was like. I was in a client facing role. They, Goldman spent a million dollars to train me. Before I actually made a call to a client I got a BlackBerry and unlimited and a no limit amex card. And I called on like you know, just the Fortune 1000 CEOs. It was insane. And the amount of training that goes into, you know, getting somebody to do that is crazy because in a normal environment, let alone during the global financial crisis, it was crazy. So now let's talk about a little breakthrough years. My mentor and partner for many years, Peter Lowy, he called me one day and he's like, hey, you know, I invested in this business, it's a real estate brokerage in Southern California. When next time you're out here, can you take a look at it? He was my client when I was in banking. And so when I came out to visit I looked at this company called telus. It had one office, 28 agents in Beverly Hills. And I realized when I did some analysis that something was not right and that the then founder CEO was embezzling from the business. And so I actually reverse mortgage my house to and we, I borrowed money to buy, you know, buy the CEO out. And my partner Peter and I, along with the other founder, Peter Nandez, we actually took over the company and we grew that business and by the way learning to run a business in an industry that I knew nothing about while taking all the financial risk at with my first child on the way was like insanely scary. And I'll tell you the crazy story. My wife is at that time was a consultant with Deloitte. She traveled the traveled the country. She left first flight out Monday morning, came back last flight Thursday night. And to convince her that I was going to take a massive pay cut leave banking. Like when I say a massive pay cut I'm talking like 1/10 the pay, right. Or maybe more right. And, and maybe I probably that was not include not including bonuses. So call it 1/30 the pay to go do this which is like if, if you were making, you know, if, if you were making $300,000 right like, and I told you like you're going to take 1/30 the pay that is just, just for, just for a rational $300,000. Like what 1/10 would be $30,000. 130 would be $3,000. Like that's some, that's the delta that I want to show you. Right. So what I had to do was I had to make. I made a PowerPoint presentation to my wife on why I should actually do this. And she thought she, she knew then and she knows now that I'm crazy and I need to take risk and I need to go like work for myself and work to do something bigger. And she, and we, we thankfully it worked well what happened? And we grew the business 10x in five years roughly to 3.4 billion in sales. We were on the, you know, four times on the Ick 500 list. And then the business was bought by Douglas Elliman which is a publicly traded on the real estate business out of New York. It was the largest transaction by two independent brands in the in US history at that time. So if you don't believe me you can Google it. So Google tell us and Douglas Elliman and you'll see it. And here's the interesting part being super vulnerable with you. After that we had also built some several additional businesses. So we had property management which we did a management buyout. We had mortgage which we sold to Element as well. We had escrow which we did a management buyout. All of this deal structuring that I learned on Wall street finally came to help us. Like I knew how to actually do these deals. So we, in a matter of three and a half years we had four exits which Was crazy. And I think I did more transaction in that three years than most bankers would do in their lifetime. From a transaction size perspective. And also based on all those deals, we had earnouts and the earnouts that were gravy train and you had to work through that and figure that out. It's crazy. But the crazy part in all of this was that once we sold the business I had a 5 year non compete because they paid us to sit on the sidelines. And so I started a private equity firm called Highland prime during my non compete and the entire idea was that I would make minority stakes in companies. I didn't want a majority stake. I would take a minority stake in companies and be a operating partner. Actually I would operate and work with this founders and CEOs and help them grow their business. Especially using my connections, my brand, whatever. I believe we got up to like 13 active companies. We had like, you know, 10 more in the pipeline and in a five year period we had, we saw some awesome exits as well. I will tell you at that point, like during those time is when I fell in love with founders while when I fell in love with private equity. And I knew that like investing and operating in large companies was my jam, which was awesome. We also at that time by the way launched this insane real estate technology platform called Kingston Lane. It was the crazy part is it was way ahead of its time. We did AI and automation tools five years too early and then we were stuck. We were struck by the COVID kind of issues and we were, our team was dramatically affected and we had to sell the assets of the business at that point. That was like a really low point for me having been, you know, having helped found a business and you know, hired an operator. Having seen it run and then having Covid hit it and being so early and now seeing all the AI tools come about. I still have my CTO message me the other day and said dude, we were five years too early. Like if we had done this right now, we would be destroying it. Cusco is insane. Well, I sat on my hands for five years and then I joined Real. Real is the fastest one of the. Is a publicly traded business. The new business model with non brick and mortar and led massive growth. Right. You know we, when I joined real we had 6,800 agents in 21 states. I grew the bigger the business from 6,800 agents to 27,000 agents in under two years. It was roughly a, you know, almost a billion dollars in valuation growth since it was publicly traded. It's all documented public. Roughly a 200ish million dollar valuation to a $1.2 billion valuation in five years. All of this in the worst real estate market in what, 30 years. And earlier in 2025, I stepped down from my operating role as the president of real estate. We were the fastest growing publicly traded real estate brokerage in the world. And I joined the company's board of directors to guide the company. I thought I was going to hang it up. I thought I was going to be, I was going to retire again. At that point, I was talking to my best friends, Alex and Layla Hormozi. Some of you may know Alex and Layla, but probably some of the sharpest entrepreneurs in the world. And I remember when Alex said to me, he's like, dude, you're going to be so bored if you retired. You should come work with us. And I was like, I don't know, man. He's like, dude, we, you know, we need you. You've done this, you've built $2 billion businesses. We'd love a great partner to help us build and grow together. And it was pretty cool because I get to work with my best friends. And I had known Alex and Layla for many years. I'd served as a friend and advisor on their previous deals, so including the sale of Jim launch and I'd, I had known the Several models of acquisition.com as it was today. So I'd served as an advisor and in all my real estate investments. Alex and Layla had invested in all my real estate investments. So I had, I deployed a lot of their capital as well. And in a lot of ways for me it was coming home to something that I had helped build from the outside. And now I get to work on from the inside and have my partners as my best friends, which is super, super cool by the way. A lot of people ask me, I'm like, hey, so what was the hard negotiation between like you and Alex and Layla about, you know, becoming a partner@accentility.com? i honestly, a lot of people don't understand this. I, Alex, you know, accidentally said, hey, send us an email with what you're looking for. I wrote an email with bullet points. They hit reply all and copied the attorneys and we drafted our contract. That literally was the negotiation. Now the, the, the part that was actually hardest for all of us was kind of ensuring that we had good rapport relationship operating guidelines that would not impact our friendship and our love for each other. I was more afraid of that breaking than I was with anything else because nothing could Ruin my friendship. But there's a good chance that if I didn't do this partnership well, we would not be friends anymore. And that was really hard for me. So I wanted to kind of put my best foot forward. So looking back at all of this, right, it's crazy because I wrote all of this down and I have a list in front of me, so I'm going to read to you. Looking back at all of this, here's a bunch of insane things that happened. I started as a code monkey. Like I was a nerd out Engineer. We built $2 billion companies, had five exits in the last 20 years. I traveled to a dozens of countries. I made a bunch of money. I also lost a bunch of money. I rang the NASDAQ closing bell which is super cool at real with my partners. I built all of this was amazing business partners. And now I get to work. What's my best friends to build the third billion dollar business which is super cool. And by the way, I, I will tell you this. I, I did all of this while being a halfway decent husband and a halfway decent father. And most importantly, I got a chance to do this all without selling my soul. I didn't, I didn't do anything illegal. I didn't, you know, I didn't screw anyone in the process. I didn't take anything that was not mine. I followed the law. Yeah, I probably ruined my health. Yeah, I probably got in a bunch of fights with my wife. Yeah, I probably did not show up for a bunch of recitals. Yeah, I probably, you know, worked more than I should have worked. Yeah, I probably didn't take some vacations. Yeah, I probably, you know, sat in front of the TV with my laptop more than once. Yeah, I probably did all of that. But I did not sell my soul. And it feels okay and gives me a chance to do it better today. And so the reason I'm sharing all this with you is just to summarize. I look back and I was like, what are these lessons learned? What did I learn in all of this that I think would be helpful to you? Because just telling me the lessons learned is useless. But telling you why I learned all of them makes a lot of sense. So I wrote down, that's what I want, kind of want to finish with. I wrote down eight unusual lessons that in, in these last 25 years and I want to kind of share those with you. So number one, lessons are often repeated until they're learned. Lessons are often repeated until they're learned. Number two, when we are tired we are attacked by demons that we have conquered a long time ago. Say it again when we are tired. We're attacked by demons that we have already conquered a long time ago. Number three. Your worst battle is between what you know and what you feel. Your worst battle is between what you know and what you feel. Number four. We need to speak the language of money to make more of it. We need to speak the language of money to make more of it. Number five. If you think practice is boring, try sitting on the bench. If you think practice is boring, try sitting on the bench. Number six. Whenever you're presented with two paths, choose the one that's harder in the short term and has a better story for the long term. When you're presented with two paths, choose the one that's harder in the short term and has a better story for the long term. Number seven. Your lack of commitment is insulting to the people who believe in you. Your lack of commitment is insulting to the people who believe in you. And number eight, which is my favorite, it's only delusional until it works. It's only delusional until it works. This is what I want to wrap together for you. I thought that you'd really like this. In fact, I actually even wrote a piece about this on my sub stack. By the way, if you're not following that, I highly recommend you do. It's called My next billion, so you can go to my next billion. Com and it's literally all my best ideas, all my best learnings, everything, by the way, 100% for free. I don't even know how to charge for it. Everything for free. You go to mynextbillion. Com. This article is actually titled the math of persistence. What happens when you don't quit? Where I track and look back at everything that I talked about in my life. I hope this is helpful to you. I wanted you to see that there is a pattern for everything that happens. I wanted you to see that. This great Steve Jobs quote, that you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect. You connect in your future, right? Which is crazy. But hopefully this helpful deal. Hey, can you do me a favor? If you like this, could you screenshot this and tag me on social? That way I know you like this and I can make more like this for you. So please, if you like this screenshot, this episode, upload, tag me and that way I can make more like this for you. Hey, this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build 2 billion dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three peat and build the next billion. So everything's free at my Next billion dot com. Please check it out. My Next billion dot com.