#7 - The Hippie With A Billion Dollars

Then the Bebo story started, this was now January two thousand and five. It took only a couple of days to develop it and we went live and we had a million users after nine days. Bebo. Bebo. Bebo. Bebo. Find out Beb, Michael Burch. Buy low and sell high. Bebo which has 40 million global users. Media giant Time Warner is buying the social networking website Bebo. For$850 million. Right, I'm recording this. I just finished my conversation with Michael Birch. For those of you who don't know, Michael is a internet entrepreneur. He built a a social network back in the day when he s he competed head to head against Facebook. And although Facebook won the war, m Michael didn't end up too bad. That company, Bebo, if you've ever heard that before, sold for eight hundred fifty million to AOL. And when I met Michael, we got back together and we bought it back for one million. years later. And then we actually sold that again just now to Amazon. So uh I've had an interesting history. I've worked with Michael for six years. He was my boss

Um, then he gave me his job to run the company. Uh, he's my investor, he's my friend, he's a mentor, I've learned a lot from him from building companies to investing. I mean he's invested in Seventy five plus companies, things like Pinterest, he was one of the first investors. Calm, the Meditation app, he was an investor when nobody believed in Calm. And he's done all kinds of crazy things. He's built hotels, he's bought a private island off of Richard Branson, he gives tons of money to uh different charities like Charity Water that he supports. Uh he's a very, very humble guy. You guys are gonna hear that and you're gonna hear the humble beginnings when he quit his job as a You know, programmer at an insurance company. and made the leap of faith to build his own company. He wanted to work for himself.

He wasn't planning to become a billionaire, yeah that you know, that was a great outcome. He really just wanted to work for himself and not have a job. Wanted to work on things he was interested in. We talk about the years of struggle, the all the different ideas he had. Uh it's almost sort of in the weeds, but I think A lot of people have talked about his success with Bebo and the big sale, 850 million bucks. Uh very few people have heard the backstory. Before that about the different products that he tried to build, the failures, the learnings, all that good stuff before he had his big breakthrough.

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