If You Want To Create Wealth In 2026, Watch This (4 Paths)

Poor people stay poor because they want a fast way to get rich and instead the richest people that I know pick one of these four paths, play it for a decade, and then end up with more money than everyone else that is just chasing shortcuts. Just a fun reminder for you, no president, no economy is going to make you rich. You have to do that for yourself. So in this video, I'm going to show you the four paths to mega money and I'll show you how to pick the right path at the right time for you. Let's get into them. You've got your money and your business. You've got other people's money and other people's businesses and then permutations of those. And so your money, your business, right, is a bootstrapped business. If you have other people's money and your business, now you're raising capital. If you have your money and other people's businesses, now you're investing. And then finally, you have other people's money and other people's businesses, which is fund management. Now, to give you some proof points around this, I actually looked up the top 11 richest people currently on the Forbes list and I'm going to tell you where they are. You've got Elon Musk. He's a raised capital guy. Almost every single company he's had, he's raised outside capital and then he's continued to fund it and grow it. Larry Ellison, who's number two, raised capital. Mark Zuckerberg, raised capital. Jeff Bezos, raised capital. Larry Page, raised capital. Sergey Brin, raised capital. Steve Ballmer, bootstrapped. Microsoft bootstrapped. A lot of people don't know that. Underneath of that, you've got Jensen Wang, raised capital. Warren Buffett, investing. Michael Dell, bootstrapped. The Waltons, as in Walmart, bootstrapped. And so that's the top 11 wealthiest people in the world. You might have noticed that fund management wasn't there. If I go like six deeper, you'll find people who did fund management. Now, one of the interesting things about each of these constructs is there's a little bit of risk and there's a little bit of trade-off with each of them. I personally have done one, two, three, and four, believe it or not. I'll actually walk you through my own examples and which one's right for you. Let's start with number one, bootstrapped. Bootstrapped just means that you fund the business from your own savings and cash flow. You have no outside investors and you grow through reinvesting your own profit. You have a website and you've got a cell phone and you've got skills and you start trading one for the other, get a little excess money, take that excess money, and then continue to build. Now, typical examples for this are usually low-cost businesses to start. A lot of times that's services. So agencies, home service businesses, B2B services, professional services, things like that. Sometimes nowadays you can actually do this with software. It didn't used to be that way, but now it kind of is. Education businesses, e-com brands, if you do drop shipping. If you don't do drop shipping, you have to front some capital in order to get the first inventory started. Local businesses, most normal companies. Now, to be fair, that scope has continued to broaden because the cost of entering business is going to continue to drop. Now, for me personally, my first brick-and-mortar business was a gym and so that was bootstrapped. I used the profits from that to start Prestige Labs, which was a supplement company, which was bootstrapped. I started Allen, which was a software company, which was bootstrapped. And so all those companies were bootstrapped. Today, acquisition.com is taking some of that capital, investing it into other people's businesses, while also having some companies that we start de novo from our hold cap, which is kind of semi-bootstrapped and also kind of reinvesting our own capital. So you can see how some of these boxes merge. Now, who is this right for? So if this is your first business, I recommend starting with bootstrapping. And the main reason is just you want to pay off ignorance. The last thing you want to do is take your friends and families money and then lose it because you don't know what you're doing. That's my opinion. Your results may vary. You can stick of the names on that list that I mentioned, Jeff Bezos, the people that he knew invested, Bill Gates, the people, I think he had rich parents. I'm sure they helped him out in the beginning. I don't know the actual public documentation of that, but I think he had a little bit of help in the beginning there. But the thing here is that I don't think you're going to want to go raise a ton of capital for everyone you know, maybe even VCs, if it's your first shot. Again, your results will vary. Your life is unique. But the main thing is that bootstrap will typically be the slowest of the four paths. And that is usually because it takes money to grow. And if you have to make the money to grow, it's almost like having a car factory built inside of the car. It's very difficult to do. Humans do it. We have human factories inside of our humans. Weird stuff, right? But in business design, it's much, much more difficult, right? It's slower to build the capital reallocation machine while also building the machine that makes the capital to begin with. Kind of have to have both. Now, the main advantage of this is that you keep the control and the equity. So you have a bigger slice of the pie. You decide the pace, the strategy. And ultimately, you can exit on your own time horizon or never exit at all, right? And the goal is that you design a compounding vehicle, which is either recurring or reoccurring, within the business. And then you let that, over time, do the heavy lifting. That's the end goal. Now, a lot of first businesses don't have any of those things. But you buy a dollar, sell for two, and you make money. There's nothing wrong with that. Here are some of the trade-offs. When you bootstrap, you incur more debt than any other vehicle. Now, you're like, wait a second. I thought I was using my own money to start this thing. Yes, but you incur every other type of debt. And oftentimes, every other type of debt is harder to pay off than money is. So what do I mean? If you're starting with your own cash, it's very difficult for you to attract a star talent team of 10 people that all need a million dollars plus per year to work and actually grow this thing. If you're a venture back, you can do that with some stock and then also decent cash compensation. And so that becomes harder to do. So you incur lots of management and leadership debt. If you can't get the high enough level of the softwares that you need in order to build your software company or whatever, if you start low, you're going to have some technical debt that might incur along the way. Same thing with your data debt. So you're going to have lots of debts that money could have otherwise solved for you, but you don't have money as one of the things that you're in debt for. Now, to be clear, there are pros and cons there. The pro is that you can stay alive a lot longer because you typically keep your cost basis a lot lower. The downside is that it goes slower. And so your capital constraint will oftentimes limit the size of what you can pursue from day one. If you wanted to start an AI robotics business to go global, it would be incredibly unlikely that you would succeed because the amount of capital it would cost to just build one robot, let alone many robots as you scale. And then you'd functionally probably lose money on building that first robot. And then after you lost money on the first robot, you'd somehow have to get more money to then build more robots. It's very hard to do without outside injections of cash. And so this box does constrain to a degree what kinds of opportunities you can pursue. And there's a reason that some of the biggest people in the world start here, which is a perfect segue to, okay, so what is other people's money into your business? This is raising capital, right? So you start and you run the company, but you raise capital from investors who buy a slice of equity to fund the fast growth. Normal examples of this are tech platforms, social networks, marketplaces, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, where it takes years and years and years to get a drug passed and then it makes money. Typically, anything that has huge amounts of upfront costs, then increasing margins or gross margins later and or winner take all dynamics, meaning you have to lose money for a long time to get the whole market. And then all of a sudden you have a network effect and then everyone buys from you. Amazon famously lost money for like a decade plus before they really started turning a profit. Facebook too lost money for a long time, but they were mapping networks. So who should take this path? If you have a very big dream of what you want to build and there's functionally no way to make your thing profitable without using other people's money, like, isn't like you will just, you know, you're going to lose money for a year, two years, three years in order to actually have this thing work. Then you have kind of like a predefined path that you're going to have to capital. So I've experienced with this because school is venture backed, right? And so we raise capital at school to continue to grow the company. And we're able to give pricing, which is absolutely absurd, like $9 a month, which by the way is very little with inflation. Uh, it's basically free, uh, in order to get as many people who want to start a business, the, all the tools they need to do it. Now, the main advantage of this is that you start with a bigger thing. You can hire the top talent. You can outspend competitors. You can be negative in your acquisition costs. I mean, you can lose money getting customers, right? Uh, you can build infrastructure faster than you could with your own cash alone. And on a personal level, you can incur way less personal debt because, you know, there'd be no way that you would be able to fund a lot of this out of your own pocket. Now, if you can, if you're already rich, then you can take on raising capital style, big opportunities and then fund it with your own cash. And that's really an amazing combination, but not available to most people. But this allows you to pursue rarer opportunities. And one of the advantages of that is that it actually prices a lot of people out of the market. So to a degree, there is an element of risk with raising capital because typically the opportunities that people pursue are high risk, high return opportunities, but there's typically far fewer competitors. And so, you know, you can count the number of competitors who are well-funded even in a space, maybe on two hands. If I said how many social media marketing agencies are there, you're gonna need a lot more fingers. And so within our car analogy example, you actually just start by building the car factory. And then even though you know you're gonna lose money up front, once the car factory is built, you know that every single car you're gonna make X dollars of profit, right? And that is how you end up recouping it and justifying the return to the investors. Some of the trade-offs here are significant. You now have two customers instead of one. In Bootstrap, your customer is just the end customer, right? When you have raising capital, your customer is both the end customer and the investors or venture capitalists. And so that's one element is that I have to serve two masters, which can oftentimes be at odds, which is a bit of a pain. The second kind of big downside is that you're gonna dilute your own equity. Here, you have 100% of the pie, right? Whatever you make is yours and that's your pie. Now you can give profit shares, you can give equity slices to key teammates or partners or whatever, but they're usually in the business. They're actually helping you succeed within the business. Whereas when you're raising capital, a lot of it's gonna depend on the terms. Sharon, my partner, tells a story about his first exit ever, he learned what a ratchet was, which is that he had a very large exit in his first company that he started in his teens that then I think he exited around age 25. It was many tens of millions of dollars, but because there were liquidation preferences and ratchets on those liquidation preferences, the investors got paid out first and with some excess. And so when he saw this very big number, the amount that he and the other founders were left with was less. Now, to be fair, he did fine, but it was less than what he thought he was going to get. Now, as you continue to scale this, typically if you do multiple rounds, each person who's going to put money in also wants a seat at the table, quite literally a board seat, which means that over time you can absolutely get voted out of your own business, which happened to Steve Jobs. And so these are real risks that happen. You can lose control of your own company. And a lot of this is going to depend on the terms of other people's money. If someone gives you a trillion dollars for 1% equity in your business, that's an amazing thing. If someone gives you $10 for 90% equity, that's going to be kind of tough. And so this one is very much the devil's in the details. And your ability to raise is going to be a combination of two things, your ability and track record as a founder, and the size of the opportunity that the investors believe you're going after, and the likelihood that they believe that you can actually hit it. And I'll say the last downside here is that typically venture money is kind of grand slam money. It's like they just want you to swing for the fences and know that they're going to have a lot of people strike out. But the economics of having somebody get 1,000x on their money allows them to have many losses. But if you're the person who takes the loss and n equals 1, as in it's 100% of your life, that is where there's a sea of tombstones of failed ventures and founders who gave 5, 10 plus years of their life and pretty much worked a job but with way more stress for a long period of time and then ended up having nothing to show for it, which is tough. And they don't even have the story of the big success at the end. So this is actually far more common than the big headlines that we see. And the reason those things make big headlines is because they're rare, which brings me to the third way of making mega money, which is investing. Now, this is the one that probably a lot of people have more familiarity with, right? It's your money, and you're investing into other people's businesses, right? So you take the cash you earn actively from other places, and you buy pieces, tiny chunks of other people's company. It's kind of the equal opposite of raising capital. Now, you don't have to buy into venture-type products. You can just buy cash-flowing businesses. You can buy public stocks. You can buy real estate. There's a lot of different things that you can buy with money. Now, the clear thing here is that you don't run them. You fund them. So me personally, I'm split in my investing. So I have ACQ Ventures, which is our venture arm. So that's where we are basically the raising capital partners for SMB tech. And so that's exclusively what we invest in because we understand it well. And then on the other side, we have kind of the private equity style investments that we do, but we also add some sort of service because we have a whole service layer at ACQ. And so those are typically more cashflow investment businesses, but also obviously of enterprise value. And so who should take this path? Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages, as headcount increases, that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. Well, once you have meaningful access cash and you want the upside without the day-to-day operational responsibility, then this is an interesting path. And so the main advantages are that you have diversification. So you're able to make many bets instead of a life or die bet with a single company. But whenever you distribute your bets, you also decrease your upside. So Dale Carnegie had a famous quote, which is, put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket. And so that's him talking about this. Bootstrapping or you're raising capital for your own business, that's you putting all your eggs in one basket and trying like hell to make that thing work. With investing, you're spreading it out. But when we look at the most successful investors, they typically aren't nearly as diversified. They're typically way more concentrated, which then allows them to maybe make five, seven, eight significant bets that they believe they have alpha or upside on above the market. And so with investing, I think that of the four of these, arguably the easiest lifestyle kind of decision because you have no boss and you're technically other people's boss. And so you just write checks. You can inform what you want the person to do. To be clear, you might not have a majority. That's going to depend on the terms. But when Laila and I sold the company and we were just a family office, this is all we did. And I'll say, of my entire life, the most chill period. And sometimes I think to myself, what was I doing? Why am I back doing this when I don't need to do it anymore? But I want to make a key point here is that this is by far the slowest, number one. And number two, almost no one makes their money this way. They have already have a high active income. And then they begin investing. And if you're like, I'm going to be like Warren Buffett. Well, did you buy your first stock two weeks after Pearl Harbor when you were age seven? No. And did you do it in a world where there wasn't a Robin Hood and you actually had to figure out how to do mail-in ballots and call someone as a seven-year-old or 11-year-old, whatever it was, to make your first bet? Probably not. Because you're like, oh, I want to be like Mozart. And you're age 30 and you want to start investing. It's like, well, here he had like 19 concertos by this point because he started age seven. So I wouldn't say, oh, let me look at what the top person in this field did if you were not that person. And so the whole point of this video is to figure out what path is right for you. And to be clear, Warren Buffett is very famous now. But until he was 60, I don't think many people even knew his name. 60, right? And he's made the vast majority of his wealth from age 80 to 95. Think how crazy that is. So if you're like, I'm in this for the very, very, very, very, very, very, very long haul, then this is a good path for you. And especially if you're somebody who wants a little bit more of a lifestyle where you're like, OK, I just have to get my passive to exceed my active costs. Then it's like, great. And if you get better and better at that game, you'll have more and more and then you'll have nothing else to do. And you'll just keep playing the game just for the love of the game. But it does take time. It's unlikely that you're going to get these 50%, 100% plus annual returns. Even Warren, for a very long time, didn't get those types of returns. And even in the beginning, he was still competing, I think, 50-ish percent. But he was the best in the world. And then once he had more capital, his returns decreased. And a great note on this is that in, I would say, Main Street, real estate is the number one most common path for creating millionaires, but not the most common path for creating billionaires. And to me, that is a great cherry on top for this little bucket, which is that it is a great way to build and store wealth. It's being smart with your money and allocating it appropriately. It's unlikely to be the thing that gets you all the way to the top unless you have a very, very long time horizon. And let's be real. You have to live to 95 like Warren Buffett to hit the list. That's real. Charlie Munger was 99 when he died. And so in a very real way, if they had died at 74, I don't know if we talk about them as much because they wouldn't have had all the compounding that happened after. So this is a long, long game. Finally, that leads us to number four, which is fund management. So this is you take other people's money, and you invest it in other people's businesses. You raise a pool of capital for investors, which the fancy word of that is LPs or limited partners. And then you use that money to buy pieces or control of other people's businesses. Now, depending on the way that you do it, you can also use debt there too. So let me give you a visual of like this is potentially one of the highest leverage scenarios. It's like this on steroids basically. And so let's say that you want to raise $100 million. Now, I'm going to use big numbers because I want you to think bigger anyways rather than thinking in small numbers. All right. So in order for you to raise a fund with $100 million, it's typical that the person who raises the fund puts about 5% of the total funds raised in. So you put $5 million in. You raise $95 million of LP capital. That means limited partner capital. So other people put their money in. And then this is where it gets even crazier. So this is $100 million in total. But then you say, you know what? We're going to go buy. I don't have enough space on this thing, so just bear with me. We're going to buy $300 million of businesses because we're going to use $200 million in debt to buy these businesses. And so think about the leverage that you get from your $5 million able to buy $300 million worth of stuff. Now, when this $300 million, let's say it just grows at 10% a year. Let's say you're not amazing. You're just matching the S&P, all right? In seven years, you'll double, right? So this is now $600 million seven years later. Now, if you had a 10% return for private equity, that'd be bad. But I'm just going to give you the base case of you're not that good at this, OK? So that means that you have a $300 million delta. So we've got to pay back, right? We've got to pay back the debt. So we have to take our $200 million out because we've got to pay the debtors back. Now, they have some interest in some other stuff there, too, right? Then we've got to pay our LPs back, right? I'm just making the box a little bit smaller so I can draw the rest of it. All right? So we've got to take this back. Now, sometimes there's a hurdle rate, which is a minimum return you give these guys saying, I don't get paid until x happens. That depends. But typically, in private equity, it's 6% to 8%, somewhere in there. And then whatever is left over here, you then have a split with them, LPs, and then GPU. So let's see what happens when you actually invest this money and then wait five to seven years. Now, let's say because you're in private equity and you're investing in non-public markets, you get a better-than-public-market return, which is basically the baseline. No one wants to get a public equity return and then have their money locked up for five to seven years. So if you got a 20% annualized return for six years, you would have 2.98 on the money. So functionally, your $300 million that you bought now becomes $900 million. Ooh, more. All right? So we've got to pay back our debt. So we have our $200 million that we've got to pay back in debt. Now, there's going to be some interest on that. Let's say that we've got to pay them back $100 million in debt payments. Okay. So we've got that, too. Now, we also have our LPs, $95 million that they put in. So we've got to pay them back that. And then there's some minimum return that we promise them before we participate, which for us is going to be about $40 million if we have a 6% PREF or hurdle that goes back to them. So that is all guaranteed to them. Now, after that, it just depends purely on the nature of the asset class and what you're investing in and your kind of proprietary blend of whatever. There's going to be some split of the profits here that goes to you, the GP, the general partner, that's the operating partner, the person who runs the whole fund, and then some that goes to the LP or limited partner. And so let's say that you had a 50-50 split here. Let's just call it. Okay? That means that after we add all of this stuff up, this slice here is $465 million. Remember we started with $5 million? This is how you get mega rich. Now, to be clear, all this isn't yours. Maybe two-thirds of that isn't yours. But either way, even if you had 10% of that and you got $46.5 million, you did pretty good on your $5 million investment, right? If you got 20%, now you're looking at $90 million. Even better on your $5 million investment. You see how this stuff adds up? And that's because this is leverage. Now, when we look back at our original kind of sheet here, with each of these four paths, you have to decide on what's best for you. If you have some proprietary way that you know how to source deals and you have a good way of finding capital, which, by the way, if you're like, I don't know how to raise capital, you absolutely do know how to raise capital if you have good deals. One of the best pieces of advice I got from a mentor of mine is that there is no lack of capital in the world, only a lack of good deals. And so if you find a good deal, capital will appear, right? If you come to me and say, I have a guaranteed way, which, of course, don't use those words, because that's a great way to get good money to run away. But if you're like, there is an incredibly high likelihood chance that I have of 5x-ing money in this way. And here's the six different ways that have mitigated the risks. And let's say those are believable. And if we have that, then I'd be like, OK, well, how much money do you need? And that's how any good investor is going to ask the question. Because when you do identify good opportunities, you just want to back up the truck. Now, in that setting, the higher, believe it or not, the higher the return and the more private the type of deal that you're doing that's more niche and specific to what you know, typically, the better the splits that you can negotiate on the GPLP split of the profits after some certain point. And so who should do this? I think the best version of this is where you build a track record. You figure out proprietary deal flows and deal flow that only comes to you that no one else has. And you have some sort of real edge in picking and improving those companies. So oftentimes, funds are organized around a singular thesis. So for example, at the very beginning of acquisition.com, I got approached by a walnut tree fund. I was like, I don't even know this exists. But they explained how it worked, which is like it takes 30 years to grow a black walnut tree all the way to like full size. But every year after year three, it creates walnuts. And so it cash flows every single year. And then the end of the 30 years, you cut the walnut tree down and you get this amazing walnut wood that you can then sell. And the cost is really just the seed and the time. And that was their entire business model. And they'd done this a number of times and they had these kind of staggered tree vintages, if you I'm using the wrong word, but like the vintage of trees every year that another cohort. And I was like, this is a really interesting business. And they had a fund around it because I don't want to know where the Venezuelan tree farmers are. I don't have those connections. I don't know how to sell walnuts at scale. Could I figure it out? Maybe. Is it worth my time? Probably not. Is it worth my money? If it doesn't take my time, maybe. And so the beauty of this one is that you have maximum leverage and you have the smallest personal checks. You have huge potentials for upside. There's also fees that you can put onto this. Typically, the better and the more trackers you have, the more you can add fees in. I'd say your first time, oftentimes you have less fees just because you want people to come in and not think you're going to get rich on the fees. They want to have as aligned incentives as possible with the investor. Now, oftentimes, the GP ends up richer than any single LP, obviously depends on how much capital gets put in, that they take from. Now, the risks. You have enormous responsibility and a very long feedback loop. And you're accountable to the LPs and to regulators and to the entrepreneurs who are running the businesses and to some degree, the customers that those businesses serve. And so you have a lot of masters to serve in this time period. And you can be rich on paper, but the entire time you almost feel like a slave, which sucks. And so your job becomes managing risk and reputation and people and portfolios, not just building one company. And if anything, you're almost building the company of the fund. So I got rich bootstrapping my companies. I took some of my cash and invested in other people's companies. That cash continued to compound. And I was able to invest and then co-found a school where we raised capital. I obviously promote school as well. And then finally, it's in fund management. So we've raised capital for some of the real estate deals that we've done when we buy big buildings, which we do through ACQ Real Estate. We've only done that privately to some of our higher level clients and portfolio companies. We are functionally general partners in some big real estate buildings, which you can check out at Acquisition.com Real Estate. But yeah, these are the four ways to make mega money, pick the path that's right for you, and may the odds be ever in your favor.