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Mohnish Pabrai

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116
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2025-08-21
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2025-08-21
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  1. “Whatever idea you have come up with. Is not going to work. Okay Because you came up with it in an ivory tower between your ears. And that's not really a great place to find great ideas. What's going to happen is we are going to be doing what I call rapid prototyping, which is we take this idea and show humans what it is. And when you show it to humans, you will get feedback. So maybe I'll just give it in more practical terms. When I was starting my first business, it was going to be a IT services business, information technology services. And I was going to be providing these services to very large businesses, companies that are billion dollars or more in earnings or cash flows. I was in a meeting with a senior IT guy at a very large bank in Chicago. And I was going through my PowerPoint deck with them. I came to the tenth slide”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Exactly. Yeah. Blue is work. Exactly. Now, when we embark on a startup, We should never do a startup to make money. The worst reason Start a company. The purpose of business is not to make money. The purpose or business is to deliver an incredible product or service to humanity. If you do that, the money is a side effect. It'll happen. We don't need to focus on it. So what we are looking for is do we have a product or a service that we are thinking about that we could bring into this world that is going to improve the world in some way?”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “For my nine to five. Now, before I started my startup, I used to get top reviews as an employee. I was very focused on doing a great job of my employer, all in, right? The day I decided I'm going to do my startup, I decided I need to be just above firing level. My performance needs to be just good enough so they don't can me, but nothing beyond that because I need all my energy to go into my startup. So that's the only tweak I'm making is the blue stays, but we're not doing extra blues like we were doing before, right?”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Other preparing dinner and showering, shaving, getting ready, whatever else. So that's about four hours a day on the weekdays, which is including commute time, and about eight hours a day on the weekend. Then we get to free time, you know, social media and watching Netflix and hanging out with friends, going for dinner. And we've got quite a bit. We've got about four hours a day of doing that and about eight hours a day on the weekend. So this is kind of typical or a typical week for most people would look like, right? Now, when you're starting a business, the important thing is don't shut off the cash flow. Some other yo-yo is paying your rent and some other yo-yo is paying your grocery. So we don't want to rock the boat, but we're going to make one change to blue.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Right. So if we look at our whole week, for example, these beautifully arranged Legos, if I take one of these blocks of Legos, so each one of those blocks in there is two hours, so eight hours a day, we are sleeping eight hours a day, right? And we're doing that seven days a week, right? So basically we've got seven days a week, eight hours a day, we're sleeping. The blue Legos are showing our 40 hours a week, eight hours a day, five days a week. We're working, right? Then we get to”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And I can clone an existing business. Now you've combined two mental models and we can start adding more to them. But two has become 11. One plus one has already become 11. It's nonlinear. And why is it that why am I saying that entrepreneurs do not take risk? If I take my own case as an example and I can give you 100 cases like that, but if I take my own case as an example, I was working nine to five at a company and I had a business idea. My employer expected me to work 40 hours a week, right? There's 168 hours in the week. So I felt like there must be at least another third. 30, 40 hours that I could work On my startup”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Another mental model humans have this perspective that starting a business is risky. In reality, entrepreneurs do not take risk. They do everything in their power to minimize risk. And in many cases, when they embark on a business, the risk approaches zero. What is extremely risky is a nine to five job. Because we have one life. And it goes away, and you may not get to do what's in your heart. You may not get your music out. And so getting our music out is really important. So this notion, which is drilled into us that if you're an entrepreneur, you're taking risk, really kind of does a big disservice to most humans. And if humans understood that if I embark on a business, I can do it in a format with the risk is zero or close to zero.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Oh, what a terrible operation. The whole store was topsy turvies, it was really bad. And Sam says to him, yeah, but did you see the candle display? The candle display was fantastic. So Sam felt that he could learn from anyone. It didn't matter if you were a useless operator or great operator or whatever, anyone in the middle. Walmart is just an amalgamation of ideas from other places. If we look at a company like Starbucks, Think of Starbucks as innovative, but actually what Howard Schultz did is he saw a concept in Italy, and his idea was that I think this is work in the US. And so he cloned that idea from Italy and brought that coffee shop experience to the US. If you are a great cloner, You will be ninety percent ahead or ninety five percent of the rest of humanity. Now”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, and they're both gone. In fact, Walmart buried them. And Sam Walton was one of the most intense cloners ever. So if he was driving on vacation with his family and he's passing some retail store, he would tell his family to stay in the car and he would go in the store just to check it out. And he said that there is no human who has lived in history or will live in the future who has visited more retail stores than he has. One time there was a manager of his and he would go in with his managers to these stores. Retail is one of the most transparent businesses. You can go into your competitor store and you'll figure out the entire business model in 10 minutes. You don't need to talk to them. It's beautiful. So he went into this retail store and the manager says to him,”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Which a competitor that he took out. We look at Excel, it came from Lotus. We look at Bing, came from Google, and you know what Bing is? But it's not Google. Everything that Microsoft has done well at has come from copying someone on the outside. And when we look at Sam Walton, who's, you know, the Walton family, if you pull them all together, it's the richest family in the world. It's richer than Elon and everyone. And Sam Walton, by his own admission, would tell you that he has no original ideas. So originally Walmart cloned Sears and Kmart.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “We think of Bill Gates as an innovator. And we think Sam Balton created Walmart, which was also new. But actually they're both Me Too models. And Microsoft would not have existed without being a great cloner. So when we look at Microsoft Word, it came from WordPerfect.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yes, let's take the mental model of cloning. Cloning, right? What we are taught is that if you want to start a business, you need to come up with something new, something that hasn't been done before. But the reality is that the world will very easily accept three of the same thing, or five of the same thing. And usually it is an advantage to look at something that already exists and say, can another one of those exist? For example, or can I take what's there and tweak it a little bit? So there's something peculiar in the human psyche, maybe going back into our history and our ancestral evolution, where humans look down upon cloning. But if you look at it so for example, two of the greatest cloners, I think, in human history were Bill Gates and Sam Walton.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It really depends on what message. There are a few different mental models that I've figured out over the last few decades. When you have clarity on these mental models and especially when you can start overlaying them, that's when you get one plus one becomes 11. And so these mental models are not all in the same direction or in the same genre”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “There are three things that matter with investing. And there's also something known as the rule of 72, but I wish they would teach it more in high school. And it tells us how long it takes money to double. Now, this is exciting.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “If humans understood that if I embark on a business in a format with the risk is close to zero, more people would do it. And that's what these mental models do. For example, cloning. We are taught if you want to start a business, you need to come up with something new. But actually, if you are a great cloner, you will be 90% ahead of the rest of humanity. And in fact, everything that Microsoft has done well at has come from copying someone on the outside. And then there's time. When you're starting a business, don't quit the day job because some other yo-yo is paying your rent. But it does mean that you need to find time to work on your business. But I will show you the perfect way to allocate your time. And that's not all. There's models like low-hanging fruit, skin in the game, givers versus takers, and the circle of competence. And I'll explain all of them.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “It's a way of doing business and making money without taking risks. Like, for example, Mr. Gates, Mr. Walton, Mr. Branson, all of these people follow these simple mental models. So if they won, they would win big. And if they lost, they'd lose nothing.”

    2025-08-21 · The Diary of a CEO · Mohnish Pabrai (Billionaire Investor): The $100 Investment Hack That's Disappearing Fast! The Fastest Way To Financial Freedom! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT