How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital: The Four Rules You Must Break To Get Rich

by Nathan Latka

What they know that you don’t is how to be a capitalist without any capital.

There are four golden rules that the business world has sold us to keep us from being successful. Those rules must be broken.

but as much as they annoy you, you’re also dying to know how they do it.

The New Rich are resourceful with their time, their money, and their energy. They get what they want when they want it.

Today, my peers and I are getting rich not just by starting companies from scratch, but by leveraging gold mines like Instagram and Airbnb that didn’t exist in the early 2000s. We drive wealth by taking advantage of new tools quickly and figuring out how to get those tools to work for us so we can work less.

Building wealth is the same.

use patterns and data to drive my decisions.

The Top Entrepreneurs,

Then there are the patterns. In all my time talking to top entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that their execution plans follow similar patterns that counter conventional business wisdom.

Other times it means following your gut when you see a big opportunity in front of you, even if it goes against everything you’re told you’re “supposed to be doing” with your

can join the New Rich if we just decide we want

You just need to be willing to break the rules and start looking in the right places.

they can put it up on Airbnb and generate cash flow.

Focus on becoming an expert at one thing. Come up with a remarkable idea. Set goals and work toward them. Give customers what they want.

But this is a terrible strategy if you’re looking to build wealth in the new economy.

Three-Focus Rule,

The way to get filthy rich is by aggressively copying others and then adding your own twist.

You have to copy to win,

The key is to analyze a business and pinpoint a need it’s not meeting for its customers—and then meet that need yourself. I’ll show you how.

you can then peacefully walk in and capitalize on their hard work.

They got rich without any of the risk, sweat, or bloodshed.

But don’t worry about any of this yet. You’ll just start by turning every one of your liabilities into assets using the sharing economy, which will erase most of your expenses.

Once the cash starts to flow, you’ll use that money to build, buy, invest, and sell your way to wealth.

Guess what? She doesn’t have any more intellect, talent, or hustle than you do.

The two biggest factors in success are actually timing and luck. (Don’t

Multiplying is when you find the patterns that link different projects and then leverage those connections so each venture makes way more than it could have on its own. Multiplying is the epitome of working smarter, not harder.

The Top Inbox is a Gmail tool that lets you schedule emails to be sent later, set inbox reminders, track opens, and schedule auto follow-ups.

Both products use lithium batteries to efficiently store energy. Since

lithium ion power—and he’s leveraging economies of scale to bring his costs down.

Multiplying is going to play a huge role in whatever strategies you embrace

get multiple ventures going and then pull out the patterns that link them.

recognize patterns and capitalize on them to multiply your income streams.

Always have more than one thing brewing, and always look for the patterns that can help your ...

However you start out, my only rule is that you’re always pursuing three new opportunities at the same time. Once a venture is up and running, you’re going to set it on autopilot so it only takes an hour or two of your time per month. I’ll show you how to do that later. At

The most important thing for now is that you’re learning to maximize your time, your effort, and your output.

with the Three-Focus Rule touches on everything I’ve said so far: it lets you test ideas (swing, miss, learn), multiply them (find and capitalize on the patterns), and then use that knowledge to launch brand-new ventures.

Other times new money comes from just talking to your customers and figuring out what else they might want that you can offer.

You have to copy your competitors. Do it now. Do it aggressively. Do it quickly. And do it by spending the least amount of money you possibly can.

you’re looking for the patterns that got your competitors to the top. Then you’re using that information to match or beat them.

Fiverr.com

Toptal.com.

Patreon.com.

Systems can pump out goals at a higher and higher speed the more you refine them, with minimal input from you.

They are what create the systems that make the audacious goals possible.

lets you create systems that automate the details. It gives you flow and routines.

Systems thinking requires you to give up making money today in exchange for taking the time, energy, and sweat equity to set up systems that will do the work for you in the future. It’s a lot of up-front work, and that’s the problem for most people. They prefer the short-term win.

If you want to defy the odds, you need a counterintuitive approach. Forget trying to appeal to the masses. Look at what the masses are going after, and then sell into the market that others have built around it.

siphon profits off the market they’ve created. This works in B2B selling and on the consumer side, too.

Pickaxes are hiding behind every popular marketplace.

The pickax to the VC industry is data.