Sex Hotline To Telecom Billions
Share
A story about how French billionaire Xavier Neil built his fortune starting from age 19.
"At age 19, he creates this business called Minitel, which is essentially a sex hotline phone service. It goes gangbusters and he makes a few million dollars off this.
Then he either creates or invests and buys a stake in something called World Net, sold a few years later for $50 million right before the dotcom crash.
His big thing was creating 'Free', which was like a T-Mobile - a mobile carrier. At the time in France, all SMS phone plans were very expensive. He undercut everybody and created the lowest cost way to have cellular service. Free became this huge company and his net worth ballooned to $6.6 billion.
After that, he created this thing called 42, which is a computer science school with no teachers and no staff. It's just a dope facility with computers where the computer is your lesson plan. It's like a video game - there's challenges like 'make a website that can do x, y, and z.' You have the internet and people next to you, and you need to figure out how to get past each level. It's all self-serve, you do projects to level up."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.