⏳ What's Rarer Than A Rolex?

T.I.N.Y email, Time Billionaires #013

Aadit Sheth

Sep 6

Hey Time Billionaire — Aadit here.

T.I.N.Y tl;dr:

Trend: The Creator Economy
Interesting: What’s Rarer Than a Rolex? A Dominos x Rolex, Rolex.
Not to be missed: Warren Buffett’s 15 lessons
Yes: It’s all about perspective

Read time: 3 mins

Welcome to 305 new Time Billionaires that have joined us since last Tuesday!

Today’s issue is brought to you by Cyber Patterns.

If you look at enough successful internet creators, you'll see they use a lot of the same strategies to win the Great Online Game.

Every week, Jason Levin writes about new, weird strategies and patterns you haven’t heard about.

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Creator Economy

Most of you probably know about the creator economy. You’re probably part of it (knowing or unknowingly).

If you haven’t heard about the creator economy, here’s a quick rundown for you:

It was 2019.
This thing called Covid hit the world.
People suddenly started spending 4x more time online: connecting, consuming, creating, entertaining themselves.
This led to a hockey stick growth of creators online.
Now creators are building companies, taking their audiences offline, making money and changing the world.

Here’s what Naval thinks:

Creator economy is an exit from employment

Here’s another example of how powerful the Creator Economy is:

Companies don’t want to get ad slots on TV or bill boards anymore.

Look at Coinbase.

They sponsored Mr. Beast’s video.

13m views in less than a day. It got them from 12th place →5th place in App Store rankings.

This is the creator economy. The money flows where the attention flows.

And right now, it’s towards creators.

Positive-sum game: If you’re building or working in the Creator Economy, reply to this or DM on Twitter. Happy to help out in any way!

What’s Rarer Than a Rolex?

I saw this image recently:

A collaboration with Dominos and Rolex?

I won’t lie — I thought it was fake at first.

So I just had to dig in further…

Here are 2 things I found out:

This is not an official Rolex release
The story behind this is pretty baller

Let’s get into the story.

In 1977, the founder and CEO of Domino’s Pizza (Tom Monaghan) wore a Bulova with the Domino’s logo on its face.

A franchisee asked what he had to do to get that watch from Tom.

Tom said: ‘Turn in a $20,000 sales week’.

Basically, make $20,000 in a week.

That’s how it started.

Now, the ‘Rolex Challenge’ is an incentive for franchisees to make more money.

Specifically, you have to make $25,000 per week for 4 weeks straight.

It’s not easy when a franchisee pulls in $17,000 per week on average.

Pretty cool to see Domino’s do this though. People really want that Rolex, don’t they?

Warren Buffett’s 15 lessons

I came across this Twitter thread about the 15 lessons Warren Buffett shared in his shareholder letters.

Here are some of my favorite lessons:

Lesson: Happiness is Doing What You Love

Cliché but true.

Lesson: More Employees ≠ Efficiency

My favorite businesses and 1-to-10-person businesses. Small team. More control. More fun. Less stress.

Counterintuitive right? Should more people mean the work is split up leading to less stress?

Managing people is stressful too.

My favorite business is one that you know. Adblock.

Created by Michael Gundlach (‘Just a guy’).

He’s the only employee but I’d imagine some people work on a contract basis.

Adblock pulls in tens of millions of dollars per year. Insane.

Lesson: Your Greatest Asset Is You

Naval said:

“In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. We want to factor luck out of it.”

This stuck with me.

Your greatest asset is you. Invest in yourself to develop skills where luck doesn’t play a factor in making money (or at least plays a very small factor).

Here is the rest of the thread: