He Became a Millionaire At 17, Lost It All.. & Made It All Back | Neil Patel

The interview was recorded in Beverly Hills in 2025, with School of Hard Knocks hosts James, Jack and Josh interviewing Neil Patel. The hosts introduced Patel as a longtime internet marketer who had built multiple multimillion-dollar businesses and a major marketing agency; the substantive discussion centered on NP Digital, entrepreneurship, global expansion, AI, marketing and business building.

Patel became a millionaire extremely young—identified by the hosts as age 17—but had lost the money by roughly 20 or 21. He said he had reinvested and spent the cash while also borrowing money, then repaid everything he owed within about a year.

Patel does not think paper net worth is the most meaningful definition of being a millionaire; he pays more attention to actual cash. He noted that homes, retirement accounts and stocks can make someone a millionaire on paper without giving them equivalent liquid wealth.

Patel cited an angel investor in major AI companies whose best investment was reportedly Apple stock bought roughly 20–24 years earlier. The investor told Patel that the Apple position had produced a return Patel remembered as perhaps 600–800 times the original investment, exceeding the investor's much more fashionable AI bets.

Patel started his first company, Advice Monkey, at 16, and the business failed. Its failure nevertheless forced him to learn SEO and digital marketing, which became the skill set on which much of his later career was built.

Patel described NP Digital's aggressive international expansion over the previous three years as one of his most expensive business mistakes or lessons. The company expanded in many markets around roughly the same time, including Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Germany, Italy and France, requiring teams and substantial spending in each region.

The simultaneous international expansion cost far more than a few million dollars and created roughly three years of financial pain, but Patel now believes it built an important competitive advantage. He said 2025 would be among the last years in which he would spend such a large percentage of the company's resources expanding overseas, although absolute international spending could still increase as the business grows.

Patel believed the broader business environment had been difficult since roughly mid-2022, when higher interest rates began slowing economic activity. He contrasted strong AI-related companies with many conventional private businesses that, in his view, had struggled during that period.

NP Digital's costly global footprint is now attracting multinational corporations that specifically want one agency capable of serving multiple countries. Patel said global prospects increasingly approach the firm because it can operate across regions rather than functioning only as a U.S. agency.

Patel used an unnamed U.S.-founded, family-owned company with more than $100 billion in annual revenue to illustrate NP Digital's enterprise expansion strategy. The company was considering testing NP Digital in Latin America, and Patel declined to identify its sector because doing so would make the company obvious.

Patel described enterprise growth as a “land and expand” process rather than trying to win an enormous contract immediately. In his example, an initial roughly $300,000-a-year engagement could expand to about $1 million across Latin America, approximately $3 million as additional continents were added, and potentially around $10 million once NP Digital handled more divisions; the figures were explicitly rough illustrations.

Patel said this land-and-expand mechanism is central to building an enterprise B2B company. A small successful test reduces the customer's perceived risk and can lead the client to grant additional countries, divisions and budgets.

Patel sees globalization as an important future direction for content as well as service businesses. The hosts recalled that he had previously identified globalization of content as a major opportunity, including localized production and AI-enabled dubbing into languages such as Spanish and Arabic.

School of Hard Knocks said some of its strongest audience growth came after a partnership with the UAE government led it to interview business owners in Dubai and elsewhere in the UAE. The hosts said producing content inside another geography helped expose them to a new Middle Eastern audience because social platforms often distribute content geographically.

Patel's signal for entering a new country is existing organic traction there, not merely management enthusiasm. He recommended watching social and other platform analytics for meaningful increases in viewers from a particular country before committing significant resources.

A company entering a new international market should, in Patel's view, have enough capital to support the operation for two or three years before it may break even. He urged founders to think globally from the beginning even if they do not physically expand internationally on day one.

Patel argued that no single country contains the majority of the world's potential audience, making the collective “long tail” of international markets strategically important. He pointed to global companies such as Google, Microsoft and Walmart as businesses that may have originated in one place but ultimately built worldwide operations.

School of Hard Knocks was experiencing enough growth that one host said he was spending roughly 50–60% of his week hiring and interviewing. The company did not yet have a conventional HR department capable of taking founder involvement out of recruiting.

NP Digital uses a mixture of acquisitions and greenfield expansion, but Patel said most international expansion has been built from the ground up with people on the ground. Acquired businesses are subsequently given NP Digital's systems and procedures.

For a new country, Patel likes recruiting someone who has already succeeded at a competitor in that market and has been promoted repeatedly. Ideally that person has worked for several competitors, giving them relationships with customers and a broad network of local talent as well as an understanding of the market's culture and nuances.

Patel cautioned against automatically hiring executives accustomed only to enormous organizations when the job is to build a small operation from scratch. Someone experienced in managing a thousand-person organization may be highly capable but still lack the scrappy skills required to launch a new regional office.

Patel gave NP Digital's APAC managing director, Dan, as an example of the profile he wants. Patel recalled Dan having worked for competitors in Canada, Europe and APAC and being repeatedly promoted; importantly, the operations he had managed were still small enough that he knew how to launch and scale regional teams.

Patel noted that a successful regional business does not need to match U.S. revenue to be worthwhile. Markets such as India may naturally generate less dollar revenue because of currency exchange rates and GDP per capita, so regional performance should be judged in context.

Patel does not fully subscribe to the conventional idea that entirely different leaders are always needed at each stage from zero to one, one to ten and ten to one hundred. His alternative is to create many regional or divisional businesses capable of producing perhaps $10–20 million each and aggregate them into a much larger company.

He considers building several medium-sized regional revenue engines easier than forcing one operation to grow from zero to hundreds of millions or billions. His hypothetical example combined a $20 million U.S. operation with $5 million in Australia, $5 million in India, $10 million in the UK and many other countries until the total could approach $200 million.

NP Digital uses several tools to attract experienced executives away from established competitors: competitive salaries, potential equity or equity-like bonuses, and operating freedom. Patel emphasized that the company has no outside investors, which he believes reduces bureaucracy and permits more flexible executive compensation than many public or private-equity-controlled businesses can offer.

Patel argued that startup equity alone is not automatically attractive because most startups fail and their equity becomes worthless. NP Digital therefore tries to combine upside with cash compensation comparable to what established competitors already pay.

Patel sees AI agents as a major near-term entrepreneurial opportunity because many conventional businesses want automation but do not know how to implement it. He mentioned use cases including websites, marketing, spreadsheets and other repetitive manual work for HVAC companies, roofers, technology companies and larger corporations.

His simple AI-agent business model was charging a company roughly $1,000 per month for something that might cost only about $100 per month in technology once configured. At roughly $900 gross profit per customer, ten customers could produce about $9,000 per month for a solo operator, with broader services potentially taking the business to $20,000–$30,000 in monthly profit.

The hosts framed AI as potentially affecting both entrepreneurship and employment, citing a previous interview with Thomas Healey and discussion of Amazon's aggressive AI adoption. A rumored figure of 30,000 Amazon job cuts was corrected during the discussion to what Patel believed was roughly 13,000–17,000, illustrating the uncertainty around the breaking-news figure rather than establishing a firm number.

Patel does not think the most important AI skill is simply coding, prompt engineering or mastery of a particular application. He believes the durable skill is rapid experimentation because tools and techniques are changing so quickly that something valuable today may be obsolete shortly afterward.

He used Jasper as an example of how rapidly AI products can be displaced or forced to change positioning when broader platforms gain similar capabilities. His conclusion was that businesses that continuously test new tools are more likely to understand what is working and how to integrate it before they fall behind.

Patel said ranking in AI answer engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity has substantial overlap with traditional SEO but also meaningful differences. Factors he identified included brand mentions across the web, topical relevance, reviews, review sentiment, the content of a company's own site, structured data and schema markup.

Brand mentions play a role in AI visibility somewhat analogous to backlinks in traditional search, according to Patel. He also said AI systems consider sentiment around a brand to a greater degree than conventional SEO historically has, including whether reviews and discussion are positive or negative relative to competitors.

Patel emphasized making a website's information structurally easy for machines to interpret. Structured data and schema markup help systems index and understand what a page contains rather than relying only on unstructured prose.

NP Digital's testing led Patel to believe AI systems disproportionately cite and surface genuinely human-created content. Although generative AI can produce content itself, he said the firm's observations suggested that human-written material still receives stronger citation and recommendation behavior.

Patel became an entrepreneur partly because, when he was 16, the high-paying career paths he saw generally required credentials he did not yet have. He said that if the current environment had offered him a straightforward six-figure job at 16, he might have chosen the corporate route instead of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship was already common on Patel's mother's side of the family. He described relatives operating traditional businesses including elderly-care and retirement facilities, gas stations, hotels or motels, self-storage businesses and pharmacies.

Patel's first serious website came from his own failed attempt to find a job. After noticing that Monster.com was publicly traded and generated enormous revenue, he reasoned that capturing even 1% of that business could make him rich and built a competing job site.

The job-board business was essentially a poor Monster.com copy and initially got no traction. Patel paid a marketing firm using money he had earned doing jobs such as picking up trash, cleaning restrooms and selling car parts to other students, but the firm failed to produce results.

Being broke and unable to afford another solution forced Patel to teach himself online marketing. He eventually became good enough to generate substantial traffic, although he still had not figured out how to monetize his own site.

Patel's first major commercial breakthrough came from a nighttime college speech he gave while still attending high school at 16. In a Speech 101 class he explained how Google's algorithm worked; someone in the room introduced him to a boss who hired Patel part-time for $5,000 per month.

Patel said that first client ultimately generated roughly $25 million in annual revenue from the work he helped perform and referred three additional clients. Each of the referrals also paid about $5,000 per month, taking Patel to roughly $20,000 in monthly income at age 16.

NP Digital had been generating nine figures of annual revenue for some time by the interview. Patel said 2025 was nevertheless shaping up to be its first year of negative organic growth, at roughly a 1% decline; acquisitions meant total revenue still grew, but he did not like counting acquired growth as organic performance.

Before the recent slowdown, NP Digital had continued growing at roughly 40–60% a year even after reaching substantial scale. Patel attributed much of the latest deceleration to tariffs and their effects on clients selling physical goods.

Patel resisted using political leaders as an excuse for business performance even while acknowledging that tariffs hurt his company. He said external conditions are real, but management still has to decide how to respond rather than treating a president, economy or policy environment as an explanation that removes responsibility from the business.

He described the mechanism by which tariffs affected NP Digital as clients facing higher product costs and responding by trimming marketing budgets before cutting employees. Marketing is easier for a corporation to increase or decrease quickly than its workforce.

Patel said the tariff-related revenue impact became visible around April, but NP Digital recovered much of the earlier loss by creating a new AI-search offering. Rather than relying solely on conventional SEO, the company began selling services specifically around visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar systems.

Customer demand, rather than an internal terminology debate, convinced Patel that AI-search optimization deserved its own commercial offering. At conferences, customers repeatedly told him they already understood ordinary SEO and specifically wanted help appearing in ChatGPT.

Patel said this demand appeared even at enterprise conferences in Hong Kong, where attendees were discussing ChatGPT despite access restrictions and, according to him, using VPNs to reach it. The audiences included large publicly traded corporations, and AI-search visibility was repeatedly one of their primary questions.

He described receiving questions from enormous companies about how to make their products appear when consumers ask AI systems relevant questions. He took the intensity of that enterprise demand as evidence that NP Digital should push the service aggressively rather than treat AI search as a minor SEO add-on.

NP Digital repositioned its homepage around discovery across both conventional and AI search. Patel gave the headline as: “We make sure customers find you everywhere from Google to ChatGPT,” followed by messaging about appearing wherever customers are searching, swiping, scrolling, streaming and shopping.

The first service highlighted in the revised homepage messaging became “AI SEO.” Patel acknowledged that the industry uses competing labels such as GEO and ChatGPT marketing but said NP Digital chose language customers could easily understand.

The messaging change produced more than a 30% increase in leads, according to Patel, along with larger opportunities, a higher close rate and faster closing. He saw this as evidence that the company had matched its positioning to an urgent customer problem rather than merely changing marketing terminology.

Patel expects short-form video to become even more important over the next five to ten years. He called it the most heavily consumed form of internet content at the time and described its appeal as highly addictive, while noting indications that some Gen Z users may be reducing consumption because of fatigue with AI-generated material.

Patel rejected the idea that short-form content is useful only for consumer businesses. He said NP Digital works with both B2B and B2C companies and cited research indicating that roughly 4% of Instagram users were interested in B2B content; that smaller audience can still be commercially valuable because each viewer may be worth more.

Patel openly said he does not think he has the personality or interest needed to build a gigantic mass-consumer following. He also considers virality partly unpredictable, pointing out that his School of Hard Knocks appearance outperformed interviews with much larger celebrities even though their names should theoretically have drawn more attention.

His preferred content strategy is education and useful tactical information aimed at a clearly defined vertical rather than chasing mass fame. He believes this creates a higher probability of attracting followers for a specific reason and makes monetization much easier.

Patel summarized the philosophy bluntly: a large following that generates no revenue has little business value. Unless someone reaches the extraordinary scale of figures with hundreds of millions of followers, he believes a focused niche audience is generally more commercially useful than a large undifferentiated one.

Patel's first core marketing principle is to identify the ideal customer with precision. Although NP Digital serves smaller companies too, he said its ideal customer is a publicly traded global corporation operating in at least 20 countries.

Large multinational clients take longer to win but are unusually sticky once secured. Patel described financial clients whose security requirements put NP Digital employees on the client's own corporate laptops after background and security checks, making switching providers operationally difficult.

Patel deliberately produces marketing material that may never become viral but is highly useful to his ideal enterprise buyer. He frequently publishes charts and data graphics that executives can reuse in meetings and presentations; as those materials circulate internally and internationally, NP Digital's brand spreads through organizations and generates contracts.

This leads Patel to favor revenue-producing “boring” marketing over content optimized merely for view counts. A chart seen by fewer relevant executives can be far more valuable than entertainment seen by a million people who will never buy.

Patel agreed that social-media followers are essentially a borrowed audience because the platform controls access to them. He therefore recommended moving relevant followers into channels the business controls.

His preferred owned-audience strategy is to collect email addresses and, ideally, phone numbers as well. He considers SMS especially attractive because of higher open rates, although his preferred setup captures both email and phone contact information.

Patel's third major audience-building principle is real-world interaction at industry events. He believes social media can create awareness, but personal brands and high-value commercial relationships are difficult to monetize fully without meeting people face to face.

NP Digital makes relatively little money directly from the size of Patel's social following, while his in-person conference interactions can produce extremely high close rates. Many prospects first discover him online, but he said some deals would never have closed without the later real-world meeting.

Patel and his co-founder have repeatedly done labor-intensive work that does not scale cleanly because it improves performance. One example is recording sales calls with permission and personally reviewing them, critiquing reps and having the reps practice revised pitches until their performance improves.

Patel still reviews some recorded sales calls himself, while his co-founder does even more of this hands-on coaching. He prefers personally understanding what went wrong over automatically delegating every diagnostic task to AI.

NP Digital discovered that simply giving international teams the successful U.S. sales scripts did not make those teams perform at U.S. levels. Patel's co-founder traveled to regional offices to conduct sales training; Patel also trained teams in person and sometimes joined live prospect calls to intervene and explain missed opportunities.

In one sales call immediately before the interview, Patel identified three specific weaknesses in a rep's pitch. The rep had not used enough case studies from the prospect's industry, had failed to quantify and dramatize the customer's problem, and had not tied the analysis together into a concrete decision and implementation path.

Patel wants salespeople to “paint the picture” rather than merely list services or findings. For a local-business prospect, he suggested showing the overall search opportunity, comparing the prospect with competitors, demonstrating missed reviews and visibility, translating those gaps into lost revenue, and then explaining what needs fixing first.

Patel cited figures of roughly 13.7 billion Google searches per day and about 5 trillion per year, with approximately 40% being local searches. He used the resulting roughly 2 trillion annual local searches as an example of the type of quantitative story a salesperson should present to a local-business prospect.

A strong sales presentation should move from problem to economic cost to solution, price, timing and next action, rather than ending with “let us know what you think.” Patel recommended giving the prospect a staged roadmap—solve A, then B, then C—while explicitly scheduling the next follow-up.

Patel opposed delaying marketing while waiting months for a perfect website redesign. His preference is to improve pages incrementally, begin generating additional traffic and revenue immediately, and end up with the redesigned site over time rather than sacrificing months of commercial results.

NP Digital is already paid by publicly traded companies to optimize visibility inside social-media search systems, not just Google. Patel said social SEO considers captions, hashtags, the actual spoken content that platforms transcribe, comments, sentiment and engagement signals.

Patel used luxury handbags as an example of why social-search visibility has value beyond an immediate transaction. A consumer who cannot afford Louis Vuitton today may repeatedly encounter the brand, aspire to it and eventually become a customer.

Patel cited Instagram as processing roughly 6.5 billion searches a day, compared with roughly 13.7 billion for Google. While many Instagram searches are social rather than commercial, he stressed that product discovery, services and shopping still represent a large opportunity, as they do on TikTok.

Patel sees performance advertising and branding as overlapping rather than separate disciplines. Search ads may produce measurable clicks and sales while simultaneously exposing users to a brand, just as television or connected-TV advertising can create awareness that later results in direct website visits.

He used Airbnb's historical Google advertising as an example of performance spending also creating brand recognition. Conversely, advertising on channels such as connected television, Netflix-style environments or YouTube can eventually produce purchases that appear to come from a later direct visit.

Modern marketing budgets are increasingly fragmented across channels rather than concentrated in one platform. Patel cited consumers using more than six social networks per month and noted that people simultaneously use Google, ChatGPT, Bing and multiple social platforms, so companies need visibility across the broader customer journey.

Earlier in his career, Patel spent more than $100,000 on luxury clothing to test whether appearance changed how prospects treated him. The host remembered the experiment as roughly $160,000; Patel himself described it more cautiously as “a hundred and something thousand.”

The appearance experiment worked: Patel said people perceived him as more successful and were more willing to do business with him when he wore expensive brands such as Tom Ford, Burberry and Loro Piana. He also wore expensive watches, jewelry and carried high-end accessories that reinforced that perception.

Patel's attitude toward appearance has changed substantially with age and established credibility. At 40, he said he often wears comfortable Vuori clothing—even sweatpants—to stages and meetings with senior public-company executives because his demonstrated ability to produce results now matters more than signaling success through clothes.

Patel currently drives a Honda Odyssey and recounted being mistaken for a ride-share driver when arriving at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills. He used the story to illustrate that visible status still affects initial perception, even though he personally no longer considers the trade-off worth changing his lifestyle.

Patel had previously lived in Las Vegas but chose his current location partly for his children's education. He said he had a six-year-old and a four-year-old and was willing to tolerate higher taxes because he considered the local school system academically better and wanted to improve their educational opportunities.

Patel strongly questioned the value of expensive business coaching because enormous amounts of instructional information are now available free through sources such as YouTube and ChatGPT. He distinguished paying for genuine community and peer support from paying thousands of dollars merely to hear information or wealth advice from an individual.

He cited a friend who spent more than $10,000 on travel and accommodations to visit Richard Branson's island as an example of an experience that produced networking but apparently no measurable business return. Afterward, the friend reportedly agreed that it probably would not create additional revenue.

Patel distinguished traditional consulting from the kind of business coaching he criticizes. Firms such as Deloitte are paid to identify problems, send teams into departments and actually execute solutions; many coaches instead sell the promise that they will turn a $1 million business into a $10 million business.

His principal objection is not coaching itself but wealth promises. Patel said coaching can be legitimate when it helps someone improve a defined skill, comparing it with athletic or management coaching, but he views much entrepreneurship and marketing coaching as problematic because the coach's commercial pitch is essentially “I will make you rich.”

Patel believes many highly profitable coaching businesses exist primarily because coaching is the seller's easiest monetization model. His preferred model is to earn by solving real problems or creating value alongside other people rather than charging people for promises of increased wealth.

He endorsed joint ventures and aligned-upside structures as an alternative where appropriate. Instead of selling someone a $10,000 weekend promising doubled revenue, partners can build or invest together and make money when the underlying business creates value.

Patel and his business partner had worked together for eight years at the time of the interview. He strongly favors having co-founders because early companies lack both time and money, making division of responsibilities valuable.

Patel recommends founding teams of two or three people and considers four, five or six founders increasingly unwieldy. His concern is not partnership itself but having too many decision-makers and overlapping responsibilities.

School of Hard Knocks explained its own three-founder division of labor during this discussion. James was described as the channel's public face, connector and front-end engine; Jack handled much of the community product and front-end agency sales; Josh ran the marketing agency, brand partnerships and part of hiring and operations, with Jack and Josh broadly dividing backend responsibilities.

NP Digital's leadership structure evolved as the company outgrew what its founders were personally best at doing. Patel's co-founder initially served as CEO; Patel recalled roughly $5 million in first-year revenue, approximately $18 million in the second year, and somewhere below $40 million in the third as the company roughly doubled for a period.

The company brought in a president around year two and later a new CEO, perhaps around year four, to professionalize and scale the organization. Patel said he and his co-founder recognized that they did not have the experience required for enterprise politics, procurement, red tape, churn management and the sales expectations of very large corporations.

Patel identified that outside executive as Mike Gullixson, who had previously run a much larger competitor. Patel recalled the competitor having roughly 7,000 employees when Gullixson was there and perhaps 13,000–14,000 later.

Gullixson rapidly helped NP Digital grow beyond 1,000 employees, win more contracts and revenue, and reduce churn. Patel's lesson was to hire someone who has already solved the next class of organizational problem rather than forcing founders to master every stage themselves.

Patel and his co-founder consequently concentrated on their strongest functions. Patel focused primarily on marketing, while his co-founder concentrated on sales and recruiting.

Patel deliberately moved to Seattle earlier in his career to be around entrepreneurs and mentors, living there for six straight years. He had already been traveling there to help business owners and eventually relocated in order to deepen those relationships.

Edward Yim materially helped Patel make that move by paying his relocation costs and housing. Patel estimated the one-bedroom rent at roughly $2,000 per month at the time; in return Patel advised Yim on his company, while Yim and others also gave Patel business guidance.

Another important adviser was Andy Liu, whom Patel described as having sold one company to a business that was later acquired by Microsoft and another to Vizio before becoming a venture capitalist. Liu regularly gave Patel feedback when he encountered business problems.

Patel's method for obtaining mentors is to create value for them before asking for anything. A young person good at social media, for example, should help an accomplished entrepreneur with social media if that is an area where the entrepreneur needs assistance.

He stressed that the help should be given without a hidden transaction in mind. In his experience, people who have genuinely been helped often become willing to return far more value later, whereas generosity designed around a predetermined payoff tends not to create the same relationship.

Patel strongly prefers businesses with very large total addressable markets. He thinks in terms of the number of potential buyers multiplied by what each can spend and prefers markets worth tens of billions of dollars rather than one worth only about $1 billion.

His reasoning is that capturing even a fraction of a percent of a huge market can create a large business, while capturing the same fraction of a $100 million market cannot. He also believes the sales and marketing effort required to pursue a small market may not be dramatically lower.

Patel said he learned this “big market” thinking partly from Michael Delaney of the private-equity firm Court Square. Delaney described marketing as a large “punch bowl” with enough opportunity for many competitors to prosper simultaneously, an analogy Patel adopted.

Along with a huge market, Patel actually prefers businesses that do not require radical innovation. He considers creating an entirely new category much riskier because the entrepreneur must educate customers as well as sell the product.

He contrasted category-creating products such as 5-hour Energy with basic products such as lumber. Wood is not novel, but persistent demand exists for buildings, furniture and other uses; Patel thinks selling something people already understand and need is generally easier and less risky.

Patel does not believe an ordinary company must be revolutionary to succeed. It can outperform competitors in only one or two meaningful areas, accept that competitors may beat it elsewhere, and still capture enough of a large market to build a valuable business.

If forced to start again and make money quickly, Patel would seriously consider buying an existing “boring” business rather than building an innovative startup from scratch. He views mature service businesses as especially attractive when their economics, customers and demand are already proven.

NP Digital itself acquires what Patel considers boring businesses inside marketing rather than diversifying into unrelated operating companies. He said the group has invested in businesses such as HVAC and plumbing companies but does not generally acquire and operate them because they are outside its core focus.

The financing structure is a major reason Patel likes traditional businesses for a new entrepreneur. A plumbing or HVAC company may have vehicles, machinery, equipment and other tangible assets that make bank financing easier, while the seller may finance another portion of the purchase.

Combining seller financing with a bank loan can sharply reduce the buyer's required cash contribution. Patel contrasted this with acquiring an asset-light marketing agency, where a lender has much less tangible collateral supporting the loan.

Patel's final advice to younger people was not to make becoming rich at 16 or 20 the center of their lives. He believes younger generations may have very long lives ahead and should spend meaningful time enjoying life, experiencing the world and not treating early entrepreneurship as an obligation.

His desired personal legacy is almost entirely family-centered rather than financial or public. Patel wants his wife to know he loved her and his children to remember that he was present and shared good experiences with them; he does not care whether the public remembers his house, cars, wealth or professional status.

Patel also does not want his children to remain preoccupied with him after his death. He wants them to remember him positively, then continue living peacefully, enjoying their own lives and experiences rather than organizing their identity around his legacy.

The conversation unexpectedly produced a potential business-development opportunity between NP Digital and School of Hard Knocks. Patel said he had not known that the podcast team also created content for corporations, praised the quality of its work and said he probably had customers he could send them.

School of Hard Knocks said its corporate-content operation had roughly 20 clients and was actively trying to scale. The parties indicated they would continue that discussion after Patel suggested there could be referral opportunities.