Lessons Learned From Investing In A Better Future #31

Podcast
Written by Nick Halaris

Hi Everyone and Welcome Back!

This week on The Nick Halaris Show we are featuring entrepreneur, angel investor, and the author of the P.S. You Should Know Newsletter, Pavel Sokolovsky.  Pavel has an impressive track record in business and investing and is someone I talk to regularly to compare notes on the world, expand my horizon, and challenge my assumptions.  I always walk away from our discussions with some new perspectives and ideas.

Ready to dive in? Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Youtube or on your favorite podcast platform.

Pavel is someone who has thought deeply about entrepreneurship and the art of investing and I wanted to have him on the show to highlight some of the ideas and practices that have made him so successful.  I also wanted to showcase his work as a newsletter writer as I’ve gotten so much out of P.S. You Should Know over the years.  In this fascinating discussion we cover:

  • What it was like to grow-up in the Midwest as an immigrant from the Soviet Union

  • How Pavel managed to build a successful technology company in a decidedly old school industry

  • The pros and cons of managing a chronically undercapitalized startup

  • What drew Pavel to pursue angel investing and how he’s managed to be successful at such a difficult game

    &

  • Why he’s so intrinsically motivated to help other founders be successful  

Stay tuned to the end to learn Pavel’s interesting take on what it means to be a socially conscious angel investor and how he prioritizes his investment decisions based on a steadfast commitment to supporting a vision of the future that he actually believes in.  You’ll also learn the origin story for P.S. You Should Know and Pavel’s unique daily process for curating and developing content for his writing.

I hope you all enjoy this episode.  Thanks for tuning-in!      

Love this episode? Please rate, subscribe, and review on your favorite podcast platform to help more users find our show. 🙏 Thank you

Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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