Episode 92: How to Build a Business You Can Sell with Damien Peters

Acquania Escarne 0:00

Today we're gonna discuss how Damien Peterscreated multiple online media companies lived abroad with his family in Spain, and made work optional by leveraging his nine to five, and investing in real estate.

You are listening to the purpose of money podcast, a podcast where we talk about ways to build wealth and create more freedom in your life. Today. I am your host Acquania Escarne.

During Damien Peters tech career, he led product teams at big tech companies and startups such as Facebook, aka meta, and Zynga. In 2017, Damien was the first African American hired to lead product at Facebook, so it's no surprise that he is an advocate for diversity in tech. Outside of his nine to five he started several online media companies, with the most recent being acquired in 2022.

His passion for lifestyle design led him to move his entire family to Spain for two years. Transforming his tech salary into profitable real estate investments has enabled Damien to accumulate wealth for himself and his family, earning him financial independence. Damian is smart, too. He received two degrees in computer science and economics from the University of Maryland, and his MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. He currently lives in Washington, DC, where he spends most of his time with his family and is actively growing and managing his real estate portfolio.

Hey, Damien, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Damien Peters 1:42

Doing really good. You know, longtime in the making, I've known you for a couple of years now, and really excited to be here really excited.

Acquania Escarne 1:51

Me too. I don't know why it took this long for me to get you on the mic. But because you've always had a great story. And for those that don't know, I'm going to tell you a little background about how Damien and I met. So I want to say in 2016, I got this great idea that I should become a freelance writer because I like to talk about money. And I like to write. So I did a Google search, how to become a freelance writer. And Google told me to go to Upwork and post a profile and tell people why I'm so amazing, and how well I write and while I was building my profile, I actually did a search for available jobs. And you had a post up about writing for Wealth Noir, a new online magazine for black millennials to teach them about money and I immediately fell in love not only the position description, but responded and then the rest is history. We talked, I did some tests articles and four or five years later, I was still writing for you.

Damien Peters 3:00

Know, it's crazy. You were I remember, you're my first writer. And even I remember thinking like, Man, if I can find this caliber of people like this easily. This is gonna be easy. Like, you know, they're just out here with amazing backgrounds, like deep knowledge and definitely mission. But ya know, it's, it's, it's crazy how much you know, we've worked together in terms of like, various ventures and different like, you know, formats and conferences together and stuff like that. So.

Acquania Escarne 3:28

Yeah, yeah, you're also how I discovered Fin Con, which thank you so much in 2018, Fin Con changed my life and for those that don't know, that's a conference where money nerds me and so it's just been really good. But today, we're actually going to talk about you, and what you've been able to accomplish by investing in real estate and leveraging your nine to five tech jobs. So I want to start from the beginning. And I hope this is not too far for you. But I want to know, what was money like for you when you were growing up?

Damien Peters 4:02

So I've been told even before I can remember that I've always been, I will say obsessed with money, but very focused or money minded. My grandmother used to joke that if there was change, I would always keep it. I always had like coins around and even in high school, I used to remember going to the mall with everybody. I've always been a bit frugal. So I wasn't trying to spend my money but I always realized I'm like ordering the smallest meal but I could comfortably pay for it where everyone else was like borrowing money or like oh, let me not get this because I don't have it.

So I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad at some point in high school and then the Millionaire Mind. So I just always had this thought of like you're working I got a job at 15 because in Maryland, you could get it at 15 instead of 16 and things along those lines. Even when in high school I remember I was in a Science and Tech High School program I wanted to switch to Business and my dad I actually told me, he's like, don't don't do that he's like, you're good with the computers. That's where you're gonna make your money. Don't worry later in life, you can go off and study business and add that on something, which, ironically, is exactly what happened.

But I always thought that, you know, business and money and investing and things like that were just appealing, it seemed. I don't know why, to be honest, but I just always was drawn to it. So, you know, even heading into school, I ended up adding, I studied computer science at the behest of my dad and added on economics as a second degree later on because ironically, I was, when I decided to do it, I was too late to get into the business school. It was too late. It was like junior year, but I could add on economics easily. So I actually got like a double degree. And that really just helped give me this really strong base in terms of understanding both how markets work concepts like supply and demand. You know, when markets go up, even when the FED is doing things like, you know, I have an understanding of this that, you know, wasn't, is deeper, and I'm just really an econ and money nerd.

So yeah, my start early on and then one of the things I'll say is my dad was always an entrepreneur, he loved to say he was like, allergic to a job. He was in media for a long time, he was actually a journalist and then he ran a print shop, and a travel agency. We, he didn't believe in selling real estate. So when we moved from our first house to our second house, we kept it as a rental in the house. So his that, you know, imbued a lot on me in terms of running your own company, investing in real estate, you know, having these multiple sources of income. Those are some things he did. He was really terrible with spending and saving money, though. So he, he was great with the income. But luckily, I had my mom for that. So my mom actually was a nurse, but she had a financial advisor, and she saved and I was really happy to tell my mom one day when she retired that she was a millionaire and I was like, Mom, you came to this country, you were a nurse, you worked for a long time, but because you saved you've done really well and she still doesn't care. To be honest. She's just like, well, good. I'm glad I saved money. So yeah, that's kind of like where I got my start, you know, rooted in my family and something like that.

Acquania Escarne 7:16

I love that. Where's your mom originally from?

Damien Peters 7:19

Both my parents from Antigua? Originally.

Acquania Escarne 7:23

Oh, that's nice. I love Antigua, I have a special place in my heart for there. So it's interesting, like, publishing and travel are not to my knowledge related in any way. So why did your dad have those two types of companies? Do you know?

Damien Peters 7:40

Yeah, um, he was. And this is an area I've started to get really interested in too, as of late, which is just kind of business operators. I, he in terms of the travel agency, and this was around, you know, by time I was conscious, right. I think he may have started after I was born. But you know, by time I was old enough to remember that was a company he had, he ran a travel agency, he had office in DC, and then one in LA. Not sure how he got started into that. The printing, he ended up found he was doing this is back before the internet. So he was doing a lot of flyers for promoting the travel agency and things along those lines. He just got into that business. So he started doing the print business in addition to the travel agency. Eventually, he sold the travel agency to actually a family member who was also working for the travel agency and continued to run it for several decades later. But yeah, he there was even he ended up going into taxes later on. But that's why I said he was fundamentally allergic to a job. He did not like the really the idea of working for someone else and I think he gravitated to businesses that made sense for him that he either had an opportunity at the time that he knew he could kind of like grow and run consistently.

Acquania Escarne 8:55

And today, we would call that a serial entrepreneur because none of those businesses in my mind are immediately related. But he successfully ran them sold one and seemed to have pretty good run. So that's good. Now you mentioned that your dad pushed you to kind of stick to the computer science space. But was he Why would he inspire you to do that? Was there someone you knew in the tech space? Or did he just see the future of tech and where it was going and thought my son needs to be in this?

Damien Peters 9:26

So one, I had a natural proclivity to computers, I'll say at the time was very much a computer nerd, just like a quiet, geeky kind of middle school high schooler. So he had brought home a computer this like Intel 386 So this is what early 90s I think and really obsessed over it just you know, before there was even Windows and it was like, you know, the actual terminal play random games, things along those lines and when Windows came, I remember for Christmas once I got a hard drive, and it was a 6.4 gigabyte hard drive, our previous hard drive, I think was two. And I literally like, almost fell on the floor out of excitement to have 6.4 gigabytes of storage on my computer.

So by time, you know, high school came, I actually hit, I was building my own computers. I had gone to like a computer camp one summer for a couple of weeks and, you know, by my senior year chosen, like computer programming classes. So he was like, given, so he was like you're already programming and interestingly, too, he actually dropped out of computer science and undergrad. I found this out, like, decades later. And he was like, Yeah, I always think had I stuck with it. What, you know, which way I would have made or like, kind of what my career would have been? So he, he did, he was very correct. He just had the foresight, he was like, you know, computers and tech is where he's seeing like money and jobs and opportunities, business, you know, not to anyone who does business, because I have that myself too. But it's like, it's a little bit more general. And it's if you get business later with a specialization in kind of computers and technology, you know, it will help you better than doing just business itself. And yeah, now we can definitely say you had a crystal ball to the future because tech is a career and job path is like blown up. But yeah.

Acquania Escarne 11:20

Absolutely. Yeah, it's one of the fastest growing industries and definitely a space where anyone can make six figures easily because of the expertise, the knowledge, and where so many companies are going. So now is the question as to how in the heck did you go from being in tech to launching online media companies? What was the first media company you launched? And what idea or action inspired it?

Damien Peters 11:49

Yeah. So ironically, I would say I was pseudo in media before I was officially in tech. I started a blog back in undergrad. It was just called like The Real Thoughts of DP or something like Damien Peters. And it was around dating, and at the time was a bit of a angsty college student. I, yeah, I just I just had certain thoughts about like dating and being in the street to go out a good bit in terms of women and men I'm at, so I just was writing this blog. And then, fast forward a couple of years. Certainly, I stopped the blog at some point I kind of, but it was interesting to kind of like, write and publish online. I'm a government consultant, work at Booz Allen Hamilton. I'm in DC actually have a government clearance at this point. And I was dating out in the streets was a good bit out the streets like buying bottles. To this day, I still love buying good bottle. And

Acquania Escarne 12:50

I'm learning so much about too, right now!

Damien Peters 12:52

Oh, yeah, the bottle is a is an ongoing joke. Even later, in Spain, the clubs in Spain don't close until eight and eight in the morning, which was really great. But so at some point, I was basically I was dating someone, and something happened, I can't remember what but I was just like, I'm gonna take a break from women for like, two weeks, I'm just gonna, like stop dating, and focus on me. I realized I had so much extra time when I wasn't dating. And that actually prompted Single Black Male, which was a dating blog that I started in 2007. And it was a continuation of this idea of like me writing about dating from back in undergrad. But I wanted to be a branded experience. I bought the domain, I started writing, and eventually continued just to write in addition to my day job, eventually went back to dating and things like that. But would write about buying girls drinks in the club, or like, you know, the the rules of engagement, started the site aimed at men saying that men don't have a place to talk and kind of complain about dating and stuff like that. quickly realized men do not care on the internet, about dating and relationships. It's just they're not going to click on it. But black women really were drawn to the fact that there was a man talking about stuff that like men don't ever talk about, like, why we stopped calling or why I'm not trying to buy you a drink from the club or you know why you can't just come up to my table and drink from my bottle and you know, expect to walk away anyways. stupid stuff that young people do.

That ended up attracting one of my co founders who ended up growing going on later on to start another podcast, and several others. But we ended up growing that site to four people we incorporated. We started getting big brand deals. We started doing talks, we hosted happy hours in DC and New York. So we really blew that started as just like me talking about girls and dating from this break into several different people where we're doing live events, talks, and blogs, and we peaked at around half a million like pageviews per month. So I was really excited to see what we could do, we learned a lot. We grew along with Twitter, because we were early on Twitter, when Facebook came out in terms of utilizing pages, and we just understood a lot about digital marketing.

That then, you know, actually kind of led to eventually, later on Wealth Noir, because as I was thinking about what to do, and the concept and so even while I was at Facebook, we were still running the company. At that point I was I wasn't writing anymore. Most of us weren't writing anymore. We had hired writers, we had several different executive editors, we had, you know, operating agreement, and, and things, things along those lines, how we actually ran the business. But yeah, it was there was a lot. There was a lot that I learned from that blog, both negotiating equity when you formulate the company, and we had someone who left because they thought their share wasn't fair. But we had like a process that we went through incorporating and, you know, dealing with Delaware versus not Delaware and the various taxes and bookkeeping and all that good stuff. And a lot of that really helped later on both to start the second company and even eventually exited.

Acquania Escarne 16:00

We're going to talk about that, guys. Don't worry, we I have some questions here about building a business for acquisition and how that works. But that's really interesting. So your thoughts, turned into a business and then led to partnerships? And eventually you started another online business? But what is the state of that website? Now? Is it still up? Have you taken it down? Like what's going on?

Damien Peters 16:25

Yeah, no. So which one Single Black Man? Yes, no. So you can check it out. Now, singleblackmale.org, it is still up, it's still actually generates a good 10s of 1000s of people go to that site every month, because we were so ingrained. And we had so many articles and different sites and Google ranking and things along those lines, currently contemplating whether to actually bring that company back, relaunch it, and to your point, prepare it for sale. And yeah, thinking about that, but it's for years and this is one thing, too, about kind of starting companies and stuff like that, around 2016, we stopped actively running the site actually bought out the rest of the partners. There was some kind of poor management around that time. And it didn't really make sense, I think, to dedicate some time to it, but it continued to generate money. And I still can usually buy a beer or two a month, just from the passive ad revenue.

Acquania Escarne 17:18

Awesome. That's really interesting.

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Now we started this story talking about how we met via Upwork and Wealth Noir, which was an online publication I wrote for for several years, everything from blogs, to interviews, and mostly about money. What inspired you to start Wealth Noir? And yeah, let's just start there. What inspired you to start it?

Damien Peters 19:03

Yeah, so I'll say from Single Black Male that got me excited about entrepreneurship. And in particular were like called part time entrepreneurship, this idea that I could be running a company on the side that was profitable, that, you know, added fullfilmeny, because government consulting is, you know, government consultant, it's, you know, giving talks in front of like, you know, college students around like dating and in relationships was just like, personally very interesting to me. So, even after to the point where I wasn't actively writing and doing as much with Single Black Male, I always was looking for my next idea. While I was in grad school. It was a there wasn't there was a link shortener that was going to be dynamic for app downloads because I was working at Zynga and we had this whole thing about app downloads, then worked on a dating concierge company and typically with all of these I was set up actually landing page, I would buy ads, I would have a survey, I would actually do a bunch of customer research, I would talk to a bunch of companies. And there are a few other ideas that kept coming. And then one end up being Wealth Noir.

So the start for Wealth Noir was, my wife comes to me, I'm working at Facebook, during Facebook making really good money. And wife's like, we're pregnant. I was like, great, because we know we've been trying and so you were pregnant. She was like, Are you ever gonna see the baby? I was like, you know, what, what do you mean by that she's like, You work all the time. You fly to London three to four times a year, you're in New York, like every month, every month or every other month in Seattle, I go do day trips to Seattle for a meeting. It was like fairpoint, I may or may not be around that much. So I'll take a year off.

So I told everybody at work, I was like, I'm planning to take a year off and I how can you afford a year off? And I was like, we work at Facebook, we're highly compensated, Why can't anyone here for a year off, it's just, you know, a year off. At this point, I had two rental properties. A lot of savings, like several hundered thousand dollars just saved and invested both taxable and retirement accounts. And I realized, and then when I would go talk to African Americans, lawyers, doctors, things like that, heads would explode, how can you dare take a year off? And if you're highly compensated? Why are people not investing in their, you know, wealth, from there, you know, passive income and other areas. And that was the birth of Wealth Noir it was I realized, for there was a unique opportunity and unique audience for high income, African American millennials and really, we expand it to be all millennials, but high income, but not building wealth. They're not investing real estate, they don't have stock portfolios, they don't understand their money. And that's, that was a community I particularly specifically connected with, I knew that I could, you know, reach. And I thought that there would be really great product ideas that we can build and directly target target this audience. Because they have the assets. They have the income and they can build assets, but they just unaware of what to do. So from there, I actually came up with a name eventually landed on Wealth Noir and I shopped it, I tested it by were waiting in brunch one day, going to brunch one day in Oakland. And I asked like three women who passed by, and this other guy, what they liked what they thought of the name, Wealth Noir. And then I told them the concept. And they're like, oh, that sounds really nice. I was like, great. That's the user validation. Neat. I'll start there.

Acquania Escarne 22:32

Love it. Love it. And you asked total strangers, so they had no reason to lie to you. But I love it because it definitely had like a upscale type of feel to it. Most people don't know, noir black and in French, yeah. And then you have the wealth. So I think it's a perfect combination. And I love that you tested it. But I am not surprised because I am also in the financial space. And I meet a lot of professionals who make good money, and they just don't know what to do with it. So I'm glad that you sought out to fill that demand and you ran Wealth Noir for several years. How did you get to the point of it being acquired? Were was that an intentional move? Or was that something that just happened by pure luck?

Damien Peters 23:26

So I won't say pure luck, but it was that, you know, I didn't see I wasn't seeking acquisition at the time. And I know a lot more about acquisitions now then, you know, kind of what, less than a year ago when I was going through the process, but it actually started with a DM on LinkedIn. So I am 100% sold on LinkedIn as a platform like honestly, my DMs and LinkedIn have led to hundreds of 1000s of dollars, like several jobs, and my acquisition, but it was someone who I worked with at Facebook, we actually started at Facebook on the same day together, both as product managers. And I get a DM saying like, Hey, we've raised a couple million dollars with my co founder, we're starting a FinTech company focused on wealth management and financial advisory. Would you be interested, and I write not to brag or anything. I've gotten several of these messages before I actually even had another friend who was actually raising for another financial FinTech company who I went to MIT with.

So I was like, send me over the deck, you know, look at it. The deck really sold me on the company. I was like, I really liked this idea and I actually had really contemplated taking Wealth Noir and starting a financial advisory quick sidebar, while the cost can be high, so I don't necessarily say it. I recommend for every single person but working with a financial advisor is the kind of most consistent way I found for someone to handle their money. One thing with Wealth Noir I would say there was a tactical and emotional aspect.

Tactically, we could teach people and that was easy for us. We could teach you How to Create a Investment Portfolio. How to think about stock and bond allocation, how to invest in real estate, the emotional part was super hard for us.

A lot of people would know everything they need to know they've written 82 books, they have this personal story, a friend $90,000 in the bank in cash and was like, I want to invest in real estate, I said, he was earning a quarter of a million dollars at the time. And I was like, invest in real estate, I don't understand the problem. He you know, he couldn't get over the emotional purpose, part of it. But I told myself in terms of turning Wealth Noir into this type of business, it would require more capital and people that I was comfortable with doing at the time I started Wealth Noir was more of a lifestyle business. The aim was to move to Spain and spend time with the family.

So when we started talking, we started talking specifically about the role first, what were they looking? Who were they looking for kind of what were the meaning in terms of the company and then second, we started talking about what not just Damien Peters, but Damien Peters and Wealth Noir, this is what we call a Aqua Hire is the acquisition and hire. Very common. Yeah, very common in tech. But it means that in addition to the company, one of the key resources, they're looking for exactly the talent in the people, as opposed to just like the physical infrastructure. So when we, so we continue to talk about both the role and in particular, when I what I thought at this time was, for me to take this role, I'm very excited about this role, I cannot give Wealth Noir the attention and the need, the desire, it needs to grow. But I think that what I felt with wealth more will actually be amazing to enhance what we're going to be doing at this company in terms of the marketing, growing an audience, and things along those lines.

So after a couple months of negotiation, and back and forth, and you know, like numbers and terms, and also, you know, whether one big part too was whether I wanted to work at the company, I met with everyone at the company, I was gonna be employee number eight and the co founder, I will say was one thing that drew me to him he had sold to companies prior for quite, you know, exits, the amount of money and the quality of venture capital they had raised, just with a deck two people was very, very good. I talked to a lot of my friends in other tech companies, some who had sold their companies in the last year. And so everything really looked good and it seemed like a really great opportunity. One thing personally motivating me to both in terms of joining the company and selling my company, was years ago, I had an offer to be the first product manager at Robin Hood.

This was back when I was at Facebook, there were only like 300 people that were worth well under a billion dollars. And I was like, I don't know, if this company is going to kind of like really, you know, hit it big or not. At least at their peak, I looked back at my original offer letter, my equity alone been worth around $4.3 million. So, you know, I kind of did look a little bit as this like, well, do I have another chance to get into a FinTech company at a really good place that matches, you know, both my aims and aspirations. And that was kind of what I did. And so, yeah, back in January, we kind of finalized everything. At the time, I was actually working at Citi Ventures, I was working at Citibank, working for innovation as entrepreneur and residents there. So I left city, joined the acquiring company, and then moved over the team and several other assets to be part of the new company.

Acquania Escarne 28:26

Wow, that's a very interesting story. And you so many things like I feel like there's a whole nother episode we could do on acquisitions, and just preparing your company for that space and how to navigate in. And, and missed opportunities. I mean, Robin Hood, obviously we know now is huge. It's had some challenges in the past, you know, GameStop, and etc. But they are still a highly used tech company app company to buy stock. So that's just crazy. But you set yourself up for success by being in the tech space. So I'm gonna pivot a little bit now because I want to also talk about how you were able to move to Spain for two years, and pretty much make work optional. What was it that you did to prepare your family for the move to Spain? And what did you do while you were there?

Damien Peters 29:25

Yeah. Alright, so the move to Spain. In terms of preparing my family that was actually a multi year process. So I had the bright idea to move abroad. I told my wife and she was like, Sure, it was like what to share me like, you know, I'm like, I don't Are you in love with this or not? She was like, if you want to move abroad, we can move abroad. I and I told her this. I was like, this is a setup because if you don't like moving abroad, then it's my fault. I want you to be as excited as I am. So this started a multi year campaign of taking her to London, and then went to France, we went to Thailand, I was talking with different companies and different offices, it was talking about transferring to the Facebook London office, there was a company I interviewed with in Bangkok. France had certain roles to Facebook office there, etc, etc. And what really kind of tipped the scale was when our baby was born.

So after leaving Facebook, I actually joined a nonprofit. I'm actually on the board of them now called Deaf Color focus on black software engineers. So I'm working there along with working on Wealth Noir. And one day, I think the baby was two months, and she was like, I'm ready to move abroad. I was like, You know what she was like, I just really thought about it. Like, if we don't do it now, it's always going to be harder. He's going to be like in school and have like, really commitment to friends. So, and I was like, great, you know, and so I'm like, let me I pull up my list of like, 35 countries, and she's like, No, we can move to Italy, or Spain. They have good health care. They're comfortable. I'm down with those two. I was like, say less.

Acquania Escarne 31:06

Let's go.

Damien Peters 31:07

Let's go. So pick Spain, because Spanish was a little bit more useful than Italian. Although I think I'd like Italy, to live there as a country, but Spain was a ton of fun. And then we went through the process of actually getting prepared, we started doing some research more in terms of what it would look like, what would we do, we actually contemplated, you know, there was a whole little chart right?

Either we both go there and we pick, we go there and get jobs. We go there without jobs, or we kind of like go there with fake jobs like we work with to work part time or remote or something along those lines and, you know, there's different qualities of life, right, you know, we get a cheap apartment, we don't work. We get jobs over there, and we live our comfortable lifestyle. But at the time, too. I like to say I had been saving and investing I didn't know for what I had a few $100,000 in the bank and I had the two rental properties and I didn't know what I was saving for. I just knew I wanted to save a ton of money. I was very focused, I was very aggressively saving.

We were saving about 40 to 50% of our income each year at this time and we went to we did some research we decide to move to Barcelona. As soon as you Google move to Barcelona, they tell you why Valencia is better. So we said okay, let's go to Valencia. We took our son we actually went there for two weeks. We did a test run we found daycare, we found apartments, we found a realtor and we both really really liked it. We enjoyed it. We thought it would be a good move. And we planned for six months it was like six or eight months to wind everything down figured out the jobs we were going to do and get the visas and made a plan and executed against it. I will say and I didn't realize this until after we did it and we're in Spain. It was way more work than than I did anticipate. super optimistic.

Hey, this isn't easy. We just go to the consulate we send some stuff we'll call some movers and then boom we'll be in Spain. It seemed to speak pretty good English I think we'll be alright. You know speak pretty good English. Movers told us like two months it was like seven or some some nonsense ship got delayed or something. And then don't get me start with the pandemic being in the pandemic during Spain versus not but amazing experience, both in terms of working abroad, living abroad understanding Europe, even for me professionally understanding the tech scene. One thing I definitely realized is coming from Silicon Valley and being in Spain, you're somewhat of a celebrity. It's like a tech I got to meet with more C suite executives of multi billion dollar tech companies than I ever have in my life and you'll put a habla espanol.

Acquania Escarne 33:52

Okay. Okay. So what made you come back? I mean, if your pseudo celebrity work optional, I know you also did work or consult while you were there. Why come back?

Damien Peters 34:06

Yeah. So one is my wife did not enjoy our time as much as I do. She was there were there are definitely some creature comforts and fundamentally, it is a different world. Alright, so I thought it would be kind of like, alright, this is Europe. It's like first world Europe. So it's like America, but they speak Spanish. No, no, no.

There's like fundamentally different in good ways and bad ways. Small things like supermarkets closed on Sunday. If you have a kid, you need milk on a Sunday. This actually is like a non trivial thing. Stuff closes really early, the bureaucracy to deal with so this didn't appeal to me as much. But we had set for ourselves a two year timeframe. So we would go for two years, and each person had a six month veto. After six months. Someone could say I hate it so much. I want to move back to America. And then at the end two years we will discuss the terms of extending. She didn't hate it enough to exercise her veto and force us to move early. But she was not interested in extending it to stay there.

One other thing too is in terms of I was consulting in Spain, and I was working at a startup there, I was leaving product at the organization. It was fun and interesting. Spanish salaries are not American salaries. Like at all, the first job offer I got was for 45,000, full time job. This was approximately like I got bonuses that were like this amount when working in tech for this entire salary. So actually working in Spain was was was different. While and then when you work for an American company, you get you're you're living the life, right? Because you're essentially making crazy money. But the time difference became hard things along those lines. So while I definitely would have stayed, either in Spain, or personally, I would love to go to another country. I'm obsessed with Holland. I just went back to Holland a couple months ago. My wife was ready to come back and yeah, is one thing I have learned longer in life has been happy wife happy life.

Acquania Escarne 36:19

Absolutely. I second that. So um, you definitely gave us a lot there, especially some of the pros and cons to being an expatriate, aka someone who's living abroad. I personally have lived in Italy, I lived there for a year in grad school. And I do say I love it. It's a great place to live great food. But you're right, I have not used Italian since. So I do commend you for picking a language and a country that could be more useful to you after your experience abroad. So I think you covered all the questions I had about living abroad, preparing your family for that experience, building a online business that can be acquired, and so much more. This is a really good interview. But my last question for you is the signature question I asked all my guests, the name of the podcast is called The Purpose of Money. So I want to know, what is your purpose for money?

Damien Peters 37:15

Yeah. I've struggled with this a lot over the years, to be honest. Early on in life, I like listen, I love rap, listen to a lot of rap and so I always wanted a Rolex. And so a lot of it was like, I want a Rolex, a nice car, and I was like, I want money and the purpose is to have a Rolex, nice car and buy bottles. And I always like to say when I bought a Rota, when I could afford a Rolex, I was like I could buy, I can invest this money instead, or this is like halfway to another rental property.

So at some point, then it you know, my goals changed. And the point of investing became different. It became to like amass my net worth and grow my net worth and hit certain numbers. As I started to hit those numbers, I kind of started to question like, well, what is the purpose of having all this net worth and money. So right now, the purpose of money for me is freedom and I know, it's a bit of a cliche thing, right now with fire community and it but I think we are starting to realize that, you know, time is one of the things that we don't, doesn't change, it doesn't we don't get back, we can't earn it doesn't go back up in a market, it's the one inflexible.

I've also realized some things about my own personal self. Corporate America has been hard for me is, it is, you know, can be tiring and things along those lines, I, while I loved the experience of both being acquired, and joining the company actually left recently in July, I have a daughter coming in, in December. So in just six weeks now, we're out for that. And I've committed now to not go back to a full time role until 2024. And that is because I've you know, have enough with my rental properties and kind of you know, sort of income and how I both manage my money and finance to get some of that freedom. So for me the purpose of money has been that flexibility I love that if I get were to get laid off or or something like that, which happened early in my career, I can survive. If me and my wife wants to spend time with a new kid. We have that time and right now I'm actually pursuing some other pursuits.

I'm going to be a professor starting in January. Yeah, I'll be teaching a class on technology ventures and marketing at University of Colorado. I started a new newsletter called The Pragmatic Mr. Peters, focus more on you know, this lifestyle design and kind of this freedom and flexibility and the purpose of money to me is really to both give me the freedom and it is also the safety net like the truth is, when bad stuff happens, I feel way more comfortable now than I did you know, 10 years ago, and with kids and stuff, that's just it really does help me sleep a lot at night.

Acquania Escarne 40:06

That is amazing. So congrats on the baby on the way and the professorship. That's pretty dope. You know, you're big when you start to teach other people stuff and it's actually matters because it's a grade behind it. It's so congrats. So now I can call you Professor Peters as well. Well, thank you so much for being on the purpose of money podcast. Before we leave, I want you to please tell everyone, how do we find you follow you and just keep up with the new Damien Peters?

Damien Peters 40:35

Yeah, pragmaticpeters.com. So that's, that's the new newsletter. It's continuing from actually what we built with Wealth Noir, but this one's going to be, I like to say it's not about me, but I want to deliver value based on kind of what I've done and the things that people find interesting that I've done. I normalize everything that I do move into stainless, just a thing that I did. But at pragmaticpeters.com And we even have some of the old team with me, you'll be able to find things about taking, taking breaks from work, how to invest, investing in real estate, and really using money to build more freedom and flexibility in your life. In a very pragmatic approach.

Acquania Escarne 41:17

Yes, pragmatic. I love it. Thank you so much, guys. I'll make sure to include links to everything in the show notes, so make sure you check it out. And don't forget to check out the book recommendations that Damien gave us earlier in the episode. Until next time, keep building generational wealth.

Thank you for listening to the purpose of money podcast. For more resources and information, check out my website, the purpose of money.com and while you're there, please sign up for our newsletter so you have the latest information on new episodes and blog posts. Until next time, keep creating freedom in your life today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai