Dan Novaes
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dan Novaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
in that sense.
How many uncles do you have? And why do they need so many leather jackets in Brazil?
i'm good thank you for having me john appreciate it you're good welcome man so dude you entrepreneurship is not something that is new for you it's not something you just started this is something you you've been doing your whole life right uh i've been yeah doing businesses ever since i was in high school so uh it's it's just kind of like in the dna and even before i knew the word entrepreneurship was uh you know i have these little tricks that i would do i guess as a kid you know to try and make a couple extra bucks i guess
Yeah. So, I mean, I grew up, my parents weren't necessarily entrepreneurs. They were like parents that did allow me to have, I think, a lot of freedom relative to my friends. Like I never had a curfew. I never had those type of kind of like rule sets. It was very like, you know, independence driven. So I think that was helpful.
I think actually where the entrepreneurship really came was, you know, I grew up through two very different environments my whole life. I grew up in Southern Indiana. and Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I'm from originally. My family's from Brazil. And they're very different places.
And I think the areas that I really started to really notice that difference as I was in my early teen years or going into sixth, seventh, eighth grade, was that things in Brazil were actually way more expensive, things that I cared about at least, like an Xbox or a car or whatever, because of this insane import tax.
And every time I'd go back to Brazil, my family would be like, oh, can you bring all of these electronics? Sure. I'm like, why? And so you realize that and you're like, wow, these are two places that as a kid you realize are, to me, they're different, but they're also the same. It's just people that I'm dealing with. But then I thought, wow, I could sell this stuff here, make a profit, vice versa.
I could take stuff here and sell it there. And that's how my first business has started. And by the time I was a senior in high school, I was doing a couple million dollars a year in revenue.
Um, that's where it started in Brazil. So basically, you know, uh, the thesis was like, I was like a eBay, uh, at the time, a titanium power seller, which, you know, for me, it was like a big title, you know, back in the day. And, uh, where it all started was, you know, I had a part-time job that I was working at Polo at the time I had just gotten a car.
And my dad was like, I'm not going to pay for all these extra things that you want in your car. You want a sound system, all that stuff. You need to get a job. And so I went, got a job at Polo, worked for a week, got like a $70 paycheck.
And I had this like aha moment when this like tour bus of foreigners came from, you know, they're coming from Japan, I believe, because there's a Toyota factory by my town. And they spent $40,000 on that day at that store. And it was just me and one other kid that was there. I'm thinking I'm going to get this great reward for like, you know, dealing with all this on a random Sunday.
And I got a $5 like Arby's gift card. That was like my reward, you know, and I was super pumped. And then I got back and I was like really upset, you know? But at the time I had this 40% discount at the store and I was like, man, if I just gave them 20%,
I could have made AK, you know, and then, you know, not that that would have worked exactly like that, where I sold my discontent, but that's where I had an aha moment. I was like, Oh, what do I, why don't I just buy some of these items and then I'll sell them on eBay. And so I walked around the entire store. I had a Palm trio at the time. And it was like the smartphone of the time.
And I was like taking a picture of the Palm Trio 600P. And so I would like take the pictures, get the serial numbers. And then I cross reference, found this jacket. And this one leather jacket was like selling there at the store for 180 bucks at this factory and outlet. And online, it was like 380. I bought three on emergency credit card, kept the receipt, you know, my dad's emergency card.
And by the next day, I had sold all three, you know, and I made 680 bucks or something. And I was like, what the hell just happened? You know, I just made more money in this day that I had made the entire month of me working here times five, right? And so I think that that's like where that started thinking. And then I was like, oh, why don't I sell these items in Brazil?
It's worth even more there. And so over the course of the next five months, I made like 30 grand in profit just by reselling Polo stuff. Eventually had to leave that job, right? Some sustainable model in that sense.
wait you're buying all of this stuff from us how many uncles do you have how many uncles do you have and why do they need so many leather jackets in brazil um and so it was excessive but it was like the initial i think starting capital uh to get started and then um and where i started really noticing why i moved into electronics it was like at the time is like when apple ipod was getting really big and all this stuff um and you know uh internationally this isn't as much of a supply chain issue now but back back then this is like
almost 20 years ago, or probably 20 years ago, typically, electronics would come out in America first. And then everywhere else, it was like three to six months later. So in addition to that arbitrage that already occurs based on currency arbitrage, there was also the delay. And so I could be the first person selling something and then basically sell it to the wealthiest people of that country.
And then I saw that that would be true in the UK and Australia. You could buy electronics and then unlock the phones, like smartphones. You could buy like bricked phones that people didn't pay their bills on Verizon and AT&T, BlackBerry, or sorry, Verizon and Sprint at the time here. And you can make a couple hundred bucks. So that's kind of like how the business started.
And I literally set up a warehouse in the UK, then I moved to Australia, I did the same thing. And I was like hiring like my taxi cab driver, you know, that I... I lived in Australia for six months in college, and I literally hired a cab driver that was just a good guy I met. We interviewed him, and then that's how I was setting this stuff up. So that's where it all started.
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