Frank Song was born in Stanford, California. Throughout his childhood, his family was constantly sick, which led to him being homeless by the age of 14. Fast forward to today, and he runs a multimillion-dollar company that he founded which invests and builds companies in high profit and unsexy markets.
His unorthodox investment thesis, and now business conglomerate, stretches across the United States and Europe in industries such as business and political strategy consulting, child education and enrichment services, employment services, niche entertainment, and real estate.
Clients include executives of Fortune 500 companies and top tech companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Walmart, Apple, and Facebook. Frank was also one of the most sought-after lecturers at the University of California, Berkeley Alumni Association where they distributed his strategies on sales, persuasion, psychology, negotiation, and strategy to their over 450,000-person alumni base.
Frank succeeded despite his humble beginnings and the fact that he was not a star student in school and university, due to the fact that he was fighting off homelessness and running a real estate business to pay for his own education. He attributes his success to his ability to not give in to trends and groupthink but instead relying on his analytical skills and logic to avoid mistakes that mainstream society makes.
Frank says, "The most dangerous thing to do is to do something because everyone else is doing it. It's dangerously appealing because there is a sense of safety that human beings fundamentally crave, and when you do the same as everyone else, you feel safe in the crowd".
Frank continues, "The irony is that even when they realize they made a bad decision with the rest of the mainstream, they still even feel safe and comfortable knowing that others are suffering with them and they're not alone. The true way to safety and success is to think through every situation yourself and break down the problem and reach the logical conclusion no matter what anyone else is doing."
After working on the investment team at Accel-KKR, one of the most prestigious and best performing private equity tech leveraged buyout firms in the world, he had an unconventional thesis that sounded crazy to most people in Silicon Valley.
While everyone was obsessed with raising venture capital, finding the next cool high tech idea, and burning through tons of money to grow revenue, Frank decided that the best way to make money consistently, highly profitably, and easily would be to do the complete opposite.
He believed that unsexy markets, with high-profit margins, were great opportunities for him to bring his resourcefulness, and operating, marketing, and strategy sophistication (that he honed from surviving homelessness and his time in high finance) to being able to dominate the competition.
Frank explains, "When things are sexy and prestigious, really smart people who are willing to kill each other over just earning another dollar are attracted to it. However, even though you can make a dollar even easier in unsexy markets, most businesspeople will stay away from it because it's not 'cool'."
Frank concludes with, "At the end of the day, do I want to make it a bloodbath to take a dollar away from my competitor or do it with ease? Because at the end of the day, they're both the same dollar, right?"
Before the age of 30, Frank had become a self-made millionaire.
Frank is now also an advisor to the 1%, companies, and politicians who want to hear his advice on how to win with little resources and gain big advantages.
In addition to running his businesses, Frank has a popular Instagram channel that has grown quickly due to his brash, logical, and unapologetic style of delivering deep, profound, and, many times, difficult-to-hear truth bombs. His bitter, but the real truth, the style has worked, and his channel has been growing exponentially.
