Patrick Bet-David’s 3-part formula behind a $300M exit

Updated September 2026. Originally published May 2024.

In May 2004, Patrick Bet-David made $18,495 in a month selling insurance. He was 25. He drove to his dad’s house and showed him the deposits.

“That was the last day my dad ever reached in his pocket to pay for anything. May 29th of 2004. I said, the world’s going to know your last name. They’re going to have to kill me, but they’re going to know your last name.”

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He went on to sell that insurance business for just shy of $300 million, and the rest of us know the last name from Valuetainment, the YouTube channel he started by accident. I sat with him in his private cigar lounge (the other side of the building is a comedy club) and asked how a refugee kid who sold his school lunch ticket for $2 a day got here. He answered with a formula that has nothing to do with money.

The formula

Patrick has studied the people who can’t stop. They’re not the happiest people in the world, he told me. But they have three things in common.

“When they were a kid, they experienced unconditional love. Somebody that if you go to jail, if you do anything stupid, no matter what you do, that person will always love you. That’s typically your mom. But the second person is missing for most people. Second person is a person you love and admire so much, but no matter what you ever do, you will never win them over. It’s never enough. And the last one is the right enemy. You choose the right enemy that gets the best emotion out of you. Good luck slowing this person down.”

His mom’s version of the first was “always fear God,” which he says is what kept him in the car in Glendale when the guys he ran with were about to go rob somebody. The way I heard it, the second person was his dad. Hardcore love, high standards, if you say you’re going to do something you do it. When Patrick was 17 and doing nothing, his dad would tell him: it’s getting late. Get off your ass. It’s getting late. Patrick joined the Army to get away from everybody.

Right after the deposit slip story, he pointed back at the formula.

“Unconditional love, unconditional pain. I’m telling you, that combo. You can’t fabricate this. When it happens, you have to use that opportunity. What am I going to do with this enemy? What am I going to do with this person that I can never please?”

Where the pain came from

He was 10, living in Tehran during the war with Iraq. One day the city got bombed 165 times. His mom was crying, his sister was crying, he was crying, his dad was calm.

“I’m like, if you’re calm, maybe I should be calm, because everything’s going to be alright. And you would hear these whistling sounds. Five, four, three, two, one. Bombed. Building’s shaking. And then you knew by the bombs if they were getting closer to your house.”

His mom got him out before 12, when he’d have been locked in for the Iranian military. Then a refugee camp in Germany, where his first business was collecting 5,000 beer bottles at five pfennig each with two other kids to buy Super Mario Brothers for 249 marks. Then Glendale, with his dad working as a cashier at a 99 cent store and the family on welfare. His high school nickname was Somalia, because he sold his lunch ticket for $2 a day and took bites of other people’s grilled cheese. 1.8 GPA. Never missed a day.

Watching people take advantage of your parents, he said, creates a rage that stays. You either use it as fuel or you don’t. He eventually used it.

The right enemy

Patrick never wanted his own company. He wanted to be CEO of the one he was at, World Financial, where he was making just shy of half a million a year. So he wrote a Jerry Maguire memo, 16 pages, nine points on how to take the company to the next level, and sent it to corporate. Nobody responded. He sent it over their heads and got a reply in 30 minutes, a five hour meeting, one of the nine points tried for 30 days, then nothing.

He flew to Atlanta and gave them three options: make him CEO, buy him out, or watch him become the competitor. They said, you’ll never leave. Everybody who comes into this room wants money, gets money, and stays.

“I looked at him in his eyes. I said, what’s your vision with this company? He was the number one guy in the company. He wouldn’t look at me in my eyes. Thirty minutes later, he flat out told me, you’re right. I don’t know what I want to do with the company. I said, I can’t be in a company where the guy that’s supposed to take us to the next level is a little bit lost. I’m 29 years old. I’m going to run for 40 years. I can’t run here.”

He resigned September 23, 2009, left 7,000 clients behind, and started PHP 30 days later with 66 agents. A $400 billion company sued him. Eight months later they settled. First year revenue was $2 million. By 2022 it was over $120 million, 49 states, a few hundred offices, 50,000 licensed agents, and an average agent who was a 34 year old Hispanic woman in an industry built for 59 year old white men. He found out the money had been wired to Goldman Sachs while he and his wife were having breakfast in Monaco.

“The way we cried during that breakfast was priceless. Six months of me being on the road. Her doing payroll a day after we had a baby, sitting at the hospital while the baby’s sitting there. You go through those days and you realize how much we sacrificed, how much we almost lost it all.”

“You’ll never leave” was the right enemy. It got the best emotion out of him for over a decade.

If you didn’t grow up in a refugee camp

I didn’t join the Army and my dad wasn’t a cashier at a 99 cent store, so I pushed on this. Patrick’s answer is to borrow the pressure. Go work for a high standard sales leader who won’t take shit from you, or go into a startup run by a hypomanic operator and survive there three to five years. If you make it five to 10, in his words, you’re a human specimen. I got my version of that working for Mark Zuckerberg.

He hires the same way.

“You can’t say I want a job with a lot of excitement, but I also want to have it easy. It doesn’t work that way. If you want the big accolades, the glory, breaking bread with the craziest people, and behind closed doors you’re a little pansy, the market is not going to keep you like that for too long. The market has zero sorrow for you. Your mom has sorrow for you. That’s her job.”

Patrick did the math with his dad recently. In Iran, one day a week, 520 days out of 3,650. In Germany, nothing for a year and a half. After the divorce, two days a month. Then the Army. He asked his dad, do you ever regret not spending more time with your son? He was asking for himself, now that he has kids.

“He says, zero regrets. I said, dad, how could you say that? He says, my job as your father, that God chose for me to do, was to raise a leader. So for the rest of our lives, when you’re a leader, we can become best friends. Are we not best friends today? I said, we are. He said, so that’s my job, kid.”

Patrick says he’s going 40 years if God keeps him healthy, and the only one who can fire him is the man upstairs. The promise from the deposit slip still stands. Find your enemy. Then go make the last name known.

From episode 352 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.