Barbara Corcoran praised Donald Trump’s selling skills and championed real-estate investing. She cautioned against following financial news too closely, and warned of AI’s disruptive potential. The “Shark Tank” star advised young people to try employment before starting a company. Loading Something is loading.
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Barbara Corcoran has underscored Donald Trump’s skill as a salesman, explained why she specializes in real estate, and detailed why she only backs entrepreneurs who didn’t grow up rich.
The “Shark Tank” investor and founder of The Corcoran Group also outlined why ignorance about financial news can be a blessing, advised people to work for someone else before starting their own business, and warned the artificial-intelligence boom threatens to displace the least-experienced workers.
Corcoran spoke during a recent episode of the “Meet Kevin” show on YouTube.
Here are her 12 best quotes from the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity:1. “He was fabulous as a salesman. What he pitched was bullshit. I learned a very important lesson which was, bullshit flies. It’s much more important than fact, and boy can he sell, because he’s not afraid to make stuff up.” (Corcoran was recalling a time she worked with Donald Trump on a real-estate deal.)
2. “Donald Trump has the power to sell, and so I take him more seriously than anybody out there who’s a contender.” (She was discussing the next US presidential race.)
3. “I have noticed that the wealthiest people in the world do what they do well. I do real estate well, I do investing well, I get good returns, I know how to pick properties, so why would I want to be better at the stock market that I know nothing about, or any other industry for that matter?” (Corcoran said that besides her Shark Tank investments, she puts all of her money into real estate, and that’s why she’s become rich.)
4. “Investing in real estate is a wonderful magic trick. What happens is you become rich, very rich, very slowly. It’s a guarantee you’re going to get rich if you just hold the course.”
5. “Starting anything and being blind and ignorant and dumb is an advantage. If I was well educated, and understood the economy, and listened to the reports on recession when I was starting out, or later building the business into something large, I don’t think I would have done as well.”
6. “Don’t listen to all the noise out there, 90% of it never comes true. I’ve been hearing recession talk all year round, I don’t pay attention to it. It just gets psychologically in your way, and it doesn’t change anything.”
7. “On ‘Shark Tank,’ I never invest in kids that have money. If they have money, what are they reaching for? They’ve had the fancy vacations, the nice cars, mom and dad were always there as a backstop. They never make money for me. You give me a poor kid who has something to prove, something to struggle about, something they don’t even know anything about, and they find a way.”
8. “You should get a job just to see what work is like, and how hard it is to make a buck when you work your ass off for a dollar. I got a $1,000 loan from my boyfriend, and I looked after every penny like it was gold, and I made it stretch for three months. If I hadn’t, I couldn’t have stayed in business. You have to cherish every penny.”
9. “Artificial intelligence has changed so many businesses. I’m a little concerned about it hurting the new hirees in every industry because people are thinking they can farm that work out.”
10. “I built my business on inexperienced people. I had housewives coming in who had never worked a day in their lives, they had raised the kids. I had to figure out, ‘Are they salespeople, are they killers, can they close a deal?’ I had my methods for discovering that.”
11. “Once I started my media business, I hired kids right out of college. It’s the easiest way to go, you have a chunk of beautiful ambition and beautiful potential and you get to decide how you might mold it. How thrilling is that? It’s pretty close to playing God.”
12. “I’ve lived through so much in this town — the stock-market crashes, 911, everything. I barreled through everything simply because I was not that informed, and I was determined to get there. All the rest of the stuff is noise. What does it have to really do with what you’re going to do today?”