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What if I told you there’s a billionaire whose path to wealth wasn’t flashy, fast, or complicated? In this episode, Sharran shares the story of Don Bren, chairman and owner of the Irvine Company and one of America’s most underrated billionaires. Unlike the typical headlines of IPOs and megadeals, Don Bren acquired massive wealth through patience, strategic thinking, and consistent, small actions over decades while patiently letting time amplify his strategy.
This episode demonstrates how thinking long-term and acting consistently can generate extraordinary outcomes even in ways that seem invisible to the public eye. For founders and investors, Don Bren’s method offers a blueprint for building wealth quietly, strategically, and sustainably.
“The biggest opportunities don’t always look like opportunities at first. Sometimes they’re just hidden opportunities.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:24 – Why buying a business reduces risk versus starting from scratch
05:19 – Don Bren’s 20-year strategy: Buying shares one at a time
07:03 – The history of the Irvine Company and its land holdings
07:43 – Strategic city planning and reserved land as a value multiplier
09:27 – Focusing on people, not just the company
11:24 – Three lessons from Don Bren’s story
14:43 – Why Don Bren’s strategy worked
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to The Business School Podcast, and today I wanna tell you about a guy named Don Bren. He’s worth about $17 billion, and most people have never heard of him. And what really caught my attention wasn’t really the money, 17 billion’s a lot, but how he got it.
[00:00:15] Because if you looked at the story from the outside, it would all s- not seem exciting at all. But this wasn’t one big deal. This wasn’t one big moment. This wasn’t him going public. There wasn’t one year where everything changed. It was something much slower, something that you and I can both do. And once I really kind of understood what he was doing, I started seeing the same idea in a lot of other places.
[00:00:35] I’m gonna break this all down step by step so you can use this exact method starting right now
[00:00:46] One thing is for certain: just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how-to. How to grow your business. How to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:09] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatsaa, and welcome to Business School.
[00:01:22] Okay, before I tell you the story, I wanna ask you a question. Have you ever thought about buying a business? Not starting one, but actually buying one. And probably not many of us think that, and I think I know why. Because most of us grew up learning how to get a job, how to get a degree, get a job, and find a career.
[00:01:38] We learn … Maybe we learn, maybe, how to buy a car. Maybe we learn how to buy a house, but that doesn’t really happen. We actually buy a house and then screw it up and then learn to do it better the next time. Nobody actually sits down and says, “Hey, here’s how a business gets bought and sold.” And so we end up with this picture in our heads that buying a business must be something that only rich people do, or private equity firms do, or heck, billionaires do.
[00:02:01] But- It’s not just for the people with more money than us. And I will tell you that sure, maybe it’s true for some deals, but the one thing that I’ve learned, especially being a banker at Goldman Sachs, is that every year, thousands and thousands of businesses change hands. I, I personally– You, you’re actually listening to a person that you know has done 100 plus deals, and I’m not that old, by the way, 100 plus deals and sold five different companies, right?
[00:02:28] But most of these are not billion-dollar companies. They are local businesses, service businesses, family businesses. I will tell you, companies you’ve probably driven past hundreds of times without even thinking about them. And you may think that that business doesn’t make that much money. They are probably making significantly more than many of us are.
[00:02:47] And the reason this matters for you and me is that starting a business is really hard. You have to figure out a lot from scratch. You need customers, you need employees, you need systems, you need the actual paperwork. You need enough cash to survive all the business, all the mistakes that you make early on that you don’t even know about.
[00:03:03] But buying a business is a little different because you already have existing customers. Maybe your– the employees are kind of already there. The business is already working. It already has a brand. It already has, like, registrations and all the legal stuff. Now, I will tell you that does not mean it’s easy, but it’s a different challenge.
[00:03:19] But it dramatically reduces the risk because if a business already is past the three to five-year range, maybe, just maybe, you have beat the risk of it going under. And once I started thinking about that, I will tell you right now, I would much rather buy a business than start a business. And I totally became fascinated by how great businesses actually get acquired.
[00:03:39] Somebody buys these things, right? Recently, I’m on the board of a publicly traded company called Real, and Real is one of the top five real estate brokerages in North America. Well, Real just made a bid to acquire RE/MAX, which is one of the, you know, oldest and most trusted names in real estate in the world, and that will combine, make the second-largest real estate business in the world.
[00:04:04] Now, this is like a story of a minnow eating a fish, and there’s no way Real would have been able to do that. And the reason I say that I was part of this transaction is because I served as president of Real. We grew the business, you know, to a billion-dollar valuation from 6,800 agents to 28,000 agents in under three years.
[00:04:18] So I was part of– I literally probably know every single person in that, in the business. And now going from Call it 28 to 30,000 agents to 120,000 agents. There’s no way that could have happened without buying the business. And the reason I’m sharing all of this with you as a preamble is I live in Orange County, California.
[00:04:35] If you live in Orange County and you know about the wealthy and the elite, there’s this one guy that everybody knows about. His name is Donald Bren. So, Don Bren, when I first heard this story, was like this big dramatic moment. I was like, “Ah, who is this guy?” But Don Bren bought his way into the most massive amount of wealth possible without a bidding war, without any kind of giant deal announcement, without any kind of hostile takeover.
[00:05:00] It’s crazy because he’s the most underrated billionaire I know, and he spent close to 20 years doing something that is extremely boring, but you and I can learn from that at all, and it made him one of, I would tell you, the richest real estate owners in America. So, backstory, here’s what happened. Back in 1977, Don Bren decided that he wanted to own this company called the Irvine Company.
[00:05:23] Now, you probably have never heard of the Ir- Irvine Company if you don’t live in Irvine, California, or Orange County, California. I hadn’t really thought about it much either. I had no idea who it was until I got here. But he– Bren is one of the most valuable landowners in the country. So today, a huge part of Orange County actually sits on and is connected to the Irvine Company.
[00:05:42] But Bren didn’t have that much money, and he didn’t buy the company that, you know, kinda most people would think, where he talked to bankers or went to an auction, or there’s a room full of buyers, or he started buying share. What he did was he started buying shares from individual owners. Imagine this: one person owned a piece, then another person owned a piece, and someone inherited a piece, and someone else inherited this piece, and someone was gifted this piece.
[00:06:05] And every now and then, one of those people wanted cash. And maybe there was a family issue, or maybe there was an estate being settled, or maybe they just wanted the money. But whatever the reason, Bren would buy their shares, and then he’d find somebody else and then buy theirs, and then he would do it again, and then he would buy theirs.
[00:06:19] And he kept doing that for 20 years. I don’t– By the way, I don’t know about you, but that’s the path that I cannot get over. Some people stick with the same diet for, like, I don’t know, 20 days. But this dude focused on the same opportunity for 20 years, and he did it one owner at a time, one conversation at a time.
[00:06:35] He bought this, whatever, one share at a time, and eventually, he owned the whole darn thing. Now, when I heard that, my first thought was, “Dude, why? Why would you spend 19, 20 years doing something like this? What was so special about this company?” So I started learning more about it because I live near Irvine, California, and the answer that I found out ended up being more interesting than I even thought.
[00:06:59] The story actually starts long before this guy, Don Bren. Back in the 1800s, there was this Irish immigrant named James Irvine. He is the mastermind behind all of this. He put together close to 100,000 acres of land in Southern California. At that time, it was mostly ranchland. And of course, no headlines and no one really knew who James Irvine was, and the family held onto that land for decades.
[00:07:23] Uh, then Cal- of course, California grew, people moved in, you had businesses showing up and cities and then expanding and, like, you know what California it is today. But eventually, the Irvine Company that owned this 100,000-ish acres of land, was sitting on an enormous amount of land right in the middle of one of the fastest growing areas in the country.
[00:07:41] Imagine, like I’ll, I’ll akin this to you. Imagine you bought Central Park in New York City, right? Imagine Manhattan. Imagine you bought Central Park and you just didn’t do anything to it for 30 years, and then suddenly you wake up one morning and you’re like, “Hey, here’s Manhattan. Maybe I should do something with Central Park,” right?
[00:07:58] And you just didn’t leave it in Central Park, you actually did something with it. Imagine that’s what actually happened. And then, of course, what these guys did, they made a decision that totally, you know, did something amazing for Irvine. Instead of selling pieces of whenever someone wanted to buy them, they started planning an entire city.
[00:08:13] As you know, the city of Irvine, California. That’s where the modern Irvine actually came from. And so while I was reading about this, I realized, wait a minute. They decided, just like Central Park, that one-third of the land would never be developed, ever. Now, that’s cool. Maybe that’s a conservation easement, and you get a tax benefit for that.
[00:08:32] They probably did. But think about this. Maybe it’s like, oh, maybe they want parks and protected space, and for the kids. Sure. Maybe it’s both, though. I ask myself another question: what happens to the rest of the land when a third of it is permanently off limits, right? I will tell you that just as soon as they put Central Park into New York City, into y- into, into Manhattan, the rest of the value of Manhattan went up.
[00:08:54] Why? Because it’s a straight demand supply. There was just not enough of the thing, right? ‘Cause when there’s less of something, it tends to become more valuable of everything else. And the more I thought about it, the smarter I realized it because they were not just reacting to the growth of what was happening around them.
[00:09:08] They just decided that, “Hey, what if we could artificially shape this growth?” And that’s when I thought, wait a minute, this is what– this is why what Bren was doing was so interesting, because it was not just buying up the land. I think it was something significantly bigger. He had this vision, and I sometimes I feel like, man, I should have thought about this.
[00:09:28] I think that most people look at a company and focus on the company. I think what Don Bren did was focused on the people, and I’ll tell you what the people mean here. A company that f- a company, what does a company do? A company follows a process, right? What do, what do people do? People follow their own lives.
[00:09:45] A company hires bankers. What do people do? People go through divorces. People go through estates. People go through, I don’t know, money for different reasons. People go through their life in some way, and Bren understood that. So instead of waiting for the entire company to be sold, he just talked to the individual owners.
[00:09:59] He just talked to the people one by one. Honestly, year after year, he just probably just waited, and because of that, he wasn’t competing with anyone else. This business was not for sale. James Irvine did not want to sell the Irvine Company. Bren just bought it piece by piece, share by share, owner by owner.
[00:10:14] Like, that is freaking insane. And most of the time, the reason is, most of the time, he was having conversations that no one else was having, right? He was talking to people about buying their share when, that nobody else wanted to have that conversation. And everybody else was waiting for this company to go up for sale, saying, “Oh yeah, when this, when the Irvine Company goes up for sale, we’ll have private equity, we’ll have investment bankers from Goldman Sachs.
[00:10:31] We’ll figure it out.” But this guy, Don Bren, was not waiting for any money. He just, he probably had a CRM or a Rolodex or some bunch of list of names somewhere, and he just realized, “Hey, if I bought one share, then I bought the other,” and that all those small decisions would add up at some point. I think in under 20 years, he owned the whole company.
[00:10:50] Now, here’s the other crazy part. Once he owned everything, he didn’t s- rush to sell pieces of it in any way. He kept operating with the same, like, thought process or the patience he had used to acquire it. Because as the city kept growing, the ra- what, what happens to the land? The land becomes more valuable, and as the land becomes more valuable, the original plan of getting it piece by piece keeps working.
[00:11:10] And the more I thought about that, the more I realized the story wasn’t really, I don’t know, helping me understand real estate. It was teaching me how opportunities or strategies over a long time actually work. So I think there’s three things, and you may say, “Well, Sharan, why are you telling me all this?” I think there’s three things kind of worth wh- thinking about here.
[00:11:27] The first one is that- I, I’ve realized that the biggest opportunities don’t always look like opportunities at first. Sometimes they’re just hidden opportunities. They’re like, you gotta have a bigger vision for these. Sometimes they’re, they’re hidden in situations that no one else is paying attention to because they’re hard, because they’re not scalable, because it’s not neatly packaged for us to actually go buy a thing.
[00:11:49] That’s number one, which is the biggest opportunities don’t always look like opportunities at first. The second is that most people compete in shark-infested waters, right? Most …Like, when you buy a house, what do you do? The, the, the worst way to buy a house, you may think, everyone thinks that the only way to buy a house is when there’s a sign in the yard.
[00:12:07] Well, when there’s a sign in the yard, everyone’s competing on the same house. Well, what if you could actually buy a house, and you were patient, and you wanted a house down the street from you, and you kept talking to the neighbor over and over and over and over and over again, that whenever that neighbor was ready to sell, they called you first?
[00:12:20] If that was the case, you would get the call first, and no one would ever know when there’s a sign in the yard. So I think the second most important thing is that people compete where everyone else is competing. People compete in shark-infested waters. And because it’s just easy. It’s packaged well. It’s where, quote, “listings are.”
[00:12:34] It’s where, like, there’s an auction. It’s the, that’s where it happens. But because of that, when everybody bids on something, you know that something is valuable. It ascertains some kind of value. But when you’re not competing, that’s pretty amazing, right? I don’t think in this case, Don Bren, who is a billionaire on the Forbes list, he bought the Irvine Company without competing with anyone.
[00:12:54] Like, that is insane to me. The third thing is that sometimes I just don’t understand, like, time can do incredible things if you just give time a chance to work, right? Wealth is a function of time. You know, there’s nothing more valuable. I read this crazy study that said if you had invested $1 when Jesus was born, right, essentially the turn of the century, or the turn of, like, yeah, uh, in, in what, AD 00, right?
[00:13:20] And it, and it compounded it, and it grew at 5% a year, it would be worth or, like, 100 to 200,000 times orders of magnitude today than any other time. $1 at that time, right? Just from a compounding perspective, which I think is crazy. Like, we don’t think about time. And a lot of it is why, like, I stress out about not what financial planning and strategies and investing can do for me.
[00:13:43] I’m … Literally all of my stuff right now is in the name of my children, and they own everything. And now, sure, there are some protection mechanisms associated with that just so my son doesn’t go rogue or whatever, but they, they have, what, 30-plus years on me, right? And No matter what, even if AI prolongs our life for another 100 years, sure, I will win, but they will always win more than I did.
[00:14:06] So I’m– I– The thing that my biggest learning here is I, I’m not saying it’s too late for me. I’m saying I’ve been fortunate to make what I made and, uh, won what I’ve won, and I, I’m good for the rest of my life. However, my children can have an extraordinary outcome because time is insane, right? So it’s amazing what time can do if you give it a little chance, if you have a little patience.
[00:14:27] Nineteen to twenty years sounds crazy, but if you see what nineteen to twenty years produced, that is insane. Like that, twenty years to become a billionaire without anybody, without being on the Forbes 400, without anybody even knowing about it, is unbeatable, is insane. So I think that sometimes we ignore what’s not exciting enough.
[00:14:47] Sometimes we ignore something because it feels too small. Sometimes we say, “Hey, you know, we’re stuck in our own head.” Sometimes we ignore something because it’s not for sale. But I really think that we had a great lesson here, which is to do the unscalable. I think what Don Bren did, spending, what, nineteen to twenty years chasing, chasing this, this single opportunity that most people didn’t even know existed, was the special sauce in all of this, was the winning formula in all of this.
[00:15:11] This guy, who’s, I don’t know, eighty-five, ninety years old right now, has seventeen-ish billion dollars worth of, worth of n-net worth. He’s on the Forbes 400 list. No one even knows who he is. But if you live in Orange County, California, you know that he doesn’t even have the last name Irvine, but he owns the Irvine Company.
[00:15:28] And he did this, what, one conversation at a time, buying one share at a time from one owner at a time. Pretty freaking amazing. So wanna tell you that that’s a great story. I thought I’d share with you because if we learn things like this, we can change the financial bloodlines of our family forever. Hey, by the way, if this is interesting to you, uh, hopefully you listened to it on TwoXpeed, and you got a great story out of this.
[00:15:48] Now you know how Irvine, California was started. Now you know how James Irvine from the Irish immigrant, actually built this, all of this, and how Don Bren, the one crazy dude who bought this one share at a time for twenty years and now is a billionaire that nobody even knows who he is. Pretty amazing.
[00:16:06] Remember, Harvey said, “Greatness is a choice,” and I hope you choose to, like, take this lesson away. By the way, if you like this, uh, and you wanna make– want me to make more like this, just screenshot this episode and tag me, and I can make more like this for you. If you live in Orange County, California, definitely screenshot this and tag me because I think everyone else in Orange County should hear the story because, uh, everybody knows about the Irvine story.
[00:16:24] So do me a favor, screenshot this and tag me, and I can make more like this for you.
[00:16:36] Hey, this is Sharran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I’ve got a chance to build $2 billion companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you’ll love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It’s on my Substack, called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything’s free at mynextbillion.com. Please check it out at mynextbillion.com.