How Dan Abbate Built Wealth by Working Less and Thinking Bigger
In this powerful episode, Joel reconnects with longtime friend Dan Abbate - an entrepreneur, philosopher, investor, and all-around fascinating human. They dive deep into entrepreneurship, long-term thinking, mindset, AI, personal growth, private equity, and why Dan thinks centralization is the enemy of innovation. 👀
🔥 What you'll hear in this episode:
- Dan’s unusual education journey (college at 15, Harvard, Edinburgh, and more)
- How philosophy helps him win in business
- Lessons from advising over 100 entrepreneurs
- How his fund, Clotine Capital, helps scale real-world investments
- The importance of time horizons in decision-making
- The mental shift that 10x’d his net worth while reducing his workload
- Government overreach, Covid, decentralization, and why gas prices are actually a brilliant economics lesson
- OnlyFans business model brilliance (yes, really)
- His Guinness World Record for the world's biggest hot dog 🌭
💡 Whether you’re a business builder, a thinker, a curious human, or someone wanting to level up your mindset — you’ll get wisdom bombs, real talk, and a few laughs from two guys who've been through it.
📌 Mentioned in the episode:
CLOteen Capital Fund: https://cloteencapital.com
Dan’s IG: @thebigda
BigHotDog.com (yep, it's real) 🌭
🔁 Share this with a friend who's into entrepreneurship, startups, private equity, mindset, or just a good old honest convo.
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Dan Abbate
thebigda / CEO
Short real estate focused bio:
As a real estate investor, since purchasing his first investment property in 2002, Dan Abbate’s real estate investment focus has been on cash flow, capital appreciation and risk management to achieve outsized returns, consistently beating the S&P 500 index with substantially less volatility.
Dan has and continues to invest directly in commercial, multifamily and residential real estate, via real estate debt and equity instruments and alternative real estate vehicles such as agricultural land leasing, development and entitlements.
LONG OPS Focused BIO
Dan Abbate is an entrepreneur, thought leader, and investor with a career-long focus in business process optimization and automation using advanced technology, organizational development, and continuous improvement. Dan has a heavy transaction background including startup financing, mergers and acquisitions, and turnarounds. As an investor, Dan’s focus is on capital preservation, fixed-income and cash flow through a variety of investment vehicles in operating companies, real estate and other alternative investments.
In the late '90s, while he was still in college, Dan started an internet company which serviced and eventually sold to Wall Street-funded .coms. Between the years of 2003 and 2013, he started/developed or acquired/improved and sold eight companies serving various markets and industries with a market value of over $100,000,000 and were funded using private and public capital markets. He has experience in both B2B and B2C companies a… Read More
