This piece originally appeared on Entrepreneur.
We’d sure like to borrow Chris Sacca’s crystal ball. The former Google (GOOGL) exec and Shark Tank guest star has made some incredibly smart money moves, also known as Twitter (TWTR), Uber, Instagram, and Kickstarter to name a few. He invested in all of these Silicon Valley beasts before they blew up and became household names.
We caught up with the cowboy shirt-rocking billionaire “super angel” and Lowercase Capital founder on the set of Shark Tank last week, where he shared his number-one tip for getting rich.
“My best piece of advice for the quickest way to get rich is to not spend any of your money, and then you’ll have more than you need,” Sacca told Entrepreneur. “People get out ahead of themselves in debt with spending on all of their desires. But if you learn to live pretty simply and well, well under your means, you feel incredibly, incredibly rich and that frees you up and gives you the option to start something new, to leave the job you’re not excited about, where there might be a glass ceiling on you. Just don’t spend your money and you’re well on your way to becoming a millionaire.”
Save, don’t spend. If only it were that simple. Well, it might actually be.
For more on money, watch this Coins2Day video:
Sacca pointed to Travis Kalanick, a former door-to-door knife salesman and the co-founder and CEO of Uber, as an example of a person cha-chinging billions while remaining relatively frugal.
“Just yesterday Travis posted a pic of himself flying Southwest Airlines (LUV), coach class, on his way home for Father’s Day,” he says. “This guy is worth $11 billion dollars on paper and yet is riding in the back of the bus still, so I don’t think showiness correlates to success necessarily.”
Bear in mind that neither Kalanick nor Sacca need to cut corners or coupons. Sacca, 41, is worth an estimated $1.2 billion. He lays claim to 4 percent of Uber, not a bad slice of a potentially $62.5 billion-dollar pie. Kalanick, 39, clocking in with an estimated net worth of $6.2 billion, isn’t exactly on a budget either.
Still, it’s sort of refreshing to occasionally see billionaires behaving like the rest of us, sucking it up on budget airlines and carbing out on McDonald’s (like Warren Buffett regularly does), perhaps not to save a buck, but maybe, just maybe, to keep it real.
More from Entrepreneur:
• Mark Cuban Slams Y Combinator Co-Founder for Dissing Shark Tank
• Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary: Having Dyslexia Is a ‘Superpower’ in Business
• Ex-Googler Launching $5 Million VC Fund
As for Sacca’s signature embroidered rockabilly shirts, he told us he bought his first one on sale at a Reno-Tahoe International Airport gift shop. “It was 80 percent off,” he points out, cranking up his voice and grinning, seeming genuinely stoked. “I was like, ‘Yeah, score!’”
Apparently, even billionaires dig a deep discount. Like Sacca says, “You don’t get rich blowing your money, that’s for sure.”