About 100 students sat in the Nelson auditorium Thursday night listening to a speaker explain how to make an easy million dollars.

Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks, gave a lecture called “How to Make a Million Dollars” to the International Business Club at N.C. State.

HowStuffWorks is a website containing various articles aptly explaining how stuff works. Topics range from willpower to architecture to robotics.

Brain started the company as a hobby and wrote articles for fun, he said. Once he had written about 20 articles for the site, popularity increased.

After selling the website for $1 million last year, Brain came to the University to work with entrepreneurial students.

“[Students] are being raised up in the best entrepreneurial climate ever possible,” Brain said.

Brain talked about the different ways any person could start a business or make easy money.

“If you have something, if you have ideas, you can be successful, any one of you,” Brain said.

Brain emphasized the importance and accessibility of the Internet. According to him, using online resources, anyone can publish a book, learn to make apps for smartphones or create websites, all of which can generate profit, skills and credibility.

Brain said his first entrepreneurial success came after a set of notes he wrote to help students gained popularity and landed him a book contract.

Many people will not take advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunities afforded them, Brain said.

“Here is the fact: 99.95 percent of you won’t do anything with [this information],” Brain said. “You’ll never get started. There just aren’t that many people who are trying, so your chance of success is actually high.”

Entrepreneurship is not about elaborate ideas, according to Brain. Many companies like Netflix, Walmart and Southwest Airlines started as simple ways for their respective founders to make money.

“It’s just a matter of getting started,” Brain said.

Brain was the first guest speaker of the year for the International Business Club, which hosts one guest speaker a month, according to club president Zach Milburn.

To thank Brain for speaking, the club presented him with a piece of IBC memorabilia made by a 3-D printer.

While Brain’s lecture didn’t directly relate to international business, Milburn said it was important for the foreign students to hear Brain’s perspective.

“In a lot of other countries, it’s inappropriate to talk about money, so they don’t hear a lot about this kind of thing,” Milburn said.