How to Make $100M During Your Career with Emmy Sobieski

Maybe it ends up with a billion and then your percentage will be a percentage of the billion at the end and it'll be a percentage ownership. So that's how that works.

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. You want to make $100,000 a year? A million dollars a year? How about you reset your sights and decide to make $100 million during your career. Today you're in for a treat as Amy Sobieski joins us. She is an author and investor. She wrote the book $100 million careers, the five fastest career paths to wealth beyond you'd wildest dreams. And she's also the CEO COO of Performative Speaking and the CEO and co founder of Competitive Storytelling Inc. She previously co managed the number one ranked fund in up almost 500%. Her institutional investing experience includes 25 years working for investment firms representing diverse strategies, asset size and types. And today, Emmy joins us to share her secrets. Emmy, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Yeah. Oh, this is, this is really exciting for me. As we were talking a little bit before the show, there's actually so much more I wanted to discuss than just your new book. But I'll never forget back in college. So I, a lot of people know my story, but I'd quit racing bicycles the first time. We were talking a little bit about our sporting backgrounds before we started recording here. And I said, all right, I'm not going to go pro. I got to go make money. And I went to there wasn't even a Barnes and Noble where I was at school at Virginia Tech, but there was a Borders and I found a book and it was six figure careers. It was like how to make $100,000 and it had all these different career options. So I thought that was pretty good. But I bought your book and it says $100 million careers. So I can't wait to talk about your background and kind of what's inside the book and what our listeners and your readers will see in this. But I mean, if you don't mind, you have an amazing background as well. If you could share a little bit about kind of what got you here today?

Sure. So I was right. Like you, I actually started as a horse trainer and, and realized that maybe my body wasn't going to hold up to do that for my whole career. And then my own horse trainer said to me, and he was also my life guide, Dietrich von Hofgarden. He said, you should go to college or sorry to, you should go to grad school, face all your opportunities. You still choose to be horse trainer, I'll support you. I started, so I started trading in grad school and a friend of mine said, hey, people would pay you to do that. Like, you've gotta be kidding me. This is like playing pac man. And five years later I was running the one fund in the world.

Wow.

So I used my MBA to switch careers and move from a five year figure career into seven and more figure career. So 25 years as an institutional investor and right around that 25 year mark I started thinking, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to die and have done operations, not have lived inside a company instead of look at a company. And so I decided to move over. And I write in my book that if I was optimizing to make $100 million, I should have made that move to get equity and get in valley much, much earlier. But I did that in my early 50s and worked at a couple of companies. So I've been VP operation, VP Operations and then COO at several startups. And right now I'm the CEO of Competitive Storytelling. And then all during that time I have done various athletics. So I was ninth in the World cup trials in 2005 in dressage. And then a North American champion for women overall 2017 in bodybuilding, silver medalist and USA Masters championship in the 100 and the 400 meter dash, so. And then various placings in marathon ultramarathons.

Yeah, I think it's phenomenal because coming from a, from a cycling background, as we were talking about, cycling is very, it's, it's varied. Right. You have sprints in there, you know, you have 100 mile, 120 mile races. You can race on the track. You have managed to have success on the track running, you know, ultra marathons, which I've, I don't know if I've really spoken to anybody else with, with such a varied, not, not just sporting background, but sporting success. And it's, it's super impressive. What I gotta ask you, what's, what's your favorite discipline.

Right now? It's bodybuilding. Yeah, but, but horses have Always been with me since the beginning. I just got to a point where the pleasure wasn't worth the cost in terms of owning and competing at that high level. It was very, very expensive. So then I needed to stay on Wall street and that perhaps I wasn't enjoying as much as I should. So that, you know, there was just the trade off became. And what I, what would happen is I would go to the barn and you know, be a fine time at the barn. I would be preparing for the next competition. Part of it was that I was in four years straight of Olympic trials, World cup trials, WAG trials, while running billions of dollars on Wall Street. And so it was a bit of a treadmill.

Yeah.

And but the other piece was I really enjoyed my, I love my horses, but in terms of going to the barn, training, competing, I was enjoying going to the gym more. And it's like a thousand times cheaper.

It's. Yeah.

So as soon as I thought about that, I was like, you know what, I should really reflect on this before I keep doling out all this cash. So that was the moment where I said, all right, going to take these horses as far as they can go, retire them, of course, keep them in retirement, pay for their pasture and everything. But after that I'm going to, I'm going to move on. But I would say so. I think there's two big lessons from my athletics.

You read my mind.

One is, one is to follow the curiosity. So always be pulling on a string and you can do this in all of your life. And this is the thing that really paid off for me as an analyst. It's the thing that, it's asking those dumb questions and asking them again and again, asking open ended questions. Number two is that we all think that things are much harder to learn than they are. And once you learn something, you learn how to. And the next thing is so much easier and you can learn it so much faster. So we think, oh wow, it was so hard to learn French. I can never learn Spanish. And what you don't realize is you're so close to getting Spanish because you already learned how to learn a foreign language. So those are the two big, big lessons from, from my time in sports.

That's huge. I know Tim Ferriss talks a lot about this and I'm, I'm forgetting his friend that's a chess champ, but he, he talks, he's a judo, I think he's a judo champ, chess champ, or maybe jiu jitsu champ. But Tim and this gentleman say the same thing. They say once you learn how to learn, you can replicate, you know, that success. And I used to love hiring athletes because athletics really teach you multiple things that lead to success in business. One, it teaches you to set a goal. And that's what we're going to talk about here next, which is like how to set your goals even higher. Right. Than like, hey, make a hundred thousand dollars. Let's, let's set that goal even higher. Two, how to put a plan in place. Right? You have to, you know, you know, I used to work in a gym and I worked with a lot of bodybuilders and you know, not only did you have to have the training, you had to have the, the nutrition down, but the timing had to be perfect. And then three, the discipline to actually move towards that goal, work your plan and then have that delayed gratification that comes from it.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So, yeah. So again, this is like, it's kind of eye popping, right? When I saw, when I saw your book come out, $100 million careers. What drove you to come up with this topic, Emmy? And why did you write this book?

So I have a bunch of courses and one of my courses is huge. It's 60,000 words and it's basically how to invest. And within that course I say, once you learn how to invest, you want, you know, want to get a job in investment banking. Here are the careers that lead off of investment banking, the five careers that lead off investment banking. And that section of that course got a lot of great feedback. And it's very similar to what we've seen with a lot of, a lot of current authors is they start tweeting, they start seeing what works on social media, they get some really good feedback, and then they say, okay, that's what I'm going to write a book on. So I actually, what the people say to do is come up with your title first. I did the opposite. I wrote the book first on those five careers, which is hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, startups, and board directors. And there's more $100 million careers, but those are the ones that I understand and can share about. And so I wrote about that. And then it was like, what is the title? And I thought about Alex Hormozi's Hundred Million Dollar Offers.

Yeah, great book.

And I was like, but is that really too click baity? Like, would it? And then I thought, you know what? I have, I have multiple friends who are worth a hundred million. I've worked for four billionaires.

Wow.

The problem isn't that I think that a hundred million is clickbaity. The problem is that all of our goals are too small. That is absolutely possible. There's 25,000 self made households in the US with a worth over a hundred million today.

Amazing. Amazing.

That are self made. So my goal is that the next self made households aren't ones that are in Silicon Valley and New York where somebody they knew someone who could show them how to get on a board of directors or they knew someone who could show them how to get into Ivy League and then get to Goldman Sachs and then get into private equity. That this is a way for me to mentor at scale. I've got three, I mean I've got more tease but three mentioned in the book who came from incredibly diverse backgrounds, immigrants, community college and have all become millionaires by the age of 30. Multimillionaires and they are on their way to that hundred million by age 50. And then I've got several friends who are also mentioned in the book but not by name for obvious reasons that who, who in their 50s who have already hit 100 million. And so I've absolutely seen the path and I share the path and I also share my mistake on, on the way and things that my friends did right that I did wrong.

Awesome. Before we get into the mistakes, I think you know a lot of people that hear that they're like, well, hedge funds, private equity startups or you know, like I don't, I don't work on Wall Street, I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I think there's a real misconception in this country and I, you know, and when I was in business school reading like the Millionaire Next Door and you know those series of books, it really was eye opening to me because I was like, wait a minute, like being a millionaire isn't that far fetched. It's just okay, you know, you have to, you know, be an entrepreneur, have a business, have a high paying career that combined with rich dad, poor dad really helped drive me in the right direction. But when I look at this list that you just laid out to me, it seems like it may be a little too far for some people. Prove me wrong.

Some of it is so. Some of it is okay. I'm not here to lie and say hey, you could get a job at Blackstone or Apollo and yeah, without, because Blackstone and Apollo only hire from the top four investment banks which only hire from the leagues. So you kind of got to know if you want to do private equity at a top, top firm. You got to know that at age 14, I mean that's just. Or you got to get so lucky. Now there's non top tier, right? There's second tier private equity that you could get in through multiple management. But the biggest thing here is that what I'm talking about is financial careers. And there's a whole bunch of other careers, manufacturing, you know, especially around entrepreneurship. But even aside from that, there's a lot of other real estate. There's a ton of other careers where people have made over a hundred million. They're just not careers where I can give you a how to guide from start to finish. So I just kind of focused on the five that I really know of the five that I really know. If you're not very focused on finance, so hedge fund, private equity, venture capital might not be for you. Then focus on startups and entrepreneurship. Now one really interesting thing is that there is a money flywheel between board directors, startup founders and venture capital, such that you could become a venture scout or a venture partner. Because let's say you start up a firm and it does really well and you sell it or it's got a great valuation, all of a sudden a venture partner says, hey, you really know this, the new direct to consumer packaged goods area very well. So because you know this really well, you could be a scout, you could tell us what the next hot things are coming and then maybe that works out really well, you become a venture partner. So now you're getting a piece of the carrier firm while running your own firm. Then later you sell your firm, you become an angel investor. You do that a few times. And there's another companies in the industry that say, hey, you grew your firm from 0 to 50 million or from 50 million to 100 million in revenue. We want to do that too. We're in a similar industry. We'd like you on our board to advise us on how to do that. And so now all of a sudden you're equity in these other companies because you're on their boards of directors. You have a payout from your own company that then you can reinvest and grow that to the 100 million. And then you're getting carry which is a percentage of the profits at that venture firm. And if it's a large venture firm, the percentage of the profits can be significant because they can be managing a billion dollars, which on Wall street we used to call opm, other people's money because you're leveraging the fact that other people have invested so much in that firm. So that's a really exciting trifecta that doesn't necessarily require any kind of finance background. And you can enter at middle age. I wouldn't say you would want to enter at age 60 or something, but you can enter and not be, not be college age.

That is, that is awesome what you just described there. And I always, when I talk to people that want to syndicate real estate, they want to do these bigger real estate deals. Like, oh, I want to do. What do you want to do? You either need to know how to operate. You know, I talked to a young gentleman I coached several years ago. We actually just had dinner last night. He owns hundreds and hundreds of mobile homes now. Mobile home, you know, spaces, parks. And he's. I was like, well, you can operate, you can find deals or you can, you can bring the equity to it. 24 years old, 23 when we first met, probably not going to bring the equity for multimillion dollar portfolio. But he learned to operate really well and in a very short period of time he's been successful. So I think what you described, Emmy, which is, you know, if you know what your skill set is, if you know what your interest is and where you are realistically in life, you can focus on that and then you can apply that and find out where there's overlap with these other areas. But one thing you mentioned, and you brought it up a couple times, you called it carry the first time and then I'll have you define that for the audience real quick here. But then you also said equity a couple times and you mentioned it. One, in having the equity from your own business and then reinvesting the equity. And this is something that the rich do that the average person doesn't do. I was visiting my friend and he very successful, entrepreneurial, and he's doing this deal with his business. He's like, yeah, I want to get paid this percentage of the profits. And I said, you need to find out if you can get paid in equity. And he said, well, why? I said, well, if you get paid in equity, a couple things happen. One, you can delay paying taxes. Two, you can let that equity continue to grow indefinitely and you can potentially leverage that through acquisitions and different things. Do you mind talking a little bit about what carry is or carried interest and then. And how you've seen that and how it, the effect it has when you're talking about these extra zeros on the, the numbers we're talking about.

Yeah, sure, sure. And just to zoom back for one second, yeah, the. When people say to me how $1 million? How do I make 100 million? Especially the hundred million.

Yeah.

Basically say you could break it down in three steps.

Okay.

You break in, break in, build equity, break out, break into the industry. You learn how to do it. You get an opportunity to manage a company, manage a profit and loss, manage a portfolio, then you build equity. And that's the mistake that I made. I stayed too long in step one. So the second one is you build equity.

Yeah.

And start kind of collecting your chips effectively.

Right.

And then break out is if you want to become super wealthy, you need to have your own fund and your own firm first. Your own. That can get you to 100 million. If you want to get beyond that, you're going to need to have your own firm. That's Bill Gates, that's Elon Musk, that Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capitalist. So that's kind of the. And so then if we back up in terms of carry and what carry is, it's actually a special term for venture capital because it's treated tax wise different. So it's a little bit of a fancy term for profit sharing because. But what it, what it is is so all of the. So private equity, venture capital and hedge funds are all considered alternative investments. They were originally for accredited investors and mostly still are. And the idea is that you want returns that are different from the market and hopefully uncorrelated with the market and you're willing to take a different set of risks for that. But at the same time you want really, really smart managers to that if you're not just going to buy the S and P index. So you want to really incent them to get you that performance because you're not just get market performance. So you pay them 20% of your own profits. And normally one, I mean it's called 22% of assets under management is the management fee. 20% of the profits in venture capital because of the way it's treated tax wise it's called carry because it's carried interest. So your interest or your percentage of the PI venture capital firm goes up. So let's say one year you have a certain profit and then so your bonus should be a million dollars. Well instead of having to sell illiquid private companies, which is very hard to do and you would do it a very deep discount, just say, okay now your share of whatever those. So let's say it's $100 million fund, your share just went up by a million dollars. And so all of the limited partners, those people that are paying you to invest, all of their shares go down by a respective amount, and then your share goes up. And then each year, if you have profits, your share keeps going up, and so your interest in the firm gets carried. And then when you all sell out and everything, then you just get a higher percentage of, of that fund. So the hundred million dollar fund invests a hundred million, maybe it ends up with a billion, and then your percentage will be a percentage of the billion at the end and it'll be a percentage ownership. So that's how that works.

Yeah, no, and it's amazing. It's almost like magic from a tax perspective and a growth perspective because you avoid paying taxes for a period of time, it continues to compound. And if, if, if you're listening as a listener, you know, it's like, well, hey, I'm being diluted. But in order for the manager of that fund to get compensated, they had to make you a lot of money in the first place. So your share goes up, it just goes up a little bit less than it carries. And this has been in politics, we've heard this thrown around the past, you know, really 10, 10 or so years a lot around Wall street, how we should be taxing this, right? How. And I always, I mean, look, I, I think that, you know, you look at who pays the taxes in this country and these sorts of things. But like you just said it, I mean, it's really hard because you say, hey, okay, I got compensated $1 million. I'm going to basically delay that compensation. It's kind of a form of delayed compensation, which we do all the time in business, but then I'm going to have to pay taxes on it. So, you know, Warren Elon Musk famously did this last year, right, to kind of stick his finger in Elizabeth Warren's eyes, like, fine, I'll just sell a bunch of my stock and pay the tax. But that made the stock price go down, and that's a liquid company. So I think what you illustrated was, hey, it's like, how do you, I mean, to somebody that says that, what are your thoughts? Like, how do you address that? Or do you say, hey, this is good for the economy because it continues to let this capital work, find places to go and grow.

I think all of these things, like carried interest, et cetera, can be solved in the market if limited partners think that these venture capital firms are making too much money or they're not earning enough of a return. And so it's that it's not worth the 20%, then they will stop putting their money in those venture capital firms. So I don't even think that's an opinion that I have, because it's just. It gets worked. It gets worked out in markets.

Yeah, that's.

I love that demand for managers.

That's a. That's a great answer. Yeah. And it's like, you can, you know, people can charge less or do different things. There's different structures out there, and then the capital flows into those places. But, yeah, I think that's.

Texas teachers actually has something where they don't pay. They don't pay any management fee, but then if you outperform the market, they pay 30% of profit.

Yeah, there you go.

You know that. And then if, like, if that's something that's interesting to you as a manager, then you go and you try to earn Texas teachers as an as. As an account and a client.

Yeah, I love it. And again, it's, you know, I think a lot of the vilification that comes from Wall street comes from a lack of understanding about how a lot of these things work. And, you know, I think if people understand, you know, more of how the back end of this works and how capital flows and like you said, hey, the market works itself out, it starts to make, you know, a little bit more sense to people. But, you know, it is a complex issue, and finances is a complex issue. And you have people like Dave Ramsey and Susie Orman that are out there, you know, kind of teaching to the masses, if you will. And our goal is to do the opposite. Our second guest on the show was Richard Wilson, who at the time, he'd really sent a millionaire headaches, and that's was it Center Millionaire Migraines maybe was the name of the book, but sentimillionaires. A family worth a hundred million dollars. So this is awesome to kind of, you know, you know, continue on that because we like to teach what the rich do with their money, but we also are here to help people shortcut and avoid mistakes. You mentioned earlier on in the show, Emmy, that there was. There was some mistakes that you made as people look at these options that are out there and say, okay, I love. I love what you're saying. I'm going to read your book. I'm going to figure out kind of what, you know, what the map looks like and potentially put this in place in my own life. What are some mistakes that you see people making as they move towards these goals?

I'll actually talk about the mistakes that I'VE made because I think it's personal. And so it sticks in people's minds a little bit better. So the two big mistakes are not taking enough risk early, which I did not make. I took a lot of risk early and not keeping the gas on. And that's a mistake that I and this, I'm talking about keeping the gas on on your career. And that's the mistake that I made. So very early on, as I described, I came out of, I came out of mba, I ran the number one fund in the world. From there. I joined a top hedge fund. This is year six in my career and it was literally the most coveted position on the entire buy side at the time. And I got it. And that boss, that billionaire boss said to me, your job is to call semiconductors. And that next year, June of 20 of 2000, I for. And I had called almost every semicycle the bottom and the top. Semiconductors are very cyclical. They're the computer chips and they're cyclical. And so you'll have big ups and downs that are more than the economy. They're bigger and they're. And lower than the economy. And then they happen more frequency. And everyone says you can't call a cycle. And I had called all of them since the beginning of my career. So I was hired to do that for Palantir Capital, which is different than Palantir Technologies. And so June of two and I usually look top, I would say three of my five indicators would hit and that's a very consistent top. Same with the bottom I would look for of the five indicators, three of those five would hit. And I would say it's time to buy or it's time to sell. Over a 48 hour period in June of 2000, all five of five hit. And I went to my boss and I said, and at the time I had been tracking since February that since February, 80% of what we needed to buy in semiconductors was already out there in inventory. So these factories continued to make chips, but we had 80% of the year's revenue in February. Right. So it's just going to be a disaster in terms of oversupply.

Yeah.

So by the time June comes along, we're, you know, it's even worse. But now all of my indicators actually hit. You can't do it just when that one thing in February. And so I said to him, we need to sell a billion dollars in semiconductors and short an additional billion. I know you like to keep high quality names. I'm telling you, they're all going down 85%, even the best ones. And so he decided to do the whole thing. Stocks were going up 2% a day. All of my partners at the firm called me up individually and said I was ruining the firm. I was going to be the death of the firm. I was crazy. And two weeks. But we were able to get all those shorts. You have to borrow stock to get a short. And often if everyone else to short, then the demand for borrowing those shares is high. It's very expensive for us. Stocks were going up 2% a day. No one wanted this. So we were able to get all of those shorts placed very, very cheaply and efficiently. Two weeks later, the number one. The number one semiconductor analyst in the world, Jonathan Joseph at Salomon Brothers, downgraded semiconductors, and they had to hire two guards for him. And semiconductors then went down 85%.

Wow.

So this was the moment. I stayed firm for a couple more years, but I had just run the number one fund in the world. I had just made the biggest call in semiconductors on the street. This was the moment that I should have capitalized and launched my own hedge fund. Hedge funds after, after a big crash in the market, then typically large investors are like, oh, we should have been hedged. And then they're interested in hedge funds. So I mean, it's a little perverse, but that's the time you want to launch a hedge fund. And so it was a perfect time to launch a hedge fund. The other thing was in 2003, my boss shut down the firm and I left. That was spring of 2003. Summer of 2003, all stocks were trading at less than the cash on their balance sheet.

Yeah, it was a bloodbath for.

So I could have gone to Silicon Valley and joined either a tech startup or joined and joined a public tech company like Amazon, got in stock, made in stock, and also built that second half of my $100 million career. I could have. So that was my. That was my get equity and breakout moment that I just didn't. Didn't take. Now in the, in the latter part of my career where I'm. I'm an to a lot of different startups, I'm a CEO at a startup now. I have equity, I have angel investment. So I'm building equity and working with other people. And it's also, this is a point that you can still do it without having your own fund, but if you want to make more than a hundred million, if you want to be an Elon Musk and make 200 billion or bill Gates kind of thing, like hundreds of billions. You do need to do that third step of breakout, have your own. But there's a lot of people, myself included, where I actually really like working for an incredible CEO. And you can still do that while building equity and having your path go towards a hundred million.

Yeah, no, I love that. That, that's, that's an awesome story. And again, it's, it's, it's incredible to have that. And that's when I, you know, I mentor younger people because it's a challenge, right? You're like, oh, I'm crushing it in my career. But this other opportunity, I don't want to leave this company I'm at right now to take this risk. It's like, well, what are you going to leave? Are you going to leave when you're not doing well? Especially, you know, sales. I did sales most of my career. It's like, what, are you going to wait till your sales suck and then you're going to go, you know, said, no, this is, you know, the time to strike is when you're at your peak, you know, in that, in that, in that career cycle. I think that's a phenomenal story. Emmy. This has been awesome. I wish I could just keep going and going and going here, and there's so much more we could talk about. But if people want to get your book, if they want to learn all the lessons that we kind of touched on today, what's the best place to pick up a copy, as I did?

Amazon is the best place. It's the easiest place, but it's anywhere. It's@barnesandnoble.com as well. But Amazon.com is great. I really appreciate reviews if people like it or even if you don't like it. But it's great to get reviews on Amazon so that other people can see if they want to read it. And then I have a, I also have a website which you can reachobieski.com or if you don't feel like spelling that, 100 mil careers will also take you there.

100 mil careers. We're going to put that in the show notes as well. And I encourage everybody to check out Emmy's resources, her website, her book, tons of interesting information, tons of valuable information. So if you like what you heard today, check that out. And we'll have the website on Amazon where you can get a copy of her book as well. Emmy, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story with the audience.

Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.