These Average Joes Became Crypto Millionaires In Under 12 Months

I have a friend who used to work with me and I caught up with him and his story, he basically went from like average, like an average job, like you wouldn't look at this person and say, oh, that's a star career. And they were good, they were doing well obviously, but they were doing like normal person well. And they went from normal person well to making like to personally making like $15 million in the last year just by— they basically quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in DeFi and they started playing with all the DeFi projects, investing their money in DeFi. And they didn't have a huge base of capital. They had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in. And to turn half a million dollars— and if you have no path in your career to being like a, you know, a deca-millionaire, right? Like, if you don't have a path where you're like, yeah, I'm gonna have fuck you money, to go from no path, no, no, like, reasonable storyline that makes sense there— you have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that's that— to that is amazing to me and awesome. And like, you know, just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi-billionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested $250K in a random token. It's like, this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market and was like, ah, instead of investing in Apple, Google, and Facebook, I'm gonna invest in like crypto and turned a normal amount, a normal like life savings amount of money into a life-changing amount of money. And I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns, um, that are like kind of amazing. So I'm gonna ask him if he'll come on and share it.

Do I know them?

Willing to? Yeah, you know them. Um, I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's gonna make for an amazing episode. Uh, I'll ask him if he'll do it next week.

Did they, um, did they earn the— did they, uh, sell— do they have USD or like some type of stable currency? Um, no, they're, they're still in crypto, like 100 or 100+ percent because they, you know, but, but is it stable like a bit like a, a popular thing?

Uh, it's a mix of popular things and like probably make it sellable and stuff. Yeah, they could— everything's liquid. If they wanted to cash out and say, I'm done, I'm going to Malibu and I'm going to chill, I'm going to pretend that this year never existed, and I basically won a lottery.

They could do that because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin, but he's like, I can't sell it. So it's like, that's different.

That, that's like, uh, those are like either illiquid, like, oh, there's this coin but it's not listed yet, or it's liquid but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin. And so like, yeah, if you have $10 million and you go to sell even $100,000, it'll crash the price of the coin. That's not what this is. That's, that's a different thing. Um, that's a— what that is is I, I make a million coins, I keep $999,000 for myself, and then I sell one of them for a dollar, and oh, now the total value of my thing is a million dollars. And it's like, no, it's not really.

You—

there's such a little— such a small amount of the supply out there being sold, it's not indicative of the true price. This is what I'm talking about, is not that situation.

Is there any other person— all right, so you have a story of someone who did $500,000 to $15 million I just told you about this guy who in like 2 or 3 years—

this person, non-technical, never was a trader or financial person. Like they would own like an index fund or mutual fund before that. Didn't know how to spell blockchain. You know, like this person is— that's why this blows my mind. It's not just this. I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome amount of money for anybody. But what's crazy is this guy, point A to point B, it makes no sense. It's like, how could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind-blowing to me.

So I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who did $250,000 up to a billion. You just said $500,000 to $15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this like crazy, crazy journey?

Uh, personally, you've talked about this guy. You talked about somebody, right? That your friend—

Yeah. I had a friend that, that they, they did $1 million to $100 million.

Yeah.

So at its peak when Bitcoin was, uh, $60,000. So I don't, why don't, whatever it's at, discount it.

Okay. I have another one. Uh, there is a kid who I call him a kid cuz he was actually a kid. He, I built this, uh, product called Blab back in the day. It was like kind of like Clubhousey. You could basically go hang out and chat with people. And this kid used to come home every day from school. He used to get on and chat and he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13-year-olds. He came to our rooms cuz he loved technology startups. He wanted to be in the startup scene. And, um, I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Okay, so fast forward, it's been like 6 years since then. So now he is like, let's say 21 or something like that. It's been a while. And he created some, but he was, he's a technical guy, but he created a protocol. Like I was like, oh, what you been up to? Like, how's your startup going? And he is like, yeah, startup's okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months. And I was like, ah, I know, man, it's tough. You just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot, find something. And he is like, actually, like we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like sidechains. And it was like, uh, what up, blah, blah, blah, some bunch of terms I don't even understand. You know, it's a, it's a derivatives perpetual contract for, you know, adding liquidity to this blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, I don't even understand what you're saying. Uh, and he's like, yeah, the market cap of it, like, you know, basically like the market cap of it is like $900 million right now. And you know, I, I think he cashed out $10 million in this. He's like, he's like, dude, it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy. Now it's at $200 million. And he's like, I was able to like take out like a life-changing amount of money. He, I took out $10 million. He was, he was like, he was asking me, 'cause he goes, I heard you guys talking about charities and Charity: Water. You told the Charity: Water story. I was really moved. Like I've set aside 7 figures to, uh, donate.

Um, you're like, what?

I was like, you've set aside 7 figures? Like, do you, like, are you 7 years old? What, how did this happen? Where, what if, what has happened in this amount of time? Like I used to talk to you when you would come home from 8th grade and get online. Like you're donating millions of dollars to charity now? Like what is, Again, A and B, it broke my brain. And I don't mean this as an insult to them.

If they were only 15 then, so they're still only like 19?

Yeah, I think they're 20 now or 21, something like that. It's been like 7 years since we made that thing. So, you know, it's not mind-blowing to me that this person is successful. In both cases, I really like this person. That's why I used to hang out with them. That's why I used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart and were gonna be normal person successful. It's like when, you know, oh, I went, like, my sister went to high school with this girl, Lily Galici, who's like this super famous Instagram star now. And she like has her own TV show on Bravo. And it's like, wait, that's the Lily girl who used to come to our house after school? Like, she was just like a normal girl. Like, wait, that's her? Like, that doesn't even look like her anymore. And I was like, yeah, she's had some work done, right? It's like just mind-blowing to know a normal person who's like, yeah, that's a cool normal, they'll do well in life, to be like, no, actually they're like, one of those crazy outlier stories and in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted. You know, it didn't make any sense. Like, you know, it's not— it's not that that was their skill set and they tried, tried, tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit. It's like just out of nowhere they just did this thing and it hit. And crypto is this amazing thing like that. So by the way, I'm going to say something. When I first talked to my friend, I caught up with my friend, I felt insanely jealous. I was like, so I was happy for him and I like him and all that. But I was also like, I was like, in my head I was just like, what the fuck have I been doing with my life?

With the friend that used to work for you?

Both of them, both the same reaction.

Yeah, because it feels weird because you're like, oh wait, you kind of looked up to me.

Yeah, I'm your mentor now. Now I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. So like, what just happened? You just like catapulted really crazy, like, yeah, between the last time we caught up and now.

There's jealousy there. It's easy.

And I just want to say, like, you know, Interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this? There's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it, but that used to be like, it used to be, I would feel that I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. And I would kind of find reasons why it was like, ah, that's just luck. Or like, you know, well, they probably are taking a bunch of risk and they might lose it all. And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not, not all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone. But I still got a little bit of that like jealousy pang left. And I'd say the interesting thing is my, my coach said this to me. He goes, you know, you'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure and they're not focused on your success. They're focused on their fail— your success has reminded them of their failure or your abundance has reminded their— them of their lack. And if you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change that. And if you find other people and you're like, oh, these people are haters, like, uh, you know, just understand what's coming on. They don't actually hate you. It's, uh, your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves, and that's where their attention has gone. And so, uh, yeah, I wanted to share that because I definitely felt this like crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time. But these stories were so mind-blowing that I couldn't— I was like, wow, I, this— I don't even know what to say.

I feel lucky know who I know, which we have the same group basically, that I've like, these stories that sound unbelievably true. Um, I'm like, yeah, I know that person. Um, I saw it. It was wild. So like an example is Moiz Ali selling Native deodorant for $100 million, 2 years after starting it. I was in, we shared an office when he was starting it and I saw him try to learn Facebook ads. Like I saw the thing come to fruition. I saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like 6 or 10 months. Um, and that was almost half the journey.