From Immigrant Kid to AI Founder (My Full Story)

I'm standing in a rental car office and I've just crashed the rental car. I have $500 left on my credit card. That's it. That's everything I had left on earth. And the guy behind the counter, this brown guy, tells me I need to pay a $3,000 deposit. And I remember just sitting there doing the math in my head and I was like, this is not going to work. Like, no matter how many times I ran it in my head, like, it wasn't going to work. I ended up negotiating with him and I gave him everything that I had, all of it, every dollar that I had. I walked out of the office, took my 4 reps that I was supposed to drive to turf to do door-to-door sales and drove them to turf. And I sat there in the car and I cried because I literally did not have money for food that night. And the reason I'm telling you this is because a few years later I was running a company doing over $350K a month with over 200 active staff, like, at one point. And then I shut that company down on purpose, which might actually be the craziest part of the story. So let me take you back to the beginning because none of this is going to make sense without it. So this short video is going to be a little bit about my story. I'm creating this for my staff because some of my staff don't know my story. I'm creating this for my clients because if you know the company that I'm running right now, AutoCaller AI, and you know my story, it's gonna make a lot more sense why I'm the one person uniquely qualified to create the most realistic sounding voice AI on the planet. So let me take you back to very beginning. All right. So I was born in Taiwan and my family came to Canada when I was 2 years old. My parents were poor and I don't mean that in a vague way. I mean, money was always the topic in the house, right? Like my parents came from Taiwan. All right. And Taiwan to Canada, like they sold everything. And after selling everything, the currency exchange, even at that time, it still wasn't enough, right? So when there's never enough of something, it was all we thought about. So from a very young age, I wanted to be rich, not in a greedy way, but in a I never want to feel this way ever again way. And I want to be clear, I started selling when I was very young and I started doing door-to-door sales when I was in grade 6. I had a newspaper route. I remember the newspaper company, The Economist and Sun, they would give us these coupon booklets and these coupon booklets would be like $5 apiece. And basically they were like, hey, yeah, like you can go sell it to your paper route, which had 55 doors on the paper route. And so you go sell it and you can keep every dollar in profits, like free advertising from them. So it's like, okay, fine. So then I went and I remember at the time there's like, I just remember the story, like I really wanted an iPod Touch, right? And so I was like, man, like based on how many doors I had, I was like, I need $200. So I just need to sell like 40 doors to make like $200. And I remember I had 55 doors. I'm like, hey, if I just went up to every single door and I just begged them, I was like, hey, please, I had no pitch, right? I was like, please, please buy this, buy this. There's coupons in there. And like, you can, you know, like, I was like, like begging them. And I remember doing that. I had my first $200 day in grade 6, right, going door to door. And that kind of evolved, you know, after that. I sold clothing at Urban Outfitters. I sold American Express credit cards. I sold beef, chicken, pork door to door back in college. I remember there's actually a story where I was tell you quickly. My very first commission-based sales job was for a company called NutraFarms. And so I sold beef jerky and pork door-to-door. And I remember being late to my interview. This guy, his name is Marc Lafleur, and he interviewed me and he was like, hey, I was late. Okay, coming to the interview, I was like, and I had the balls to tell him, look him in the eyes. I remember he had like, I still remember the office. He had like a Lambo on his wall in the back. And I remember I told him, I was like, hey Marc, like, if you want to be the number one branch in southwestern Ontario for meat sales, you got to hire me on the spot right now. And he's like, okay. Sure. He hires me on the spot and then he asked me, Sam, do you have a car? And I'm like, I don't have a car. He goes, well, you need a car because you got to drive from London to Sarnia to go sell meat in Sarnia. And I was like, oh shit. I was like, I need a car. So then I went and I took the remainder of my OSAP money, which is Ontario Student Loans. I took $1,800 out of the remainder, $2K that I borrowed from the Canadian government to pay for my college. And I bought a year 2000 Honda Civic at the time for $1,800. And I went back to Mark. I was like, hey, I got a car now. I fucking forgot that I needed money for gas. So I had $200 left in my bank account. I went to Mark and I was like, hey, I got $200 left in my bank account. When can I start? He's like, you can start whenever. So the next day, on the first day of work, I go out and he has me shadow this guy named Stan. And so I go and I'm talking to this guy named Stan and I'm shadowing him. And I remember Stan told me, he was like, literally, he was like, Sam, I'm old. All right. So after I make my first sale, I'm going home and I'm like, oh, shit. Okay. So 4 doors down, bang, he makes a sale, $400. And he's like, all right, cool. We can go home now. I'm like, bro, I just drove an hour and a half to come out here. Like, I need a little bit more training. He's like, no, I'm done. Like, oh, shit. Okay. The next day day, bang, 15th door down, sold, right? $500 commission. I was like, holy shit, that's crazy. And I remember after 4 days of this, I was like, enough is enough. Let me add it. On my 4th day on the job, I broke the company record and I sold $20,000 worth of meats in one go. I made $2,000 in commissions in one go. Changed my life. I remember they paid us out in cash. I had the cash and I went home and I remember I'm sitting in a car that's $1,800. I had like maybe $100 in the bank account and I had $2,000 cash in my hand and I was like, holy shit, like my life's changed. That was the reason why I dropped out of school. I I still remember the moment that I dropped out of school. I was like sitting in Business 2251. My buddy Simon Art, he was sitting beside me, and I remember I was listening to my prof. Her name was Shannon Wright. And I turned to my friend Simon, I'm like, hey Simon, I'm like, how much do you think this prof makes? He goes like, I don't know, like maybe like $70, $80 grand. I'm like, no way. I'm like, prof, don't profs make like $300,000, $400,000? He goes, no, I think like maybe $70, $80 grand. I'm like, pull up my laptop, right? And I'm like looking it up, and I'm like, how much do the University of Western Ontario professors make? And I remember I look up the number and like her number was actually posted up online and it was $74,000. And I was like, holy shit. The moment I found out, I got up, I dropped out of school that day. I remember walking into her office and I was like, I'm done. I'm done school. I'm like, do I have to tell you? Or like, because I didn't know how it worked. I was like, I've never dropped out of school before. I told them, I was like, I told her, I was like, I'm out. And after that, I went and I worked with the largest door-to-door— I worked with the largest telecom company. So after that, that was in 2014, 2015. I started doing door-to-door sales for a company called Ledcor, which is a construction company that built all of TELUS's fiber optic cables. And TELUS, for those of you Americans, I don't know, is the largest telecom company in Canada. And so when I joined the company, there was like 25 people, 20 of them left, 5 people. We built the largest telecom sales team in Canada at the time. There's 400 door-to-door reps at one point. We hired Grant Cardone back in 2017 for 2 years for $300 grand and basically trained up our entire sales team. This is like back in like 2017. And so I worked with that company, scaled that company from zero pretty much zero. It was like, it was like maybe 5, 10 people all the way up to 400 reps. And I was a director of training and development at one point, which I was in charge of training every single and onboarding every single door-to-door sales rep that came through the doors. And so I did that for about 5 years. Then COVID hit. When COVID hit, they literally said, hey, like, TELUS is a publicly traded company. You're not allowed to go door-to-door anymore. And then we were like, what the fuck do we do? So then that whole operation got shut down. And then I was like, okay, at this this point, like, I'm like, what do I do? So I thought about it. I was like, oh, masks, right? So I was like, let's go and sell masks. So I started dropshipping masks from China to the US. And the way that I did it, because I didn't know all the fancy dropshipping tactics, I literally picked up the phone, I called, I went on Alibaba, I found manufacturing companies, and I would call these manufacturing companies cold and say, hey, I know a ton of like American hospitals, American government. I'm like, can I get some supply agreements? And obviously I didn't at the time, but I figured out it was just cold call, you know, like American hospitals and, you know, call their main company line, which is exactly what I did. So I locked up some supply agreements, I picked up the phone, I went on the first page of Google, and I started Googling like hospitals in New York, Florida. I pick up the phone, I would call them, and one at a time I would say, hi, is this, uh, you know, blah blah blah. I'm like, could you pass me over to the procurement department? And so through that, I dropshipped, you know, mass from China to the US. And in the beginning, it went really well. I made like $80K in 3 months, and it was like amazing. At the time, I thought I was like rich, right? And so when that happened, I was like, oh my gosh, okay, there's something here, right? But then what happened was the company that I was working with, like the Chinese factory, they changed the payment terms on us. And the reason why they changed payment terms on us and originally it was pay on delivery, and then they changed it. You have to pay up front. And the reason why they have to pay up front is because at the time it was COVID, it was so crazy that they ran out of the fabrics to make the masks. So in order to go bid on the fabric, they needed the cash up front. So I had to go and get cash up front. So I raised some money, I went, and I put money on a stock of masks that when it landed in New York, the American government seized because of martial law. They seized anything that was at the airports and seaports that was labeled PPE. They just confiscated. So after confiscating all of my masks, the Chinese factory that I already wired money into, okay, they were not going to give me the money back. I lost my entire life savings at 26. So when that happened, I was like, okay, well, I can't take another job because I literally lost and I'm in more debt. Like the amount of debt that I was in, I had to go and like I had to work for like probably 10 years to go pay it off. So I was like, okay, I had to find something in the meantime to do. So I went back into door-to-door sales because that was the only way I knew how to make money. I had no degree. And so I had to go back into door-to-door sales sell home security and build a home security door-to-door team. Now we're caught up. And so that rental car that I crashed, I was telling you about in the beginning of the video, that was a rental car that I crashed when I was running that door-to-door team. I had 4 reps waiting outside. I crashed the rental car, $500 left in my bank account. They asked me for a $3,000 deposit, which I didn't have, and I negotiated with them, gave them everything that I had. And then I drove everybody out to turf and I sat in my car and I cried. Now, I'm not going to pretend that there's some triumphant moment. It was humbling going back to the one thing I had already conquered— door-to-door sales. Because it was the only thing that paid. But here's what was different this time. I wasn't just knocking, I was watching because COVID had changed something. Everything was going remote and every business that I talked to, every person I talked to, the same problem. They had leads and nobody called them. I've trained thousands of sales reps at this point. Like, that's the one thing I knew how to do at scale. So right in the middle of COVID $60,000 in debt, I started a virtual assistant company called VT Member. Human callers working the phones for businesses. A lot of them had webinar funnels, confirmation calls, paid ads running, $0 to $80,000 a month. In 11 months. And then over the next 3.5 years, we grew to over $350,000 and over 200 staff, active staff at one point. The poor kid from Taiwan, the guy who couldn't afford food, was running a company with 200 staff on payroll. And by every definition that I had, I thought I was rich. Then AI came out and I remember the exact feeling. Everyone around me was playing with chatbots. Voice AI came out and I remember looking at voice AI when it first came out and I was like, this is dog shit., but it was going to get to a point where it was going to be more realistic than humans. And as I saw it progress and it got better and better and better and better and better, I had a moment where I had to make a decision, you know, do I continue down going and scaling callers with humans or do I make a pivot into creating the most realistic sounding voice AI on the planet? The reality is I looked at AI and I was like, if I don't lean into this, it was going to destroy my business because my entire company was humans making phone calls. Think about it. And I was watching software learn to make phone calls. So I had two options: pretend it wasn't happening or do the one thing that still sounds insane when I think about it out loud. We shut it down voluntarily, a $350,000 a month business. We stopped acquiring new clients on that end and we started over on the new business because I had already learned that lesson once in 2020 when I was standing in that office and they told me, yep, no more door-to-door. When your whole business depends on something that's external, something that's outside of your control, the doors, the government, the technology, you don't wait for the announcement. This time I wanted to be the announcement. So I built Autocaller.ai and the idea was stupidly simple. The idea was super simple. Everything, the thousands of human callers that I had, the script, the time, the tonality that I spent a decade drilling people. We train voice agents on it. 3.5 million cold calls worth of lessons poured into a software. Autocall is a piece of software that we installed into your funnel that will book calls automatically. And here's the part that still gets me. I went to school to become a director originally because I love telling stories. And that film degree that I was studying for, the wasted one, every single ad that we now run for this company, I make with AI. All those years studying story, directing, why a scene works, I now do with a click of a button. The degree that I thought I threw away in 2014 is now the marketing engine for an AI company in 2026, which for me, that's the biggest lesson because nothing that you learn is wasted. I had a wise mentor tell me one time that who you become through what you do is more important than what you do. It's even more important than what you get from what you do, because at the end of your life, if you believe in an afterlife, the one thing you can take away to the next life is your experiences, your skill set, and who you become through what you do. So if you made it this far, let me give you what all of this cost me to learn. One, rock bottom is a price. It's not a verdict. The rental car office, all the money that I lost, it wasn't the end point. It was tuition. The win right before the wipeout is the most dangerous place to be in. 80 grand at the time made me feel invincible, and invincible people make stupid $140,000 bets that I should never have done. 3, your unfair advantage are usually the things that you did for years that you felt was for nothing. I thought I was just knocking doors. The reality is I was building the training data for an AI company that didn't even exist yet. And 4, the hardest one is kill your own business before the world does it for you. Everyone thinks a brave move is starting a company. The brave move is ending a $350,000 bid. The brave move is to not be like Blockbuster and embrace new technology. Always since the dawn of time, it's always been man plus technology versus other men. And so if new technology comes out, do not be afraid to lean into it and surround yourself with people that are typically younger than you that can teach you in the coming era of AI. So that's the story. Born in Taiwan, to The Doors, broke, 200 employees, shutting it all down for AI. So if you're building something right now with either webinar funnel, a sales team, if you're running ads and you're curious on how Autocaller can work for you, or if you just want me to review something, I'm gonna put a link so that you can book a time directly with me, my channel, and I'll see you there. But honestly, even if you don't click on anything, I hope the story was still worth your time because somebody out there is standing in their version right now of that car rental office right now doing the math that doesn't work. And I just need you to know that's not the end of your story. That's chapter 6. I'll see you in the next one.