The Billion Dollar Secret

20 Principles of Billionaire Wealth and Success

Rafael Badziag

• Publisher: Panoma Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784524098
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Based on face-to-face interviews with over 20 self-made billionaires.

There are thousands of books on millionaire thinking. The knowledge they offer isn't enough to get you to the highest ranks of wealth. The richest people of our times are billionaires. Only 1 in 5 million world citizens belongs to this group. Billionaires are extremely rare, and their mindset differs hugely from that of ordinary millionaires.

"The Billion Dollar Secret" offers firsthand knowledge of billionaire entrepreneurs told in their own words. Never before has someone interviewed 20+ self-made billionaires across the world for a book project. The author worked for years with some of the very best entrepreneurs on the planet and distilled their secrets into 20 mental principles that enabled them to start from zero and create billions of dollars in value during one life span.

This book gives you the road map to follow their path to extreme wealth and success.

"There is no other book available anywhere in the world that contains this much entrepreneurial experience, insight, and wisdom in it." —from the Foreword by Jack Canfield, multiple #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Success Principles™ and the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series

This book is recommended by billionaires:

"I recommend all entrepreneurs to have a look at this sensational book." —Cho Tak Wong, self-made billionaire and the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2009

"Rafael Badziag has compiled a [...] book about what it is to be a billionaire in the world of digital and exponential growth." —Chip Wilson, self-made billionaire, founder of Lululemon Athletica

"I highly recommend this book. It is a very thoroughly researched book on successful philosophies of life." —Tony Tan Caktiong, self-made billionaire and the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2004

CHAPTER 1

It’s Inside You

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

It is astonishing to consider how deeply public opinion about billionaires is dominated by stereotypes. The average person knows little about their reality—a world that represents a mere 0.00002% of society.

This knowledge deficiency is distorted by the media, which focuses on flashy images and dramatic incidents to create and promulgate envious sentiments. The picture painted by the media and accepted as fact by the general public is heavily skewed and a far cry from reality—at least insofar as self-made billionaires are concerned.

Let’s start by refuting some of the most common misconceptions. The following will give you a taste of the kind of people we are talking about and introduce you to their world.

Billionaire Misconception: Billionaires are born in rich, developed countries.

If you think it is necessary for a person to be born in a rich, developed country in order to become a billionaire, you are mistaken. The story of Narayana Murthy provides a good example.

N. R. Narayana Murthy was born in 1946 in India, one of the poorest countries in the world. Narayana’s family didn’t have furniture; everybody sat and slept on the floor. His father advised him to choose his hobbies carefully and select ones that wouldn’t drain his meager budget. Reading, listening to music, and talking to friends became his hobbies of choice. He couldn’t afford to buy a newspaper, so he would go to the public library and read a copy there.

In the early 1980s, India not only was one of the poorest countries in the world. It was also one of the countries most hostile to free enterprise. India had a socialist government that had developed an array of restrictions and ridiculous regulations that made it almost impossible to conduct business. This led to extreme corruption; government officials had the power to decide which enterprises would succeed and which ones would fail. As a result, India’s economy was strangled.

In 1981, when Narayana Murthy, together with several partners, founded the software company Infosys, the problems they encountered seemed insurmountable. The country’s frequent power shortages were one of the lesser obstacles they eventually would face.

Consider this: Do you think it is possible to run a software company without a computer?

Well, Infosys didn’t have one. Why?

Because a license was needed from the government in order to import a computer to India.

Narayana Murthy told me he had to endure three years and 50 visits to Delhi to obtain that license. The time frame barely hints at what was involved in this endeavor. Infosys was located in Bangalore, and Delhi was some 1,500 miles away. (To put this in perspective, it’s 200 miles more than the distance from New York City to Miami, Florida.) Narayana couldn’t afford to fly, so he needed to travel by train two days each way. As mentioned, the bureaucracy required 50 visits to Delhi; if you do the math, that is the equivalent of 200 days in total travel time in a three-year period!

Now, you are probably asking yourself: During the three years they didn’t have a computer, how was it possible for them to run a software company? How did they program?

The team found a customer in America who was amenable to allowing them to program on his computer. Six of the cofounders traveled to the United States to work on this, while Narayana remained in India in order to clear up the formalities and obtain approval to import their own computer.

Communication was yet another problem. Narayana informed me that it took the average Indian company five to seven years to get a phone line. Aside from the technological backwardness, the reason for the long wait was that retired government officials were prioritized to get phone lines.

The obvious question here: How did he communicate with his cofounders and customers in the United States without a telephone (and in the days before email)?

Narayana made regular visits to the post office, where he used a public phone box to call them.

I asked Narayana what happened if they needed to contact him. He smiled at me and replied, “Well, they couldn’t, they just couldn’t.”

After a year of struggling, they finally had a phone line installed. But having a phone line didn’t necessarily mean they could also get connections—especially with the United States. Most of the time there was no signal on the line; when there was a signal, it was usually busy.

As previously mentioned, it took three years for them to obtain a license to import the computer. Yet having a license didn’t mean they could afford a computer. Complicating matters further was the fact that the software they were creating required a minicomputer, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—money the founders just didn’t have. Infosys was founded with $250 saved up by seven founders. Narayana Murthy faced another problem and performed another miracle, which we will discuss later.

After the computer was imported and installed, the six cofounders returned to India to work on it. But that still wasn’t the end of the bureaucratic obstacles they had to overcome. They now had to figure out how to get the code they produced to the customer in the United States. This occurred pre-internet, so it wasn’t as if they could simply email the code to the customer. The only way to do it back then was to save the program on magnetic tape and send it via the traditional mail service. On the other side, the customer loaded it from the magnetic tape to his computer. Unfortunately, this solution didn’t work between India and the United States.

Why not? Because any package being shipped from India to the United States needed to go through Indian customs. It took customs officials about two weeks to perform the customs procedure. This meant that it took three weeks for the code to be shipped from Infosys in India to the customer in the States. With every change Infosys made to the program, they needed to wait another three weeks before they could receive any feedback from their client. The consequence was that project durations extended to what seemed like an eternity. This process was unacceptable and akin to an entrepreneurial hara-kiri. They needed to shorten the shipment time considerably to speed up their production cycles.

How did they solve this? The team came up with the idea of printing out the code on paper and faxing it to the United States where, on the other side, another Infosys employee typed it manually from the fax into the customer’s computer. Of course, this required additional manual work and wasn’t error free. But it dramatically increased the speed of their software shipments.

That was not all when it came to challenges: Imagine the conditions they had to work in and the obstacles they needed to overcome while building their company in this poor developing country.

I had a firsthand taste of these conditions when conducting the interview with Narayana Murthy. At that time, it was 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) in Delhi. This kind of temperature isn’t exactly conducive to performing physical or intellectual tasks. But people in India must perform their work in these conditions on a regular basis.

Today, Infosys is considered one of the wealthiest and most developed companies in India, offering the best working conditions available for their employees. And, of course, there was air-conditioning at the Infosys guest house in Delhi, where we conducted the interview.

Even so, there was a power outage during the meeting, and the air-conditioning system went out. Our own attempts to switch it back on failed, and the temperature rapidly became uncomfortable. Narayana called a maintenance team. After 10 minutes of fumbling, it finally clicked on. Five minutes later, there was another power outage, and the air-conditioning once again went out. We decided to leave it alone because we didn’t want to lose any more time.

I had only a tiny glimpse of what working life is like in modern-day India. For those readers who have never had such an opportunity, can you imagine what it may have looked like to work in that environment 30 years ago—when India and Infosys were far less developed?

Today, Narayana Murthy is a billionaire. Infosys is the largest software company in the world, employing 200,000 programmers; this is more than Microsoft, Apple, and Google combined. In 2003, Narayana Murthy was named World Entrepreneur of the Year—the best entrepreneur in the world, if you will.

It is therefore a myth that only people born in rich, developed countries can become billionaires. In fact, not only has Narayana himself become a billionaire, but he also made six of his cofounders into billionaires and at least 4,000 of his employees into millionaires.

What most people fail to realize is that wealth in developing countries grows much faster than in industrialized countries. In 2016, the number of billionaires in Asia surpassed the total in all of North America.

In my research I stumbled upon the phenomenon of immigrant billionaires. Yes, a strikingly high percentage of self-made billionaires made it big outside their countries of origin. They came from poor or war-torn countries with nothing in their hands, yet found ways to build great wealth. We will discuss this in greater detail later in the book.

Billionaire Misconception: Billionaires come from well-off, supportive families.

If you think a person must be born into a wealthy, supportive family to have a chance at becoming a billionaire, you are likely unaware of the story of Mohed Altrad.

Mohed Altrad was born a nomad in the Syrian Desert. His Bedouin tribe lived in tents. They set up camp where they found water for the animals and stayed there as long as the vegetation was enough to sustain their herds. Then they folded the tents and moved farther in search of better pastures.

When Mohed was born, his father disowned him. He expelled Mohed and his mother from their home and slaughtered his brother to death. Mohed was forced to live with his mother on the periphery of the tribe, his life so unimportant that nobody even noted the day or year of his birth. Even today he doesn’t know when he was born. He told me that the dates he uses now were invented because his children wanted to celebrate his birthday with him.

That is far from being the end of this Dickensian tale. When Mohed was four, his mother died. His grandmother assumed responsibility for him and raised him with the belief that his destiny was to become a shepherd. She didn’t want him to go to school because she thought it was for “do-nothings.” Every day, Mohed escaped from home and walked barefoot through miles of desert to the nearby village, where he could attend school.

The teacher gave him a notebook and a pencil because he didn’t have either of these things. He had gone to school empty-handed, as well as barefoot. The only thing Mohed owned was a torn djellaba (a type of robe), which he had outgrown years earlier.

On several occasions, Mohed tried to get basic support from his father to obtain the bare necessities, but was consistently rejected and humiliated by him—sometimes even beaten.

When Mohed was in third grade, however, a miracle occurred: He received a present from his father—an old bicycle. It was the first and only gift his father ever gave him.

With that bike, Mohed’s entrepreneurial genius appeared for the first time. He rented the bike out to his schoolmates for a fee, earning him a bit of money. It wasn’t much, but it allowed him to purchase some school materials.

Realizing that school was his only chance to get out of his lot in life, Mohed studied hard. Soon he became one of the best students in his region and was granted a scholarship to study abroad.

Many years later, after he completed his education, Mohed took over a bankrupt scaffolding company in France and developed it into a world leader in the industry. Over the next 30 years, he added over 200 companies to his business, the Altrad Group.

Today, Mohed Altrad is a billionaire. In 2015, he was named World Entrepreneur of the Year—the best entrepreneur in the world, if you will.

So, if you think one needs to be born in a well-off, supportive family in order to become a billionaire, you have been clinging to a misconception. Mohed Altrad was born a Bedouin on the margins of society in a poor country. He was disowned by his family, who wanted him to become a shepherd. But this didn’t stop him on his way to achieving unbridled success, proving that it can be done.

My experiences with self-made billionaires reveal that a conside...