This book has a singular goal: to teach you how massive wealth is created in the twenty-first century.
Itâs not a system or a secret, so Iâm not going to build this up into something fancy like those bullshit self-help books youâve already bought.
Iâm just gonna tell you how a C-minus student from Brooklyn (before Brooklyn was cool) clawed his way into the tech industry, got lucky seven times (and counting), and made tens of millions of dollars.
Most folks think Iâm lucky, some say Iâm a complete fraud, and a handful think Iâm a brilliant hype man, and I donât agree with any of themâI agree with all of them.
Thatâs why this will be the greatest business book ever written. I shouldnât be the one writing it, yet here we are. Iâm the outsider who made it in, letting you know how he pulled it off.
I am as shocked as anyone I made it here, and itâs a hell of a story: the son of a nurse and bartender watches his family lose everything when the fedsâwearing raid jackets just like in the moviesâburst in with shotguns to take back his dadâs bar. He crosses the bridge to Manhattan with something to prove and, ultimately, he heads to the West Coast to make his fortune.
The American Dream
The American Dream still exists, itâs just not as widely distributed.
Our parents and grandparents took factory and white-collar jobs and rode them for all they were worth in the last century. Now the robotsâwho never sleep and self-improve on an exponential curveâare taking these jobs. Meanwhile, we humans, with our nagging physiological and emotional needs, struggle to keep up.
Most of you are screwed.
But youâre here, so youâre clearly willing to learn and I can radically improve your odds if you do the work.
The world is becoming controlled by the few, powerful, and clever people who know how to create those robots, or how to design the software and the tablet on which youâre reading this. But please donât stop reading, because Iâm going to show you how anyone can get a seat at the table with the digerati, illuminati, and moneyrati and, perhaps, tap into this hundred-year boom.
Yeah, Iâve got my own formula like those other business books youâve bought, but there is a major difference between my formula and theirsâmine is forward-looking.
All of the other books out there, and some are great, try to explain to you how people made money in real estate, by mastering the art of the deal or by getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong ones off), but they are largely historical documents now.
The world has changed more in the last ten years than it did in the last ten decades.
Thatâs not just some clever one-liner to say in a conference keynote or at a dinner party. Itâs an undebatable fact.
The changes weâve seen with the internet, with mobile phones, with robotics, with sensors, and in biology are mind-blowing not just to civilians, but also to the people working in these fieldsâand the pace is increasing.
I could give you a list of mind-blowing breakthroughs to prove my point about how fast things are moving, but Iâd like this book to stand the test of time, and the truth is that giving you examples like a computer beating a human at chess, or an encyclopedia made with no paid writers, or computers flying airplanes and cars without steering wheels, or wars being won with robots, are so commonplace that science fiction is having a hard time remaining, well, fiction.
I know because the top-tier investors who invested in the last fifty big things call me to find the next big thing. I live on the edge of the future of business and technology.
As an angel investor, itâs my job to write the check when no one else believes in youâand thatâs the most thrilling bet in the world.
Every week I meet a dozen dreamers with insane ideas who want me to give them my money, advice, and access to my Rolodexâbut mostly the money.
Oftentimes Iâm the âfirst moneyâ in, the first investor willing to take a chance with a company like Uber or Thumbtack when they are only worth four or five million bucks and almost everyone else has said no.
This year I invested $750,000 in a company that makes a robotic cafe called Cafe X. It eliminates the two most expensive aspects of Starbucksâs business: real estate and humans.
When the founders emailed me a video of the prototype in action at a college in Hong Kong, I wrote back to them, âIs this a joke?â
They said, âNo, it is not a joke,â so I invited them to come to my incubator where we spent three months refining the product and helping them craft their pitch. Then I introduced them to my rich, powerful, and, in many cases, compulsive-gambling, narcissistic friendsâwho funded the company for millions of dollars.
If we succeed with Cafe X, we will reduce the price of a latte to $2 (again), make it perfectly every time (a computer never forgets how much foam you asked for), and reduce your wait from more than five minutes to under thirty seconds (the machines know where your smartphone is and they make your coffee when youâre ninety seconds away).
Instead of a Starbucks on every other corner in a city, there will be a Cafe X machine in the lobby of every building on the block.
Instead of being open fourteen hours a day, these robots will serve us twenty-four hours a day.
Cafe X and other startups will also eliminate millions of jobs in which humans get paid to stand behind a counter and repeat back your seven precious little instructions on how to prepare your morning libation, before pressing one button and masturbating a milk-frothing pitcher for two minutes.
The Future of Jobsâand Making Money
If right now you think Iâm a horrible, marauding, free-market monster, youâre only half-rightâIâm also a humanist who thinks there are better things for our children to do with their time.
The quicker we eliminate the low-paying, repetitive, and menial jobs, the quicker our species can get to work on bigger issues like sustainability, being multiplanetary, and perhaps retiring the last couple dozen dictators and despots who are murdering, raping, and otherwise oppressing the weakest among us.
Of course, I could be wrong.
When we eliminate all these jobs, the world might spin into a global version of the long-forgotten dry run Occupy Wall Street where a group of savvy but poorly organized hippies and millennials slammed their feet down and said, âNo more! Weâre not leaving until things change!â
Until, of course, the economy rebounded and they got cool jobs with free food and their own private drivers from uberPOOL, then realized that, net-net, things are actually pretty fucking awesome and they donât need to storm Michael Bloombergâs town house or stink up the Goldman Sachs lobby anymore.
In my mind, candidly, weâve got a 70 percent chance of figuring out this massive sea change without starting a full-on revolution in the streets, like we saw in Greece or Egypt, or any other place where unemployment among young adults breaks 20 percent.
But I donât invest in this future because I want to sit in an ivory tower laughing at people whose jobs are replaced. I invest in this future because itâs inevitable and I think I can help accelerate the efforts of the founders and innovators who are missionaries, not mercenaries. Of course, I plan to make a great deal of money in these revolutions, but I also plan to look back proudly and know that I helped propel changes that made our planet better.
Escaping the Matrix
If youâre reading this, congratulations! You chose the red pill and youâve taken your first step to understanding the bitter truth: the world is going to get flipped on its head two or three more times in your lifetime.
The jobpocalypse is coming, which is not just based on my coffee-making robots. It also includes the elimination of most white-collar jobs we were told were careers, like being a lawyer, doctor, teacher, accountant, pilot, journalist, orâwait for itâa software engineer.
Yes, while the greatest opportunity on the planet today is probably being a software engineer, I just invested in a company that hopes to eliminate software engineers by letting you type into a box âmake me an app that does X, Y, and Z,â before spitting out your own version of âUber for . . . [insert service that sucks right now].â
If you havenât had a panic attack reading this introduction yet, let me tell you the next product Iâm looking to back: an artificially intelligent robot that studies humans and builds other robots.
I havenât found it yet, but I probably will by the time you reach the end of this book. The snake is going to eat its tail.
When that happens, there is a good chance that it will be every human for themselves.
By the way, a lot of rich folks have already planned for this outcome by buying islands or huge ranches in remote places like Wyoming or New Zealand (Iâm not kidding) that are fully off the gridâcomplete with solar, water desalination, fortifications, and weapons.
Yeah, there are billionaire preppers, not just hillbilly ones.
A perfect storm of black swans is coming and this book is going to prepare you not only to survive itâbut to ride it out on top.