I got kicked out of college. I was pretty lost at the time. The long and short of it was I had a good friend of mine that I grew up with. Her boyfriend was doing real estate. This is in Chicago. When I say Chicago, in the city that and not in the Chicago land or the suburbs. We were at a wedding and we were having a good time and he's like, “What are you doing?” I'm like, “I'm interested in real estate.” He's like, “Meet me on Tuesday at the office.”
I hate to use the word mentor, but he was my mentor. He taught me the business. At that time was, I was the project manager. I was overseeing the contractors. I’m not a beast, a huge hulk of a man that I am now in front of you. I was 130 pounds telling Polish contractors and my Mexican brothers what to do. It was interesting work. I had to gain their trust and confidence because they're like, “Who's this skinny punk kid who has no experience?” They had to listen to me.
It was great to get that street cred from salt to the earth, people. I love that experience. I did that for several years and I stopped. I was project manager and that means I was taking care of the budget. I was every day on the job site. For a while, until we brought it in-house, we had clients. I was also the warranty manager. I was dealing with clients. That was the deal with new moms who are going to build a family in their house. It’s not the funnest thing.
That's exactly why I got into commercials. I had experiences with people. This nick in the baseboard, you did that intentionally, “You don't like me. You're trying to make it so that my son doesn't have a good experience growing up. How could you do that to little Johnny?” In a commercial building, you’re going, “The roof doesn't leak. Bring the furniture in. Let's get this office set up. We got to make some money.” That was my transition. You're right. It's home versus tool to make money with a business.
It was a pain in the ass. At the same time, my mentor, Jamie, and I ended up doing GC projects for other people. Eventually, we ended up doing single-family luxury homes on the high end. He instilled in me both of those situations, which I do give him credit for, whether it was the homeowner and I would even say I was better at it than he is. He made me pay attention to detail.
Vishnu, you were doing that. Where's this zero-to-hero thing happened? Where's the punch line?
I went back to college, got my useless degree in Political Science and International Studies. I graduated from DePaul in Chicago. I was once again lost. I was like, “I want to do something radically different.” I moved to New York. I worked in the film and TV industry for a while. To get to your point, there's a theme here, I get bored pretty easily. Usually, when I get a modicum of success, I'm probably like, “That's boring now.” I then move on.
I'm a challenge fiend. I'm always trying to level up. I'm always trying to challenge myself. If I don't see that happening, I get that. By the way, the film and TV industry are the worst human beings on the planet. I did that for a while. What I did was I changed radically to become a trader. I was trading my own money. I was a stock trader at first, where most people start as day traders. I moved into the futures market and I ended up in the options world. Derivative of stocks is where I ended up. I did that for 4 or 5 years, something like that. I did it enough to make a salary. I wasn't one of those millionaire guys. I was enough to peel off enough to live. I was happy with that.
Of course, one of these Wall Street guys that I talked to was like, “It's great until it's not.” It became that. When my buddy, Elon Musk, tweets that his own company isn't worth $420 at the time, that hurts me a little bit. Our former president starts treating it like madness. I'm not going to blame other people. A lot of it was I wasn't managing the risk well. The long and short of it with what Shannon's alluding to, I ended up with a loss of $500,000. I don't do the math because I'll jump out that window right there. I never calculated the math. It was enough money to crush me. That's where that loss came from.
That's the thing. Loss is one thing, giving up and quitting is another. This is the thing that is awesome about having this show because I get to get people to be vulnerable like this and talk about when it wasn't successful. Life was great until it was not. Now that it's not, you have control of that and you haven't left it there. I've never been around a guy that's not happy. I've not been around the guy that's getting his head caved in or trying to figure out if there's enough there to buy ramen. That's what I see in all the successful people that I talked with. Nobody's had it all great in the beginning. Nobody stayed on that wave. There's that element of, “Ta-da. Shoot.” We then go back to, “Ta-da.”
It's peaks and valleys. It goes like this. If you think it's not going to hit you, two things are happening. Number one, you're not diversified enough. It's coming. We know that because we've been there. I was sitting there with a $500,000 loss. To your point, before we even go back to that story, I will tell you the way that I filter people in real estate, for example, “Were you around before 2008? What did you do after 2008? How is your adjustment?” The kids that are after 2008 are crushing it because real estate looks like that. I hate to say this. Yes, everybody has value. To me, the person who survived, how did they adjust? What did they do to survive? It has more value.
In 2006 and 2007, there were a lot of people who were getting into the real estate world. As soon as they realized it was covered in barbed wire, there were real bullets flying everywhere, and you had nine miles to crawl on your hands and knees to get to safety for nine years, they went back to corporate.
For the rest of us, I don't want to say that we were the most intelligent group, but we stayed in it. We stayed after it and we made sure that what we did from here was going to continue to provide us with that value. There's that battle hardness. There's that thing that I know if I'm doing a deal with you, Vishnu, and it goes sideways, not one of us is going to panic and run. We're going to go, “This again.”
How do we adjust? You’re right. It's grit. For everyone who’s reading, without grit, patience, and time, go back to the W-2 because this is not for you. It’s simple as that.
There's a way to get that. Hooking up with a mentor, being around people that have been through it, and following their lead. I'm looking around and I see a lot of kids that are doing what I was doing in ’05. You can't miss it at this point. This is like playing Whac-A-Mole being clairvoyant. You know what hole it's popping up out of next. Everything is a home run. One of the things that you've done since then is you've walked through it, you stayed with it, but you've also diversified yourself.
Both of you and me are in Clubhouse pretty often. The problem with Clubhouse is, thankfully, I don't get to sit there and tell my story every day for an hour. It's the nature of Clubhouse. The real value that I have is truly learning from my mistakes. Also, take whatever knowledge I have and apply it. The stuff that I do is not complicated, back to that story of the $500,000. I was sitting there and completely unemployable. If you followed the story, I pretty much worked for myself and I become, somewhat by design, unemployable. I do have a strong network. I went and had to get a W-2. I was an assistant stage manager in a studio in Manhattan where they do film and TV. Going back to my old network of those things when I worked on that.