These Average Joes Became Crypto Millionaires In Under 12 Months

Shaan Puri

I have a friend who used to work with me, and I caught up with him to hear his story. He basically went from having an average job to achieving something remarkable. You wouldn't look at this person and say, "Oh, that's a star career." They were doing well, obviously, but it was the kind of success you would expect from a normal person. Then, they went from being "normal person well" to personally making **$15,000,000** in the last year. They basically quit their job and went down a crypto rabbit hole. They started betting on things in DeFi and began exploring all the DeFi projects, investing their money in that space. They didn't have a huge base of capital; they had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in. To turn half a million dollars into a decamillionaire status, especially when you have no clear path in your career, is incredible. If you don't have a path where you're like, "Yeah, I'm going to have 'F-you' money," going from having a stable job at a company that pays you a good salary to that level of success is amazing to me. It blows my mind even more than those who become multi-billionaires as prodigies who invented the protocol or invested **$250,000** in a random token. This is someone who just took their own money out of the stock market and decided, instead of investing in Apple, Google, or Facebook, to invest in crypto.

Sam Parr

in that's crazy

Shaan Puri

Crypto has turned a normal amount of money, like a life savings, into a life-changing amount of money. I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has a bunch of twists and turns that are kind of amazing. So, I'm going to ask him if he'll come on and share it. Do I know them? Yes, you know them. I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode. I'll ask him if he'll do it next week.

Sam Parr

Did they earn the... Did they sell? Do they have USD or some type of stable currency?

Shaan Puri

No, they're still in crypto, like a 100% or 100+% because they, you know... but.

Sam Parr

but but is it stable like a bit like a a popular thing

Shaan Puri

It's a mix of popular things and, like, you know, at least sell more stuff. Everything's liquid. If they wanted to cash out and say, "I'm done. I'm going to Malibu and I'm gonna chill. I'm gonna pretend that this year never existed," they could do that.

Sam Parr

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...

Shaan Puri

That's different. 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. So, like, yeah, if you have $10,000,000 and you go to sell even $100,000, it'll crash the price of the coin. That's not what this is. That's a different thing. What that is, is I make 1,000,000 coins, I keep 999,000 for myself, and then I sell one of them for a dollar. Oh, now the total value of my thing is $1,000,000. But it's like, no, it's not really. There's 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, not that situation.

Sam Parr

Is there any other person? Alright, so you have a story of someone who went from $500,000 to $15,000,000. I just told you about this guy who, in like 2 or...

Shaan Puri

This person, by the way, has no technical background. They were never a trader or a financial person. Before this, they would only own an index fund or a mutual fund. They didn't even know how to spell "blockchain." That's why this blows my mind. It's not just that the amount is not the craziest amount of money; it's an awesome amount of money for anybody. But what's crazy is the A to B connection. It makes no sense. How could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind-blowing to me.

Sam Parr

So, I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who went from $250,000 to $1,000,000,000. You just said $500,000 to $15,000,000. Do we know anyone else that has this like crazy, crazy journey?

Shaan Puri

personally you've talked about this guy you talked about somebody right that your

Sam Parr

friend yeah the friend that that they they did 1,000,000 to a 100,000,000

Shaan Puri

yeah so

Sam Parr

at its peak when bitcoin was 60,000 so I don't whatever it's at discount it

Shaan Puri

Okay, okay, I have another one. There is a kid—well, I call him a kid because he was actually a kid. I built this product called Blab back in the day. It was kind of like Clubhouse; you could basically go hang out and chat with people. This kid used to come home every day from school. He would get on and chat, but he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13-year-olds. He came to our rooms because he loved technology startups. He wanted to be in the startup scene, and I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Fast forward, it's been like 6 years since then, so now he's like, let's say, 21 or something like that. It's been a while. He created something—he's a technical guy. I asked him, "Oh, what have you been up to? How is your startup going?" He said, "Yeah, the startup's okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months." I was like, "I know it, man. It's tough. You just have to hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot." Then he said, "Actually, we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random side chains." It was like, "What up, blah blah blah," some bunch of terms I don't even understand. It's a derivatives perpetual contract for adding liquidity to this blah blah blah. I'm like, "Okay, I don't even understand what you're saying." He continued, "Yeah, the market cap of it is like $900,000,000 right now. I think I cashed out $10,000,000." He was like, "Dude, it's been insane! The market cap went up like crazy; now it's at $200,000,000." He said, "I was able to take out a life-changing amount of money. I took out $10,000,000." He was asking me because he heard us talking about charities and Charity: Water. He said, "You told the Charity: Water story; I was really moved. I've set aside seven figures to donate."

Sam Parr

you're like what I was

Shaan Puri

Like, you've set aside 7 figures. Do you like... are you 7 years old? What... how did this happen? What has happened in this amount of time? I used to talk to you when you would come home from 8th grade and get online. Now, you're donating $1,000,000 to charity! Like, what is... again, A and B, it broke my brain. I don't mean this as an insult to them.

Sam Parr

like if they're if they're only 15 then so they're still only like 19

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think they're 20 now or 21, something like that. It's been like 7 years since we've 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. We're going to be normal person successful. It's like when you know... oh, my sister went to high school with this girl, Lily Galici, who's like this super famous Instagram star now. She 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?" She was just like a normal girl. Like, "Wait, that's her? That doesn't even look like her anymore!" Yeah, she's had some work done, right? It's 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," in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted. You know, it didn't make any sense. 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. Crypto is this amazing thing like that. So...

Sam Parr

the way

Shaan Puri

I'm going to say something. When I first talked to my friend, I caught up with him and felt insanely jealous. I was happy for him, and I like him and all that, but I was also in my head thinking, "What the fuck have I been doing with my life?" Wait...

Sam Parr

with the the friend that used to work for you

Shaan Puri

both of them both the same reactions yeah

Sam Parr

Because it feels weird. You're like, "Oh wait, you kind of looked up to me," and I was the passenger.

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

there there is jealousy there it's easy

Shaan Puri

And I just want to say, like, you know, an 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... I would feel that, and I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. I would kind of find reasons why it was like, "That's just luck," or, "Well, they probably are taking a bunch of risks and they might lose it all." And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone, but I still have a little bit of that jealousy pang left. The interesting thing is, my coach said this to me: "You'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure. They're not focused on your success; they're focused on their failure. Your success has reminded them of their failure, or your abundance has reminded them of their lack." If you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change it. And if you find other people and you're like, "Oh, these people are haters," just understand what's going on. They don't actually hate you; it's that your success has reminded them of some feeling that they have in themselves, and that's where their attention has gone. So, yeah, I wanted to share that because I definitely felt this crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time. But these stories were so mind-blowing that I was like, "Wow, this... I don't even know what to say."

Sam Parr

I feel lucky to know who I know. We have basically the same group. I've heard these stories that sound unbelievably true, and I'll be like, "Yeah, I know that person. I saw it. It was wild." So, an example is Moiz Ali selling Native Deodorant for $100 million, two years after starting it. I was in the same office when he was starting it, and I saw him try to learn Facebook ads. I saw the thing come to fruition right in front of my eyes every single day for like 6 or 10 months. That was almost half the journey.