Pabrai's Investment Growth

A story about how Manish Pabrai went from working at a company to becoming a billionaire investor.

"Manish was working at a company when his dad told him it was time to quit. Manish didn't want to do what his dad did as an entrepreneur because he was traumatized from childhood memories of trying to keep the business alive. He just wanted to work, save money in his 401k, and be set in 35 years.

His dad told him he took the wrong lesson from those experiences - he actually got a crash course in how to do business and how not to do business. His dad said 'You're just a cog in the machine, you could die tomorrow and no one would know. You'll never reach your potential just sitting there.'

So Manish started an IT consulting company during the dotcom boom. He sold it and took $1 million to start investing his own money. He knew the Indian tech scene well because his consulting company had overseas staff. He invested in one company that went 140x, turning his $1 million into $13 million.

Along the way, his friends were getting stock tips from him but wanted him to manage their money instead. He took $1 million from friends to invest, treating it as a side thing since he had $13 million of his own. Over the next 20-30 years, he grew that into just under a billion dollars in assets under management through compounding and more people bringing assets in."