How I Lost $2,500,000 at Age 22

so here is how I lost $25 million at the age of 22 so in the summer 2023 my former Coan and I were accepted onto a program called Y combinator which is like a startup accelerator in San Francisco where a lot of big companies have been free before for example like Airbnb Dropbox stripe monzo and like tons of other names you might recognize in the tech bace and basically when you're accepted nowadays you get $500,000 and on top of that usually in demo day the average company raises about $2 million so that's why it's $25 million and basically we were accept on a program and we did it for a couple weeks only for everything to go to so I hope you can learn something from my experience for when it comes to

startups and businesses and just generally working with people so when I was 10 or 11 years old I watched a movie The Social Network which is about the Fanning of Facebook and like the story along the way and basically since then I had this kind of dream or like idea of starting an app or like business in the future and having it grow massively and like spread to hundreds of millions of people around the world and everyone to be using my products or whatever and this was kind of in the back of my mind for high school and then also University College and then after college about like a couple months after I had an opportunity where me and a friend at the time were able to we had an idea of like starting company and she was like more of an influencer at the time and I was like more of a programmer so I was really good at programming cuz I had been programming since like the age of eight or something and she hadd been vlogging through our University and grew to like over a million followers joining University so it's kind of obvious that one person will work on the technical side and the other person work on the marketing side so yeah basically we ended up having an idea for like a co- studying platform where people could match one to one with each and then like

study together on the platform and we ended up building like a prototype or like a initial version applied to a YC and then we had an interview with YC but often what happens in the interview is like they ask you whatever ideas you have especially in your application form because sometimes people apply with an idea that they're not really excited by but they still like the founders and they'd rather have them work on a different idea together so I remember during YC one of the group Partners saying something about how like free phds physics phds applied with an idea for a dating app and then they were accepted told like hey you should not be working on a dating app cuz like you have no advantage in this particular area so you should work on like a business physics related idea instead because of course like you have PhD so you're better suited to that environment so yeah basically the person who interviewed us like he kind of pattern matched us to like a previous company that he funded which is often the case in vure capital where they see two people who seem similar to like people that they've seen before who are successful and they ended up being like settling on like a Nar which was kind of like a patreon like substack like create economy related thing for like East Asia and like basically most of Asia in general so yeah then we end up getting a call back which is what happens when you accepted and they were like we don't like the previous idea do you want to work on this new like creative related idea instead and we were like sure that's work on it and then we flew to SF and

like we did a couple weeks of by cator and then like things kind of collapsed from there and like the main reason this comes down to like a lot of early stage startups what often happens is it isn't because the startup like runs out of money or they couldn't get that idea to work because they can always pivot another idea it's most often disagreements between co-founders of they don't like get along with each other or they can't decide on the direction or like how the business should run like I think most early stage startups the reason they fail is because of the kanders themselves not because like a competitor ends up like building a feature that completely wipes them out and what happened in my particular case to put it Loosely is that when you apply to YC you don't have to have a company incorporated and they will help you with the incorporation of the company and basically we were still like dealing with the incorporation of the company like a couple of weeks into YC and then when it came to finally signing the documents and like putting down the equity split my cound at the time she wanted to bring her dad onto a company and her reason or justification was that during University she had started a similar business to what this is but it was like more like creating merchandise and like creating merchandise for her own brand and her dad helped her a lot with that and she kind of saw like what we were doing as like a continuation because it was also related to creater stuff as a continuation of what she was doing during college which her dad was helping her with and I saw what we were doing as something completely different which wasn't related to manufacturing or merchandise at all and it was like a completely new business idea which is like entirely software related whereas she thought it was like merchandise which was complemented by software so the software was like the big aspect of it and ultimately because her dad is like really experienced in merchandise and had been doing it for like 2 30 years with factories in China and stuff she wanted to bring her dad onto a company and then for us to be given like one fed one fed Equity split instead of 50/50 and I was kind of like oh like this is not what I want to do like if you want to bring your dad on then you should like give him like half of your Equity instead because I don't want to be in a position where like a family member and someone else like own like well two family members basically own a greater portion of the company than I do because I can be kicked out the company quite easily in the future and I would have not minded if it was someone else he was really experienced in merchandise if I generally believed we needed it but it was more of the family relationship where like I don't think anyone should be in a position where you have two people who are like say married to each other or like family basically owning a larger fraction of the company than you personally do because of course no matter what argument ends up happening is like the two family members are going to side with each other and potentially kick the third person out so it may well have been the case that if I agreed to do this then we would have continued to build this and then like something may have happened like 2 3 years later where we disagreed on something and then I was like forced out of the company because I didn't own a majority share and of course two family members would agree with each other on whatever like big decision happens so yeah ultimately like it's something I didn't feel comfortable with I expressed this and then like she didn't see my side of the argument and then we just didn't incorporate and of course like if you don't incorporate a company then you just don't aren't part of why combinator like you need to have a company to do y Comin so we ended up

leaving like I think 5 6 weeks into batch or something but I think during that time it was still a really good experience but I think what it means is like personally you and your co-founder relationship are perhaps the most important thing in the company and if that doesn't work out and if you can't agree on something especially something which is like pretty foundational or trivial like putting down the equity numbers on the like actual company formation like table paperwork then that's like a pretty big problem I think another lesson from this is like don't always take someone a face value of what they say in the sense like I explicitly said oh so do you want to end now or like if we're not incorporating then we should just end things and she was like yes and then of course like sleeping on it like later like a few days later you end up changing your mind or you like actually deeply think about it so rather than having the decision made in the moment of like whether you should end things um I think it's better to like Let It kind of sit for a few days and then to decide whether or not to actually end things or whether you can actually get someone to change their mind so yeah this fa story basically came from like a difference of expectations of I didn't want to be in a company where we were bringing another co-founder who was a parent of an existing co-founder and she didn't see a problem with that and she saw the company as a continuation of what she was doing in college with her metch brand and ISO is a completely different new company and I think when you're so caught up in like building the product you end up forgetting to have these like high level conversations about what this actually means or where we're going with this or what we building can who should be involved because you're so like quickly trying to grow your revenue or whatever else as quickly as possible and I think in some cases like you can really navigate those decisions quite easily with your co-founder and in many cases you may not be able to do so for whatever reason so I think my main two takeaways from this is like it's better to have no co-founder than like a co-founder you don't get along with or disagree with or like someone who's just a bad co-founder it's better because you can just start a business yourself and many people who do this but of course it's still better to have a good co-founder than not having Co co-founder at all and I think a no lesson is that even though there are movies like The Social Network where it shows like Mar Facebook at 19 or whatever like many people don't need to start a company at such a young age you can like go out and get into Street Experience you can start another company which actually makes like a lot of Revenue up front so you can like be liquid in terms of like a million $2 million or something and then you can you basically have enough money where you're set for life and you can start a new bigger company in the future and you can also start a company like if you have kids and a family and stuff like that in the future I know like the CEO of Vel is like a cloud like infrastructure company that has I think it's like worth a couple billion and the CEO is like 35 36 and he has like fre children as well so he manages to be a parent and like a CEO of like a billion dollar company so yeah like you definitely don't have to start a business if you're like very young I know given how much like problems can end up having happening with startups like if you want to be liquid like have a couple like liquid hundreds of thousands or millions and that's more important for you then you may be able to do that through other means instead of doing a startup but of course I think doing a startup and having a hyper Growth Company is like one of the best ways of becoming like a billionaire I guess one lesson here because many of my subscribers are still in university is that if you're in University it's really important to find good people that you can work with longterm on various projects and one way is to find out one way to find this out is to like work on them with various different ideas whether it's group projects or you can even try making some money together where like over summer you can say to a friend of yours like hey let's try and like sell like 50 different products this like summer or like let's buy this inventory and then try and sell it or like let's build like a small software and try and like get subscribers for it or something basically like finding people you can work with together and work with and make money with is usually a really good sign that you may be able to start a successful company with them in the future and finally as the one

caveat for the title says like I lost $2 half million at the age of 22 often when people make videos on YouTube of like oh I made $5 million last year or like made $2 million last year they didn't make the money themselves in the sense they don't have 2 million liquid in their bank account often it's the company did revenue of $2 million and then they might have invested it all back into a company in which case they actually made zero for themselves in their own bank account or they like took out like 10% which is still a lot of money I guess in some cases but basically many titles you see on YouTube where it's like I lost $5 million I made $5 million it's not that they lost the money it's the company that they had lost the money and in the case of y combinator when you get accepted you have like $500,000 um that they give you as like a investment and then on demo day which most companies do I think the average y combinated company raises like $2 million $1 half million around about that amount on demo day some rais much more like 4 million 5 million 6 million so I took like the average number of like the 500k the 2 million 2. 5 million and basically we didn't end up getting the 2. 5 million because even though we were accepted on the program we left before the end of the program because we couldn't agree on like who would be on the founding team cap table like when it came to registering the company