A 55 Year Old Billionaire Shares His Worst Failures in Life

But let's say I get a little bit careless and I lost a lot of money. Within three years starting that company, I now became a multi-millionaire. And then within a few months after that, I lost almost all of it. So imagine going from having nothing to being a multi-millionaire to almost having nothing again. I literally achieved my dream and then the dream was snapped away from me. If you don't do that, then by definition you will never succeed. The answer absolutely will be no 100%. And because of that, I was able to do my second company uh becoming a public company at 4 billion valuation. Wow, we are born happy. Our society take that away from us, — right? That untrain that from our brains. Where do people go wrong? I think if you really uh boil it down to one thing, it would be — In this video, I am in Cairo in Egypt asking a 55-year-old Egyptian entrepreneur who's grown and started a business to over a $5 billion valuation about his best life advice, experiences, lessons, and his biggest regrets. Dr. Ammer was always supposed to be a professor. things changed and he realized he was in Silicon Valley with a passion for tech. 30 years later, a lot has happened in between. So, without further ado, let's just jump into it. How old are you? — Uh, 55. — Would you say you feel your age or younger, older? — Yes, I feel my age, — but I try to not let age be something that worries me in terms of uh my actions and stuff. What would you say you've done in your life to be 55 and to feel the way that you feel? — Ah, that's a very good question. I would say first having very uh healthy, stable relationships — if you can and not everybody is lucky to have that but that makes a huge difference in your life. The wisdom to take care of your health as much as you can. We need to always be conscious and always be thinking that um we are eating away at something that belongs to us but also belongs to our future selves. taking care of this vessel that we're in. And that is very important. And then the third thing is to continuously manage your psyche obviously yourself and your psyche and your expectations. Uh making sure that you stay positive and stay happy. — A lot of people get older and feel worse. Where do you think people go wrong in that case? — Where do people go wrong? I think if you really uh boil it down to one thing, it would be forgetting that we are born happy. — Like when you're a baby that came out into the world at the beginning and even a young child, you're always happy. Like it's it takes a lot to make you like really sad, you know, like clinically depressed sad as a child. It just it would take a lot. — So our default state is we're happy. I think it's because of our upbringing, our society, the way things work. You have to buy things to be happy. There's just so many things around us. — Yeah. — That take that away from us, — right? — And we need to be consciously pulling it back. No, I I'm by default happy. And it's only because society made me have this expectation — that now I set for myself that goal — and now I starting to measure my happiness as a function of achieving that goal when I'm I was already happy. — Right? And then we let that eat at us. — I think it's really I think that's it. But the biggest thing that teaches us as humans is going through things and experiencing it. So I'm I would not be surprised if you not if you had not had a very hard uh event that happened to you and you were able to work yourself through that and that was very strong training for your body now — and more importantly for your brain to tell your animal brain that is thinking is upset that everything is okay. I always like separate between my logical — which is the brain that allows us to have this very smart conversation — from our animal brain which is our innate um default uh um neuronet network. the animal brain unfortunately you cannot talk to it — unfortunately right so how do you calm an animal like your dog if your dog is upset — the thing that came to my mind was sedating the dog — and that's what society is treating us right — if you apply that to society people are finding sedations whatever form that might be to — that be drugs or anti-depressants yeah right you're right so the first thing that you need to do is move — like move your body — yes — okay animal the animal brain it's nervous system it's the entire nervous system throughout your body — the only thing it understands is very raw signals like that so when you start moving same if you take the dog and now go for the dog on a walk you'll see the dog will calm down right away — as soon as you start moving that for some reason and you're looking around and observing how things are around you listening to the sounds grounding yourself right away the animal brain starts seeing the truth right — you mentioned you need to go through somewhat of a challenging dark uh period

in order to understand these concepts. — If you don't mind sharing, was there a time for you or you — Oh, many times. — Oh, many times, — right? So many times in life, — but let's say I get a bit a little bit careless in the stock market — and I lost a lot of money. Like I lost like a really big amount of money — uh very quickly — and uh and that hit me very hard. It made me think, "Oh, I'm a failure. I don't know what I'm doing. " and and it was really and I and at that time I was married and I had two kids and so on. So I took it very hard on myself but then that was maybe the biggest most pivotal point in my life because I was fortunate to have so such an amazing support system around me and I was able to come back from it. It became the thing that made me who I am today. Like I have a much more stronger uh threshold of tolerance — because of that event. and and forever anybody in your audience right now that's going through a very hard tough time like that — I just I want to tell them this too shall pass if I have another hard moment that happens and my oh my god and I feel so bad and — I I just remind myself remember the darkest moment in your life — do you remember how bad you felt back then when that happened all the tears are gone — it's like the beauty of our how we our brains work is we forget pain — we forget pain both physical pain and emotional pain. But sometimes it uh it now can start to harm us, right? Where it because it creates fear. — Yeah. — And the fear — is our biggest enemy. Like if you look at us as what's going to stop between you and achieving your dreams, it's going to be fear — always. — Yeah. Like fear is our biggest enemy. and by going through a traumatic event uh whether that be you trying to start your own business or uh trying to find a healthy relationship or or and it doesn't work that creates such a very heavy pain, emotional pain — that reinforces the fear of being afraid to try again. And that's where you now need to really reason with your uh first calm down your animal brain, but then as much as you can uh put that animal brain back in the fox, back in the box with the fear — and tell it, I know this is um uh dangerous. — Yeah. — But I learned my lesson. But sometimes the lesson why this happened is not under my control, — right? — I'm not going to let that stop me from trying again because there's no guarantee that it will happen again in the same way. It might happen in a better way. But unfortunately, it's really hard to do that as as but as you talk to yourself over time, you get better and better at it. — Yeah. — Just a sec. If you don't want to forget any of the advice that you hear in this video or any of the other interviews on our channel, we put together a free newsletter and we send it out to you every single week that condenses these interviews into five life lessons that will help you live a longer, happier, and healthier life. You can join by scanning the QR code or clicking the link in the description. All right, back to the video. So the background and everything is a little misleading because we were in Cairo in Egypt. — Yes. — You would think that we're definitely not in Cairo. — What do we need to know about your childhood about how you grew up to understand the person that you are today? — I was very curious. — Yeah. — And then I was very lucky that my parents, my mom and dad, both of them, they really nurtured that curiosity in me. We did not try to uh no go back and study your math, history. No, if they find me curious about something, they reinforce it. They actually get me more of it. And so I was very curious about computers, which nobody was teaching computers back then. This was like 40 years ago. We're talking 40 years ago now or even longer. And they would buy things from me and take me places and just support me in terms of pursuing the thing I'm passionate about. — Yeah. — And uh that's what I'm doing with my kids as well. And that's my advice to any parent right now is like try your biggest um power in life when you're in charge of this amazing new thing called a kid that you had is to guide them to find their passion and lock on it like you're just locked on this right now. This is your passion and you love it because once you lock in your passion it's not a job anymore. So that's my uh that's the kind of the key thing that I would uh be thankful to both of my parents for is that they reinforced that in me and guided my curiosity in the right way. — Okay. So we were doing research about you and there's an article from Forbes about you from 2016. I'm sure you're very well aware of it. But the title of the article is did a ride from an airport lead to an immigrant's $4 billion company? For someone who has no clue what you do, who you are, what you've been through, what does that mean? My dad kept telling me when you grow up you should be a professor like me. So he was choosing my career for me. It got reinforced through my childhood as I was going. So that was it. So my dream in life, the goal I'm going to achieve was to be a professor. So I left Egypt in um 1995. I went to the US. I went there to get my PhD and I uh was lucky to be accepted at Stanford and that was the beginning of the change of I'm not going to be a professor. That

was not my calling, right? — That was my dad's calling. and he and he put that calling on top of me. No, I have a different calling and that that calling is to be an entrepreneur. That first ride from the airport, it was a pivotal ride still because going from the San Francisco airport to Stanford, I got to see a number of the key companies that I've been hearing about all my life, but I never see. So to see it with your own eyes that now makes it more it's not just a story anymore. It's not like an abstract concept. It becomes a physical and your animal brain of course now resonates a lot more stronger to physical. So I think that was the beginning of it. And then Stanford itself is an amazing entrepreneurial school. Like from day one when you step onto the school — they will spend effort to teach you how you can turn your idea into a company. They invite entrepreneurs that uh succeeded or failed both because we don't look at fa at failing as failure. — Failing is not failure. As I said failure failing means I tried I could not achieve. I'm not going to let that make me unhappy. I'm going to learn my lesson. I'm going to try again. Right? That's so it's very important to always remind yourself and never let failing equal failure. — That would be your brain now killing your dreams. So they give you all of that teaching and right away seeing these other entrepreneurs come in and talk to you that was it. Like for me as soon as I get seeing that story over and over again it's like wow I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that was like a potential career path or that's a like the only thing I thought was possible was to be a professor at the university that was it. — So that's the first half the airport ride and then I guess Cloudera is your — Yeah. So so yeah how did that translate into wealth the rest of the question? Yeah. — At Stanford after they gave me all of these uh insights I then started uh aiming the trajectory of my life to achieve that right which was a big kind of pivot. — What did your dad think about that by the way? Very good question actually. So he was not enthused. — Yeah. So I actually took a leave of absence. So I was at Stanford for three years and then the third year that's when I took a leave of absence to start my first company. I didn't finish my PhD — and I started my first company and yeah my dad was fuming. He was like yeah he was very upset. — Yeah. — Very upset and I tried to talk to him and calm him down. I was like yeah it's my dream. I need to do what's right for me and this is where and eventually he he understood. So eventually he understood my first startup was um acquired by Yahoo a few months later. So the company was one year old. We were five people and uh we got acquired for $9 million which was amazing for my first company and I couldn't even believe myself at that time. When I went to the US I only had like a few thousand like maybe $2,000 in my pocket. uh within 3 years starting that company, I now became a multi-millionaire. And then within a few months after that, I lost almost all of it — because the stock market collapsed. So imagine going from having nothing to being a multi-millionaire to almost having nothing again. I literally achieved my dream and then the dream was snapped away from me. Was extremely painful — that po moment in time. Like when I think about right now like it is bringing back memories even in my head like how painful that moment was. I could have given up at that point. Yeah. — And that was that would be it. — Yeah. And I would not be sitting with you right now and having this conversation. In that point was about 25 years ago now because I was able to go through this reinforcement cycle of calming down the animal brain putting back the intellectual brain in control. Recalibrating the intellectual brain on goals are artificial. We set them for ourselves. They come, they go. They don't define us. We define them. — Which is very hard. It's very hard to do that. But it's very important. And because of that I was able to do my second company. One of my favorite sayings in the US which I always like to remind people of is fortune favors the prepared. Meaning to succeed you need luck but to succeed you also need to act. — Right? — When you see luck coming your way. In my case it was I have a very clear problem that I know is going to hit so many other people right now because data is going very fast. Somebody else could have like I see the problem and keep going. And somebody else like oh I see the problem. I'm going to leave and make a company to solve that problem. Right? That that's the prepared part. I'm going to take action to turn that into something bigger. And that's exactly what I did. I left Yahoo at the time and I joined with uh three other founders and we created Cloudera. And luckily Cloudera became a very uh massive success. It's deployed in many countries across the world today and including uh becoming a public company at 4 billion valuation. — Wow. — Yeah. Eventually got acquired by a private equity firm for 5 billion actually. Yeah. — Have you been looking to start a side hustle or add an extra stream of income to your repertoire? If so, you got to check out the sponsor of today's video, Printify. Printify is a print on demand system, meaning you can make t-shirts, arts, mugs, and many other products without having to deal with the inventory and shipping. If you create a product and you sell it, Printify will then manufacture it and they will ship it for you. So, you only pay for what you sell. 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We use them to make t-shirts for our live events. We've used them to make art. Essentially, I went on Printify, I created a sample, I ordered it, I checked it, I verified that it's great quality, which it always has been, and then we got it ready for launch. So, if you're someone who is looking for a bit more flexibility in your life, and honestly, no matter what age you are, you should check out Printify, and you can use the link in the description with a discount code Sprout for the first thousand people who click it to get a free 30-day Printify premium subscription. What do you attribute to this company growing to the scale that it did? So if you look at startups just like any other um hard to achieve goal like sports there's going to be million trying but only few are going to succeed. — Yeah. — The few that succeeded need to have these two key things fall in the lap. Uh they first need to have the hard work will motivation — the prepared part. The fortune favors the prepared. — They need to be prepared. I'm going to do I'm going to put the work. I'm going to be running my ass off. reading very hard. I'm going to be studying practicing very hard. I'm going to be uh hustling. I'm going to be doing everything in my power — to make this succeed. It's necessary. If you don't have that, you're not going to succeed. But at the same time, because you're working hard and there's — 100 other people or 100 other companies working very hard do the same thing. It's just not possible for you to succeed. Right? The key point to know is if you don't try very hard and convince yourself I have the will, I have the motivation, I have the energy, I have the ambition, if you don't do that which is the necessary part, then by definition you will never succeed, right? The answer will be no, — right? — The answer absolutely will be no 100%. Like logically, you need to tell your brain that like if I don't do this — very scary thing, — then the answer will be no. If I don't do this very scary thing of going to that beautiful girl and ask her if she likes me. — Yeah. — The answer is no. She doesn't like you. If I don't go and try to build this great company, the answer is no. You couldn't build that great company. — And then you need the luck. You need the luck to come your way. — And maybe it will and maybe it won't — to make it come your way. Uh I'm a very big believer both in positivity but also in uh I'm a religious myself. I'm Muslim. So I very very strong believe strongly believe that for the luck to come your way you have to ask — right religiously that means you have to be making prayers and then if you're not uh religious which is totally fine if you're not religious that's okay then you need to be uh manifesting positively the outcome you want to see. It's the same thing by the way like they're both the same thing. One of them is secular and the other one is sp spiritual. You need to be seeing the goal you want to achieve and believing it's going to happen. It might still not happen and you might still fail, — right? — And that's fine. If you fail, it's fine. And it's hard. I know. And you should be sad. You should be sad when you fail. But you should you shouldn't tell yourself — it's the end of the world. I'm doomed. We I just told you it's a game where there's a hundred other people trying to hit the same goal. A few will hit, a few won't, — and they're going to go try again, a different goal, and goal. Cuz that was not go their goal. as long as you know I tried my best. I did everything I can. I worked very hard and yet it still did not happen. It — it's interesting the amount of successful people that we speak to and then I look at the comments in a lot of the videos. — And right away people who haven't achieved that level of success, they instantly say, "Well, you were lucky. — You were lucky. This happened. That happened. " You know, and the same can't be said for me. I have three kids. I have this. I have that. Like what you're saying is so simple. You can try hard and you can not succeed, but because you haven't succeeded doesn't mean your life is over. — Yeah. — So, you could sit and type and complain. Um, but really the people who did get successful, they might have been like you at that point and then they kept trying and then they — they were successful. Some hit it right away. — Some takes their whole life to hit it. And some might never hit it which is okay — because you have to tell yourself which is the stoic part or but also in Islam we have the same thing which is in maku our journey is written we're going through a journey that the faith what we are going to face in life that's already there. So just accept it and keep moving with it. Yeah. In Islam there is four levels of how you react to something bad happening. The first level is the level of uh blaming yourself and and like hating yourself and crying and like the really depressive bad characteristics. Like that's the first level and that level is sinful. The Quran, the religion tries to tell you don't do that. Like that's bad for you. Like it's trying to tell your animal brain don't do that one. Like the second level which is the level that most people should be able to do and achieve is the patience level. like be patient, be sad, but don't let the sad become the sadness become paralysis. — Right? — Third level is acceptance. — Acceptance. I'm going to accept this change because I know there's a bigger thing happening for me. — I'm not going to be sad. happy either because if it worked then I would have been happy. I'm going to accept it and keep going. Right. And that's the stoicism. The

hardest level. — This is the boss level. Yeah. — The boss level. Level four — is thankfulness. — Okay. It's like when something happens bad to you, — you're thankful. Thank you. Thank you for testing me in this way so I become a stronger person. — Like when this thing happened to me where I made tons of money, lost over money. — Thank you. — At the time when it happened, now I'm saying thank you. Now I can say thank you. The time passed, I can see what happened. But at the time like thank you. I know you this is happening to me right now. you universe or you God whether you're secular or religious — because that's going to make me a stronger person in the future, — right? — But imagine if you can achieve that where you're like so much in peace, — right? — That you just don't like your leg will be chopped off. Thank you. — Maybe in the next life for me. I don't know. — Yeah. If you drop my leg off, I'm not saying thank you. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty mad about that one. Other things that could be — That's the boss level. We strive to achieve that level. I agree. You mentioned that you were married in the past. — I am still married. — Still married? Okay. Same relationship. — Yeah. Same relationship. Yeah. — So, how long have you been married for? — 31. We met when we were 16 years old. — What has contributed in your opinion to lasting as long as it has so far? — It's an answer that puzzles me. — It's it's the correct answer, but it puzzles me at the same time. Okay. The answer is true love. M — if there's a true love between your animal brain and the other side's animal brain, not the logical — the animal brain, — yeah, — you will never leave each other. — What is true love? What is love? — Love is undefined. We cannot define love. So, nobody can define love. — Unfortunately, it's a it's a it is like God. It is a metaphysical concept, right? is that when we are with this soulmate, which also is a metaphysical term, the neural networks kind of speak to each other in a way that calms you down. — Yeah. — Not your brain, not your language, not your words. — It's your presence. If you have that, no, no matter the fight you're going to have, trouble you're going to overcome everything in front of you. — If you were to advise to someone who's not married, they want to get to where you are. — What would you say? You have to work for it. Don't expect it will just happen. — Don't just sit there and my soulmate will appear now. — Go there, meet people, talk with them. Uh put yourself out there. Uh don't be shy to ask the question. — Uh even if the answer is no. — So I did ask you to put a piece of advice down on this journal. Can you read it out for me and then just say why that's what you chose to write. — What I wrote here is change is constant. We fear change, but we need to recognize that change will happen whether we like it or not. — Yeah. — Because change is not about us. Change is about the environment and the world around us. — We don't control that. And you need to always remind yourself, you don't control that. I don't control other people. If my spouse wants to leave me, my spouse is going to leave me. If my customer doesn't want to buy my product, my customer is not going to buy my product. Absolutely. Like there's nothing you can do. So you need to recognize that change is constant — and what you need to do is draw power from change. M. — So don't let change be the obstacle that slows you down. Like every time a change slows down I I I I freeze. No, — let change be the signal that guides you to go faster. — You see what I mean? — Yeah. That's it. — Thank you so much. — Of course. My tether.