June 2011, I was 29 years old when I made my first $1,000,000. You can see it on screen here. The funny thing is it wasn't an overnight thing like most people talk about, and it's actually boring I realize. But the best part is that anyone just like you can become a millionaire, and in this video, I'm gonna show you my story so that you can create a game plan for yourself. Let's dive in. And before we get into the video, I have a small ask for you. I am never going to sell you a course to teach you how to become a millionaire, the only ask I have for you is that subscribe and hit that like button if you enjoy this video. After graduating college in 2004 from UC Berkeley, I got an exciting job at Intel.

It wasn't really my dream job, but it was the best thing and I wanted to be in technology plus bonus points for living at my mom's house. I made 50 $5,000 a year, and I had a job doing supply chain optimization and I hated it. It was a big corporate company. I worked in a cubicle, but there was a silver lining. I had a lot of free time to do a bunch of side hustles. Think of it this way, shitty jobs are great investors. So I did entrepreneur27.org, I did a lot of meetups, I ran ninjacar.com, a discount site, as well as I was blogging on okdoor.com. So if you hate your employer or you don't really like your job right now, that's a great opportunity to do mornings, nights, and weekends starting some side hustles.

I was about to quit my job at Intel where I totally randomly sent in my resume to facebook.com in 2005, and I somehow ended up getting the job. The main reason I was able to get the job is because I did so many things on the side that they were like, wow, this guy's a hustler and he's doing work that was relevant for the college market. I got paid a whopping $65,000 in 2,005, and there's some lessons learned from getting that job there. Number 1, if you don't know what you wanna do in your own life, go work at companies you love. Look at your browser history. Hopefully, it's not foreign. Look on your phone, see what apps you're using, and just go work for those companies. That was for it for me.

I was using Facebook all the time and if it wasn't that, I was gonna go start my own thing. The other thing about wealth that I think is a little bit confusing is that if I would have just been a good employee at Facebook, which I wasn't, I wasn't able to scale with them, I'd be worth over 9 figures today. Are they hiring? Can we look up their job applications? So you can get rich joining a rocket ship. You don't always have to be an entrepreneur to be really wealthy. And lastly, being around impressive people like I was at Facebook was one of the highest growth periods for my professional career. So if you get a chance to be around extremely smart people in any type of industry, go take it. Honestly, that really paid off later in my career because I had this knowledge plus some network, from being a part of that organization and a brand that even today people I'm still talking about I worked at Facebook. Like, can he can that guy just shut up? Okay.

It was 20 years ago, old man. So after I got fired by Facebook, I was living on my buddy's Johnny's couch in Santa Clara. So this is around 2006 and I said, well, I got nothing to do and I wanted to meet and talk to other people about social networks and no one else was doing it at the time. And so I never started a conference but I started communitynext.com and I just created the event I wanted to go to. Hawaiian food during lunch, drinks all day, free Red Bulls, and open happy hours, which most conferences were the opposite of that. So the first thing I did was I made a budget to figure out, alright, how much do I need to break even? And that was really my goal and I focused on that. And I didn't have a network. I literally cold emailed Guy Kawasaki, Max Levchin at PayPal, James Hong, suicide girls, and as it turned out I did this for the next year, year and a half and each conference ended up making $50,000 profit and I did it four times for about $200,000 in profit.

Events? You can it's something to think about for yourself. You can't actually make good money throwing events. So a few key lessons about making money from this part of my life. 1, you can actually make good money throwing events. 2, solve your own problems. This is something I talk about in a lot of my videos. I wanted to go to this conference and if even if it was just me and the audience and Guy Kawasaki talking, I would have loved it. As well, I would have done these things for free just for the network.

It would have been so valuable, meaning people like Eric from chest.com who I gotta hang out with recently. For the viewer right now, you, how can you start planning these active seats to either build your network or do events or businesses like this that you would enjoy for yourself? Plant the seed today. So while I'm doing these events, I'm also doing a little bit of consulting, not really making a ton of money besides the conferences. I ended up getting a job at mint.com in 2006. So how I actually got the job at mint.com is a little bit crazy, my friend David McClure brought me into Mint and said, hey, check out this product, I saw it and I fell in love with it. I asked the CEO Aaron Patzer if he hire me, he said no. Okay. So I said, well, let me come back to you with the marketing plan because I was hiring a director of marketing, which I've never done in my career before.

Said I'll come back to you with a plan and if you like it you can hire me as a contractor to execute the plan. There's no risk for you. I'll work on the plan my own. So I spent a whole week working on this plan. I came back to them and, you know, kind of the rest is history. I got a job there, I ended up getting paid a $100,000 a year, which I thought was crazy at the time, working for Mint. And that marketing plan that actually helped me get the job is what we executed and also helped Mint to get about a 1000000 plus users, I think within the 1st year. Leave a comment below if you want me to actually make a video about that marketing plan which is still relevant today.