How I made my first million in my early 30s

I hit my first million in net worth in my early 30s.

Here’s how I did it, and what I learned from the journey.

My Mom

Parents have a major influence on their children’s success in many ways.

No, I didn’t have the privilege of having a father to advance me “a small loan of a million dollars”. But I did have a mother who got me into the habit of investing.

(Picture: my mom and me during our last family vacation together in New Zealand)

As a self-taught investor, she brought our family from a net worth of nearly zero, to a comfortable retirement in the Bay Area, California, over the course of 30 years.

She taught me that no one ever got rich by holding cash, and made sure that I was constantly moving money out of the bank, and into the markets.

Her constant nagging made sure that I invested everything I earned into index funds, leaving only just enough cash in the bank for necessary expenses.

Even when it sometimes annoyed me, or whenever I was anxious about the paper losses I racked up during market downturns. 

My mother’s determined nudging helped me overcome my own initial nervousness around investing. Thanks to her, the first $50K that she pushed me to invest in the S&P500 during 2015 is now worth $127K.

My Job

In an era of mass tech layoffs, and the slow death of finance from an avalanche of post-2008 regulations, it has become popular for people to scoff at the idea that a salary can be the path to riches.

But the truth is that earning a salary will probably be the biggest contributor to your net worth in your twenties and thirties. Especially if your salary comes with stock-based compensation.

When I graduated from Haas at UC Berkeley with a business degree in 2014, it was considered unconventional to go straight into a career in tech. 

Most of my colleagues were pursuing more “traditional” careers in banking, consulting, and accounting, so I was small <5% that ended up in the “others” category.

I ended up working at Google and Amazon, thanks to my internship at Goldman Sachs as an investment banking intern. While working on deals, noticed that the P/E ratios for tech companies were through the roof compared to other sectors.

Despite having been dead-set on a banking career, I realized that the markets were telling me to follow the money into tech.

Even though the total pay initially felt less than in finance, the compensation that I would get from shares in these tech companies was way more exciting to me than the annual cash bonuses I would receive in banking. 

My stock-based compensation at Google contributed over 40% of the growth in my net worth (excluding my salary). The shares I received from my first annual vest in 2015, worth close to $20K at the time, are worth close to $100K today - that’s like having a bank account that’s paid me 20% in annual interest on my savings.

My Peers

Being surrounded by peers who talk about the latest technologies, helped me translate those insights into investment theses. 

I was immersed in communities within high-growth sectors like tech and, later on in my life, crypto, which allowed me to take early bets that paid off handsomely.

I invested in Tesla back in 2015, as I was very excited about the potential of the electric vehicles market, and couldn’t help but notice the early hype it was getting amongst buyers in San Francisco.  Even though Tesla has gone through its fair share of ups and downs, I’ve still made more than 10 times my initial investment.

With crypto, even though I had some losses in the market between 2021 and 2022, I re-entered gradually from the middle of 2023 to the beginning of 2024. From what I observed in previous cycles and from talking to peers in crypto, I was confident that there would be a reversal from the bottom of 2022 - especially with the advent of BTC ETF approvals and the BTC halving event that happened in April. To date, I’ve almost doubled my initial investments ETH and BTC.

Today, my portfolio is sitting a bit above a million dollars, with investments divided into these particular asset classes.

(Note: this goes without saying that nothing in this article is financial advice. My investment decisions were based on a series of factors relevant to me - like my risk appetite - and may not apply to each person for their situation)

If I had to distill my experience into two lessons, it would be these:

1) Cultivate the habit of taking calculated risks

I’ve found that when it comes to investing or career decisions, the surest way to lose in the long run - is to take no risk at all. And sadly, many do just that.

You need to take some calculated risks to generate significant returns. And learning how to deal with losing money in the short-run is a skill.

I’ve taken a few calculated risks in my life around investments, and each time, I made sure that the amount I put in was no more than 10%. That is also known as a “satellite strategy” - where it involves a relatively small risk that offers the potential for high gains.

In both tech and crypto, I simply invested a reasonable amount that could potentially boost my net worth, but not enough to cause financial hardship if the market went against me.

2) Go where the growth is

One of the biggest shackles that hold people back is outdated advice on career choices, and investing. 

Working as a doctor, lawyer, or banker may have been the boom industries of our parents’ era. Investing 80% of your net worth into real estate may have been how previous generations multiplied their net worth.

Those truisms are no longer true. Yet many people continue to fall back on these tropes they grew up with. Many of my peers chose traditional career pathways, and few invested as aggressively or consistently as I did.

Much of the growth in my net worth came from being an employee and investor into the meteoric rise of tech companies in 2010, partly driven by the near-zero interest rate environment since 2008. 

Takeaways

Not everyone is lucky to have someone like my mother. Or have peers who are working in innovative tech areas to provide alpha into high growth sectors.

I hope to solve that with the app we’re building at Peek (peek.money) - your personal finance CFO.

Despite being in their infancy, LLMs have become incredibly sophisticated - and continue to improve at a breathtaking pace.

We think they can help us make better financial decisions, understand, and identify investment opportunities at a scale that human financial planners cannot.

We’re building tools to help you analyse your portfolio health and know the right places to take some risk, and how to manage it.

Whether in investing, nutrition, or working out - consistency is key. But navigating the complex array of bank statements, investment apps, and brokerages can be a process so daunting as to deter even the brightest among us from developing the habit of investing regularly.

There is no silver bullet to making money in investing. It's about making compounded decisions over time.  And it's not always about making the perfect decisions, but just getting into the habit of making a lot of financial decisions over time. Just showing up and participating in the market.

With AI as a coach and cheerleader, it could help you make better financial choices, faster, and more consistently - to help you achieve your financial goals to enable the life you want to live.