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I lost around 90, 95% of my net worth. This is one of my worst nightmares. I've worked hard. I've made sacrifices. I got a little lucky. And as a result, I've built something quite substantial. A lot of people say that this fear is incredibly irrational. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen once in a while. I don't know if it's Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger that said you only have to get rich once. I'm going to do it twice because I have to.
Today, we're going to talk to Dominic. He made his money in a bunch of different ways, including building a business. He made some investments. But, and this is the biggest one, and it's, in my opinion, the most interesting one, he made a ton of money because he was a very early employee at Facebook.
I had gotten fairly lucky at the time that somebody advised me to take as much inequity as possible. Being an early Facebook employee, to me, that's like a very mythical thing. To have been there, to have witnessed history, to be at the beginning of social media, I think that's incredibly fascinating. Now, aside from the historical part, there was also a lot of money that was being made by a lot of employees.
Having shares of Facebook in the early 2000s, like Dominic did, that was like winning the lottery. This is the story of what happened to one of those early employees. We'll hear how much he made at Facebook. And by the way, it is a ton. We're going to hear about when he left, what he built on his own, how he lost nearly all of his money, and what he's doing now since losing and regaining a lot of his money.
I'm Sam Parr and this is Money Wise.
And so because of Hampton, I'm able to see all these amazing private conversations about money. And in my opinion, it would be helpful if a lot of those conversations were done publicly. And that's what this podcast is. With Money Wise, we provide advice by speaking to real people who have made a ton of money, and they're radically transparent about all their numbers, which means their portfolios, their net worth, their monthly expenses, all that stuff. And more importantly, all the personal issues and problems that come with being successful and how they're solving them.
And of course, if you're the CEO or founder of a startup, you guys have to check out my company, joinhampton.com. You're going to be put into a group of eight people who have similar sizes and types of businesses as you do. You'll meet monthly. You'll also have access to hundreds of in real life events throughout the year and access to the rest of the community with thousands of other founders. So check it out, joinhampton.com. As you'll learn, Dominic is all about looking forward. It kind of has to be. Dwelling on a situation like the one he went through is a trap.
But man, as someone hearing his story for the first time, it hit me hard. And it hits even harder when you understand what he built up from. I grew up in Southern Virginia, like banjos, moonshine. What was your family situation in life growing up? Pretty good. My parents were about to celebrate 50 years of marriage. They're good folks. My dad...
It's like high school dropout came from a broken home and built a business that, you know, it's nothing special. But I remember growing up very poor. I have memories of using an outhouse because our house didn't have plumbing yet. But I also have memories of my dad like selling that home later for way, way, way above, like basically as a luxury home for that area in that time.
My dad just, he just worked. He still does, but he built a business and went from nothing to having a pretty comfortable life. So,
At some point between elementary school and high school, I don't really know when, I've moved from being pretty poor to just middle class. What was your goal in wanting to move out to San Francisco? It was just for a girl. I'd always kind of figured I would figure something out. A good friend of mine had said, go out there, check out the Silicon Valley stuff. I went to school. My education is in writing. And...
I didn't really understand tech or get into it that much. And then this woman that I worked for, she's kind of just like old school, like web 1.0, like before the bubble, she was kind of a big deal in communication, speech writing, stuff like that. She just kind of took me in under her wing and I really liked it. Like I had never, I'd made money before. So like in grad school, I built a house. I took out student loans to build a house.
That was just to make more money to, you know, like I saw that arbitrage and that possibility because I knew I could build a house in my spare time. But I didn't think of it like, I'm a businessman, I'm going to be a contractor. I just thought of it as like, this is something I can do to take care of myself. That's kind of how I've always operated, whether I'm building a business or building a home. And then ended up just kind of in this communications consultancy. And then I got introduced to, because we were doing some work with Google, right?
I got introduced to Zuckerberg in like 07 or 08, interviewed as his speech writer, did not pass that interview, but no one did. But I got handed off downward into the company. And so I was consulting. Facebook was like my favorite client when I was this consultant. And none of my coworkers wanted Facebook because we were just sure MySpace was going to crush them and like nobody cared. And
I was living in Palo Alto and everybody at Facebook lived in Palo Alto then and I just hung out with them. And when I joined the company, it was literally because I'd go out to the old pro every night after work and all the Facebook folks would be like, you got to come work with us. I'd be like, no. And then when I joined, it was just because...
So many of my friends worked there. I was like, wait, why wouldn't I just go work with my great friends? How many people worked there at the time? I think I'm employee around like 600 to 700. It's been a while since I've had to look that up. It used to be in your Facebook ID. Like you could see it in the URL of your Facebook profile.
What was Zuck like back in 2007? I think there's a lot of stories that are really juicy because we were all young and we were working 20 hours a day. And it was fun. Like Zuck had this idea of hiring pointy people. And the idea of a pointy person was if you have, if you imagine all of your talents,
as sticking out from a center but you're really talented in one way then you're pointy so it's just kind of like a lot of really unique people with really unique personalities and we were all just working really hard and having a good time and some of the juicy stuff from back in the day was just like
stupid stuff that kids do and offsite with too much alcohol or anything like that. And then I think the business stories, I think Facebook has become so big that it's easy for those stories to get lost. Like it's hard to understand them in the context of the time. We were a small company that was getting crushed in a lot of countries.
When you were the 600th employee, what was your pay back then? Boy, not enough. Probably between 50 and 80K. Certainly not over 100. Barely livable in the Bay Area at that time. I had gotten fairly lucky at the time that somebody advised me to take as much in equity as possible. One of my clients who'd sort of been through the runaround in Silicon Valley... I mean, that's the thing with Silicon Valley is...
It has a really short memory because everybody makes a bunch of money and pieces out. So I took a lot of equity over salary, but I remember taking about $100K pay cut to go work at Facebook. Back then, you had to take a title cut and a pay cut. Were you nervous about that? I was a little nervous, but I really wanted to work with my friends. And it was clear pretty quickly that Facebook was going to succeed there.
You just can't have that many smart people who work that hard and really care about work not succeed at something. How big did you think it was going to get? I just remember realizing that every major invention that has truly gotten huge, it's always either helped people talk to each other more or helped people be healthier. The wheel is both, right?
It makes it easier to carry heavy loads and on a car, it can get you to places and see people. Once I realized the power of Facebook as a communication innovation, then it was very clear to me it was going to be huge. Well, when you were doing the math, what did you think it was going to be like? Never as big as it is now. I guess I didn't think about that and I don't think many people did. You know, in the early days, we were pretty good about filtering people out who were just in it for the equity growth.
So somebody asked about the stock in an interview. It was usually common to mark it down. And that wasn't in their favor. And we were just focused on building. It was really intense focus then. And we were so young. It's hard to describe how naive I was at that time. So had you not sold any of your shares, what would those be worth right now? Probably in the low,
Low nine figures, high eight. So 200 to 500 maybe. Compared to my friends, because most of my good friends there started the company before me because I was just a consultant. I'd say compared to my friends, many of them did much, much, much better than I did. How much is much better than $200 million? I think when you make money in chunks, there's a lot of taxing.
tax situations that people don't talk about. I think when you make money in chunks at a young age, you behave differently than when you make it at an older age or where you are in life. If you come from wealth, usually you get better advice when you first make it. When I look at how everybody has spent it and how everybody has kept it or lost it in those days, it's really across the board. Do you have any stories?
In the '08 crisis, it was common for a lot of people to intentionally default on their mortgage. There's all kinds of like moral hazard debates when you get into that, like, is that cool to just like default on a mortgage? All of these things are still up for debate. But there was, for instance, one person at Facebook who was sort of an open secret and well known that this person had joined Facebook just after leaving his previous role.
and defaulting on just walking away from a bad mortgage. So fast forward a few years, we all make some money. When that person shares like, hey, here's what I'm doing, which was at the time, it's really common to just borrow against equity that you have. And so that person chose to borrow against their Facebook equity in order to fund their lifestyle and make other investments. The result of that is it looked like a bad financial decision. Like it looked...
Because this one person is doing it, it suddenly taints that idea as a strategy. For this person, that obviously, you know, Facebook stock continued to go up. That ended up being an incredibly wise decision. But you look at employees of startups that were part of the like 2020 to 2021 VC boom and borrowed against their equity in some of those companies that are, a lot of them aren't even in business anymore. It's not actually a very sound strategy, but it did work out for some people.
It worked out for that person. Dominic wasn't borrowing money on his equity, but as we've learned, he had negotiated a significant amount of his contract. Ironically, a contract would end up being his undoing. We're going to get to that. Despite taking very low pay and making a big bet on the future of a new company, Dominic wasn't exactly scrounging up his change to make his bills. We'll get to that financial breakdown in just a moment.
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I pretty much paid rent and other bills like insurance.
and worked 24-7. There was this thing with Facebook where we had a rent subsidy early on before I got there. But what it resulted in was a lot of Facebookers lived together. You would do that because if you had a home in Palo Alto with four bedrooms and you had four Facebookers living there, then each person's subsidy contributed to the overall rent. Like it just turned into a little bit of a cultural thing. And so there were just a lot of
For a lot of those years, my roommates were fellow Facebook employees, even long after the rent subsidy was gone. And some of us were closer to sales, some of us were closer to engineering, but depending on our job, we all just woke up in the morning and went to work and then worked all day. My expenses were probably rent and beer and insurance.
And then, in May of 2012, that equity bet paid off huge. The employees at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters were not the only ones celebrating in the region around Menlo Park, California. William Colick is certain at least a few of the newly rich will be dropping by his luxury car dealership to try out Lamborghini models that can cost more than $380,000.
There's this funny thing about that Facebook IPO because it was all over the news for so long. It was almost like nothing else to have news about then. Because of that, even people who I hadn't spoken to in years, people just sort of assume you have a lot of money. And so the requests from people coming in and asking me for money had started before I had any.
I noticed people treated me differently before I had money. I lost my credit card and had to cancel it, but it was right before vacation.
So I was traveling and I needed my card. And they were like, sorry, it takes nine to 10 days or whatever it is to mail you the new card. And I was like, well, change it. Like FedEx it to me overnight. And I remember the banks just being like, no, it's policy. You know, it takes this time. And I remember saying to them on the phone, I remember saying, you know, you're able to see my checking account. Could you...
scroll through my checking account and see who's been making a direct deposit every other Friday for the last four years. You're gonna see that I have some really big banking decisions coming up on who I'm going to deposit with. And it would be really helpful if you got me that card tomorrow and it showed up the next day. That was like my first time kind of like swinging around money like it was power and I didn't even have any yet. When Facebook went public, a lot of people's lives changed, Dominic's included.
I made a few different investments. I really didn't spend any money until after I left the company because we were still working so hard that you just didn't, there was no time. Maybe my vacations changed from going to Mexico to going to Australia, but that's not like a very material difference in spend. I remember I paid off my student loans
And the woman that I, you got to call the number and do it manually. You can't just like send in a check. And the woman that answered the phone and helped me process the payment started crying. Like she just thought it was the most amazing thing. And she's like, all day I just talked to people who are trying to defer payment. And this is so amazing. I don't know what happened to you, but this is great. I think I had probably 100K outstanding at that time.
But even though the money was all but guaranteed, he was still hesitant to make any major purchases. I remember being pretty excited to have some of that. I started house shopping before it was liquid.
And then when I did liquidate it, it was almost out of my system. To me, it was a lot of money. Like I wasn't going to purchase it in cash. It was such a big commitment. Like I'd never signed a 30-year mortgage before. In hindsight, I probably should have bought that property. But I got, I was young. It was my first time and I got really scared. You know, my friend passed away and that just kind of messed me up for a week while we were in escrow. And then also during that week, we had one of the first properties
reorganizations at Facebook. Back then, we didn't really lay people off. We just suddenly, they were without a job and they had 30 or 60 days, depending on their performance, to find a new one within the company. And a friend of mine at the company had just closed on their dream house. He had had to borrow money in really creative ways to do it.
And it was kind of a big stretch on their income, but they were really excited. And obviously, the sky's the limit when we just had all gone public and it felt very comfortable. I was working on the reorganization and my friend that had come in really excited to just take this enormous risk for the next 30 years for his family. I knew and he didn't know that he was about to get noticed that he needed to find another job within the company or that he would be let go. I was young, I was new to money and that just really spooked me. And so I just, I'd never bought.
That hesitation to spend went away around the same time he left Facebook and liquidated some of his shares. I sold after leaving the company. I want to say I put like maybe eight shares
into my account. And then, Dominic went through a stage he calls the fuck-its. A lot of that had started with a good friend of mine dying. And then in that year, another friend died of cancer. A friend died in an avalanche. A friend died on his motorcycle. It's just sort of a rough year. And it was my first real experience with grief. You know, I had all my family at that time. And at that time, one of my very closest friends, her husband died. And I think there's this stage of grief where
Where you just a little bit feel like, oh, fuck it. Like any of us could go at any time. And if you have a lot of money in that stage, you will spend it. I call that stage the fuck it's. And my friend was in the fuck it's because she, her husband had been an executive at Oracle. And so she inherited quite a bit when he passed. And at the same time, she felt like she had no reason to be living. And so...
her fuck it's in my fuck it's kind of overlapped to me spent we spend an enormous amount on just doing stupid stuff like just go on vacation go somewhere just do something just kind of wallow and self-pity but again it's pretty hard to run out of money by going on vacations I bought a lot of real estate I've always loved real estate and so then I once I was liquid I started purchasing homes and I'm just like a work person I like projects I like doing things so I would buy homes
and really remodel them myself or with only a few other people. And it was just, it was fun physical work that doesn't require my brain. And, you know, it felt like I was out of the bubble of Silicon Valley. Having your wealth go from zero to 100 like that, especially when you don't come from money, that's a very confusing time.
And by the way, that's one of the reasons why I launched my company Hampton. But hey, Dominic's Facebook days, that was way before Hampton existed. At the time, Dominic and his coworkers were using their own product to get through this period.
A lot of our biggest money questions surprisingly got resolved in Facebook groups. Like it was incredibly powerful to go through that experience with a lot of other people because you could compare notes and having friends that you trusted because you'd been in the trenches for so long and ask questions. And I ended up in Facebook groups that were a lot of my friends had a lot more money than me because the friends I had made there were
they had been at the company longer than me. You know, in some of those Facebook groups, they're asking really early questions about like plane ownership and understanding who to invest with and how to set up a venture fund and just really basic, simple stuff that you could find an older person to ask. But asking your peers that were also, because it wasn't just like, I'm going to ask this Facebook group and do whatever they say. It was more of,
Everyone in this Facebook group is reading and learning and listening as much as they can. Let's compare notes. And so it almost felt like a study group of how to be high net worth. And those were really useful conversations to just be able to be vulnerable and straightforward with good friends that had gone through it. But even with this community, Dominic made some early mistakes. I sold too much up front. The numbers, when you watch them, you feel stupid because when I sold...
to have a little bit of liquid capital, it probably could have been maybe 10 or 20%. But when those numbers, when the share price is really low, you think of that 10 or 20% later, and it suddenly is such a huge number that it feels terrible in hindsight. Two mistakes I made were I interviewed financial advisors pretty aggressively. As soon as the IPO started getting
So way before it actually happened. But when the S-1 was filed, you immediately start getting outreach from different financial advisors at all the houses. So Merrill Lynch, Schwab, everybody's just hitting you up. You don't know how they got your contact info and they're all trying to, they want to manage your money. Making money makes you skeptical of other people because everybody, everybody has an interest in it and they want it, especially new money. The financial system really loves to take money that fits new money.
And I was really skeptical of all those people. And since I'd gone to school back east, where money's a lot older, I sought out financial advisors that were used to managing family funds that were multi-generational. And the first generation was long gone. I sought out financial advisors more accustomed with preservation. And I wanted...
I wanted a financial advisor who wouldn't be impressed by the amount that I had. I wanted me to be the small change nobody in their portfolio, so they were less incentivized to make unfair plays towards my money. That ended up being a mistake because the kind of advice I got was old money advice. It was focused on preservation, not on growth, which at that age, you know, we were in our 20s and 30s. Growth is a fine objective at that age in your wealth.
That was bad advice. And the other bad advice was that by choosing more old money, East Coast financial advice, they didn't have a lot of understanding of technology or of Facebook. And usually if I hire somebody, I try and give them the reins and trust them. So I made a lot of decisions based on trust that at the end of the day probably weren't. So one of those decisions was to sell...
FB and diversify. And say FB was like around like maybe it was 40 to $80 a share then. That is a stupid decision because one thing I've always been sure of since the first times I met him is that Mark is incredibly good at learning and he's incredibly good at winning. If you've ever played the game of risk with Mark Zuckerberg, you know to hold your investments in Mark Zuckerberg.
He doesn't lose. And he's really remarkable. And he's also a very good person. And I knew that in my heart. And I knew I was always long on Facebook at that point. But when my East Coast advisor is like, well, the correct thing to do, the classic investing advice is sell some of this and diversify. And so I did do that. That ended up in my favor somewhat later by creating a small cushion. But my personal feeling at the time was to hold it and I should have.
And by the way, the experience that Dominic went through with a financial advisor, that's one of the reasons why I'm not the biggest fan of advisors like this. I don't really buy individual stocks. I, like a lot of the guests on here, mostly believe in just buying index funds because I just want to preserve what I have and not bet on a lot of different stuff that I don't really know too much about. Now, despite letting go of some of his shares prematurely, Dominic was still in a pretty good place.
So then what age were you when the shares and the net worth crossed $10 million? They were worth much more than that before they were liquid. So I was probably 32 once I had liquid. Once I could just write a check for 10 million, I was 32. And what was the liquid amount then? At that time, probably between 30 and 60. Okay.
This is when he started his own business in propane accessories, which for a while did quite well. Well enough that it got acquired. But that acquisition, it wasn't like this big exit story that we've heard on podcasts like this where they made a ton of money. This was the beginning of a worst case scenario. Now, we have to keep everyone anonymous here because there's a lot of information that is legally bound not to be shared. And so we're going to be a little bit vague here. But the long story short is this.
I had never been through an acquisition before. I'd never even sat in the room for one. And I signed terms that later weren't in my favor. As far as details go, here's what we can tell you. As part of the acquisition, Dominic made a significant financial investment. I bet really big. So I bet a fair amount of everything I had. Did you like sell $30 million of Facebook stock?
I sold a lot. It was an all-in move. And this time, it did not pay off. The way that that dispute went down is it was personal and not personal at the same time. But there was a lot of, there's a lot on the table. And that founder is excellent at contracts. Like he's one of the smartest contract writers I've ever seen. A loophole in the contract left Dominic with relatively nothing, practically overnight. More on that right after a quick sponsor break.
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When everything fell apart, I spent, it was very expensive to, you know, I fought it a little bit. When I left there and got here, I had about 680K to my name. That's fucking insane, right? That's horrible. It sounds insane, but it's the same as like, I have a few friends that know the whole story, either because they were around for it, so it was before I was NDA'd, or because...
You know, they're really close confidants. And those people get really angry. Like, let's go get revenge or let's build a company and sell it to him just because that'd be the ultimate thing. And like, for all those people, it's a story, you know, or for you, like those numbers are a narrative and a story. But for me, it was an experience. You get to decide when it's your own life, whether that's going to define you.
This is like really crass and silly, but when we were all young, my little brother dated my older brother's ex-girlfriend. Like the weirdest thing on earth, right? That's some Virginia shit, bro. Yeah, yeah. You guys are... You got to break that stereotype. And everybody was so mad. Like even my dad and I still make fun of my little brother for it. But my older brothers made this comment. I was hanging out with him and he said, you know...
As soon as I heard the news, I realized if I got mad about it for even one second, I'd be mad about it for the rest of my life. So I'm just not gonna. That's like a lot of wisdom tucked into a dumb story about 20 year olds. But it's truly how I responded to this situation. Everyone I know is more mad about it than I am. For everyone else, it's a story. But for me, it's something I had to decide whether it was going to affect me or not.
Oh man, you could give me the most philosophical Marcus Aurelius book on how I should enjoy suffering, but that's not how I would handle it. To me, it's more like a
I set my family up to have this thing and it's just been taken away from me. You know, like when you read about on Black Friday or whatever, or whenever the market crashes, you see people jumping out the window. Yeah. I empathize with that. I'm like, I would feel distraught as well. But that's a victim mentality. Call it anything you want. It is. Sure, you could. But that's just how I would react. I don't think you would because... I mean, I work with people that are successful and high net worth. And I think...
There's a difference between making it yourself and being born with it. And you're more likely to have the victim mentality when you're born with it and it gets taken away. But if you made it yourself and it's gone...
You make it again.
that's like one of those things where it's like, you yourself are like, I didn't know it was going to work. We didn't know, no one knew anything and it just was the right place at the right time. And so it feels like I'm rubbing it in your face and that's not my intention. No, no. But I want to be like, that was a lottery ticket that was lost to me. Yeah, sure. There was a lot of luck involved in that. But also, you know, I've always thought of making money differently than that.
There's like a couple ways to make money and like one is with your time, right? You can just spend more time doing something. One is with your effort. You can just really work hard and get better at that thing and be better than anyone. And the third is with your brand. You need to be smarter. You can make a better investment. And...
For me, when I was young, I knew I had more time. Like the first time I really made money or like had a exit was building and selling a house while I was in college. And that was just done in my spare time. I mean, we were like setting windows at 2 a.m.,
while our friends were still at the bar. And all I realized then was that I was in my 20s and I functionally had more time than somebody in their 40s because I didn't have kids, I had a ton of energy, three hours of sleep a night is gonna be no problem. So why am I not monetizing that time? As I got older, I look back at Facebook. I think the reason anyone at Facebook made money is we did work hard. There's a lot of luck involved, but at the end of the day,
Zuckerberg and everyone he hired to be managers are very good managers and they're very good hirers. And they hired people who work hard and we worked really hard. And when I got here, I own a bunch of land here and I'm just in the middle of the sagebrush. I lost all my money. I lost my girlfriend and I'm non-competed out. So I can't do what my previous company did because I still have a non-compete from the acquisition and I can't do anything related to my previous company. I just looked around. I was like, well,
This story is stressful.
And by the way, this is one of the biggest anxieties that people talk about in Hampton, which is that they are afraid of all of their money going away. They've worked really hard, maybe got a little lucky, likely both. And then something happens and the money goes away, sometimes as fast as it came. And even though this situation is sort of rare, it definitely happens. But there are two ways you can deal with events like this in life. One, you could wallow and let it define you. Or two,
You can face what happened and say, "Look, I've got to move forward." Dominic chose the latter. I'm in the stage where every penny I make goes into building back. Like, I'm working as hard as I was when I was 25, and it's hard, man, like, two kids. Like, I'm in my 40s. That's not to say that his life didn't change, even if he had still been living a decently frugal lifestyle. Having a lot of money is an incredible cushion. Like, you know that you can weather most storms. You know that you can...
you can solve problems for people in really fast ways like if a friend is like getting married and they want to have a bachelor party but they're not sure about where to do it and they want to keep it inexpensive you can really easily just write a check for 10 or 15 grand and you can create a really great weekend for people with low standards with 15 grand
Just the ability to just do that. Like if anybody's got a problem or like one of my employees is like complaining about their car, I just get them a car. You can just solve problems for people really easily and losing that ability to hear someone else's problem and immediately solve it for them is probably the biggest intellectual change of like, oh, I'm
My capacity to just remove these really trivial problems that people see as huge problems, because a lot of problems that you think about as big are actually just really trivial. And you can just find somebody to solve it or you can solve it or you can purchase something that solves it. This all happened about five years ago. Since then, Dominic has founded a new business that currently works at and is committed to rebuilding his wealth. And he's incredibly focused at it.
I'd like to be cashing a $30 to $50 million check when my daughter turns 10. When you say cashing, like you literally want to buy something or you want to have a net worth of $50 million in eight years? I say cashing a check of that size as in like, we'll sell one of the things that we own for that amount is what I'd like to be doing. You think you'll get there? I do. You know, some days I don't, but I like working at it and I like having a goal. I've achieved every goal I've ever set. So...
This would be a bigger one than most, but it's there. What is your net worth now? Mid-million. So like probably five to seven-ish. How did you build it back? Every single penny I make, I invest. If I get new socks, it's because my wife decided to buy me new socks. I don't spend... I do spend on things that aren't investments, but it's usually because somebody told me to. I operate so much more like...
This episode is mainly about one thing, confronting the anxiety of losing it all. Dominic went through what is arguably the worst case scenario, but he didn't stop. Instead, he had a plan and he's rebuilding.
The thing is, he's not really starting from scratch. And I don't just mean the nearly $700,000 that he still had. Money, in my opinion, is just one of the forms of wealth that you can accumulate in life. Another form, and definitely more meaningful, is experience. And even if you've had bad experiences, there's always something to be learned. 95% of your net worth is a lot to pay for a life lesson. So the good thing for us is that we get to learn from him instead of firsthand experience. Hopefully.
One thing that I have spent a lot of time thinking about that doesn't totally have to do with money is what makes you a man. And I feel really, every year I get older, especially now that I have kids and I'm around other dads, I'm constantly amazed at like how crappy a lot of people are at being a man and how crappy their dads were. And I just, I feel really lucky that I feel pretty secure in being
in myself and I have strong values and you know I take care it's in my nature to want to take care of my wife my kids and build more and build for them and and I think money has this really gendered aspect because it brings you power it brings you the ability to provide there's all these like cultural stereotypes around money and gender and one thing I do think about is
It's very easy when you make a lot of money to let that become the thing that makes you a man. And when you depend on money to be a man, to be a provider, to be a caretaker, and to be a helper and a leader, like you're the one deciding where your family or your company is going. When you depend on money for that security in yourself...
or use it for that, that's when it's a problem. So that's probably not a fully formed thought, but when I think about who I am and myself, I wouldn't say I'm grateful that I went through loss and gain, but I would say that I have a stronger sense of knowing who I am and knowing that what I can do because of that. That's a little more philosophical. The second thing that I would say is a really great lesson is,
Read every sentence of every contract you ever sign for the rest of your life and get really good at managing your attorneys. Because the incentives for an attorney are never there. If you get a contract from somebody you're doing a deal with and you send it over to your attorney, they don't actually have an incentive to get that right for long term. Like they don't think about it was game theory. They don't think about how it could be wrong. They think about where they can make edits and charge you.
they're working in billable hours and their incentives are totally wrong so the more back and forth that contract does the better for them but attorneys are like accountants where they have this problem where they're just used to no one questioning them and so they make stupid mistakes and they're really comfortable making stupid mistakes because they're cocky about it and i think getting really good at managing attorneys and getting really good at reading contracts where you could read every sentence of every question and then stop and ask yourself out loud
what would it mean for me to comply with this sentence? And it's crazy when you start actually writing down that answer of what it would mean to comply with a sentence. And when you get into buying and selling businesses, what I love about like equity investing and buying and selling businesses or parts of them is the options are endless. You can be as creative as you want because it's not like buying a house where there's some realtor being like, well, this is how we do things. You can structure a deal any way you want, but the more creative you get,
the less capable your lawyers are of keeping up with it, and the more you really have to be on top of every single sentence of the contract. It's admirable that Dominic is able to refrain from looking backward and dwelling on his mistake. But the thing with looking back is that if you don't stop looking, you stay there. The experience that Dominic had in his 20s and 30s cannot be taken away.
He was a part of history at Facebook. He lived comfortably and he had fun and he paid off his student loans in a lump sum. He built a business and he got to watch it grow and thrive. And although something bad happened that took a lot of the zeros away from his net worth, all of the life he lived during that time doesn't just go away.
And of course, all this wisdom and foo-foo sort of advice that I'm saying, I think that stuff's important. But there is another really important lesson here, which is after you've already made some money, diversify. I think going all in on something is a great way to get wealthy. Maybe the only way to get really wealthy.
But after you've hit your number, whatever that number is, diversification is definitely a better way in order to preserve wealth. It may not be the best way to build wealth, but it's definitely the best way to preserve it. And so that's a big takeaway here. And that's an easy one. And so for this lesson that we've learned today, do me a favor. If you've listened to this episode or any of the other episodes, you, my friend, are now in debt to me. You owe me something for all this work that I did for creating this podcast.
But you don't have to pay me money. All you have to do is pay me with a share. Please, if you can, share Money Wise on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you want. And show us a little bit of love because these podcasts take a ton of work and we would appreciate getting the word out there. And by the way, if you are a business owner, you guys have to check out my company, Hampton. Joinhampton.com.
It's changed my life and it's changed a ton of our members' lives. It's probably the only place online or in real life where you can have these types of money conversations, but also conversations about building your company, conversations about whether you have to fire people, whether you're doing really well and how to celebrate, whether you are earning a ton of money and you want to save a little bit of money on taxes.
A lot of the conversations that we have in Hampton, they would not look cool to have in public. And it's a great place to have these important conversations in private. So check it out, joinhampton.com. And by the way, I say that this podcast takes a ton of work. Well, it does, but I'm not the one who has to do all the work.
I've hired this company called Lower Street, lowershreet.co. They are the production company that helps me find guests. They are the production company that helps me edit this podcast and get it on the air. And it has made my life so much easier. So if you're a company who wants to make a podcast like this, check them out, lowershreet.co.
