He Made $400k/Month Before 30... Then Realized It Meant Nothing

- We're selling custom Minecraft maps. It's how I made my first $100,000. - You sold Minecraft, you made $100,000, and at one point you made much more than that, right? - The first net worth milestone I had ever had, what was a million dollars, I thought. That was the whole goal, was to be a millionaire. I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Ohio, my mom made $31,000, $32,000 a year. I had become a millionaire within a couple weeks, literally weeks of her passing. She passed away from stationery on cancer, I remember getting a call from my cousin, and I was on a ski trip for BCG. - Do you think there's a way to be successful without the community? - All the stuff that people told me was gonna make me happy. Totally, no, wrong, every single thing. I did not feel like happy from the money at all, and I think like community, and doing something that you feel as meaningful, I think that is the same. (upbeat music) - Today's guest is Nathan May. He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Ohio, and never even left the state until he was 18. Now his company did $400,000 in a single month, and he rents out a huge office space with eight other business entrepreneurs in New York City. This is Nathan May on Moneywise. Welcome back to another episode of Moneywise. I have a guest here, Nathan May. Thanks so much for joining us today, Nathan. How are you doing? - I'm doing fantastic, dude. Happy Friday, I'm feeling great. - Fantastic, okay. What about your life today is fantastic. Tell me about what brings you to the episode this morning and why today is fantastic. - Not that many calls and stuff like this, where I just get to the whole day is just, I get to be playful. That's like number one thing. (laughs) - I love that. I love building my life around as many playful moments as possible. To the listeners, I know Nathan outside of this podcast as well, and so it's kind of a fun, unique moment for us to, you know, be on a podcast like this, but also just reconnect. It's been a while. I'll see him in New York in a few weeks, and it's just good to be with friends and podcasts. - It's cool, dude. I've never done this with a friend like this before, so I'm excited to jam. We need each other a little bit, but not super, super wall. And so in my head, I have, I mean, it's one PM, so I don't have a O'Bizky sourd is for some Artini, but theoretically, I do, and I want to jam with you today, I'm pumped. - That's so cool, man. Yeah, I think a great place to start. Just tell us a little bit about who you are, how you grew up, the way that you really built your life around business building, growing other people's businesses with your agency, but also making money for yourself, and kind of the why behind Nathan, who are you? - So my name is this right now as an agency. We do a couple of million dollars a year, our biggest month was January. We did about $40,000 in January. We won't do that every month, but we're on our way, businesses are too old, two years old. My life did not start that way. I grew up in Ohio. I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Ohio. My mom made something like $30, $31,000, $32,000 a year. And so I feel like a lot of the last 10 years of my life has been sort of everything has changed, particularly the last two years, and I'm kind of figuring out how to spend, and I have friends I never thought I would have, and people I get to spend time with and everything I would get to, and I'm just kind of adjusting and figuring shit out, but it's all good. - I love that. You mentioned before our call, we were kind of shooting the breeze together a little bit, and you work in New York, you live in New York. Have you been your entire career? When did you leave Ohio to the big city? - I left way later than I should have. So I don't know if you knew this. So I didn't leave Ohio, I didn't step foot out of Ohio until I was 18 years old. I got on a Greyhound bus. - But you literally never left the state? - We didn't have money for vacations, we didn't have money for any of that, dude. My mom was like, she did the best she could, but she was like, she was a hoarder. So we were not making a ton of money, but like every additional dollar that was made was like, shoot by crazy stuff. Do you like our whole basement? I don't know, she thought like the world was gonna end or something, but our whole basement had like Campbell, check in new soup cans and like, Heinz, 'cause we get 20 Heinz ketchup, 'cause she thought the world was gonna like get newt through something she had, like do you remember Shake Weight? At all? - Yeah. - Are you round for Shake Weight? - Yeah. - She had like four, we should four Shake Wates, which is like, you know, like-- - Are you serious? Did you use them? - Yeah. - They're collecting dust. - No, they're four, like you have two hands. Like how do you do more than-- (laughing) - I don't know, like you have four Shake Wates. - Then you run out of batteries and you just have another one available. - I guess you should. - I don't know if I've ever met anyone who has a single Shake Weight, but having four, that's unique. - Yeah, dude, so there was no, like, you know, we weren't going anywhere, man. And so I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to leave Ohio, I wanted to like see the world. And so I didn't go to college in Philadelphia at this like Fancy's Mantee school, which is different and through this whole other world, I moved to New York right after, 'cause everybody did. Everybody from my college, you gotta become like, an investment banker, a private equity person, hedge fund, this and that. And so I've been in New York on and off since 20, 20 and 18, 20, 20. - That's very cool. So the five, six years now, so you're 25 years old? - I'm 28, yeah. - 28, I don't know why I said 25. You said something about 25 before the call, and I got those things confused. So tell me about the story, - Yeah, I was like, do I wishy-g? I know, I was like, I'm aging so fast, I just bought some face cream from a buddy of mine who launched a new product. And I'm like, oh, I guess I'm in my stage of life where like I have to think about the wrinkles on my forehead and stuff. That's fun, that's new. Never thought I'd say that on air, but here we are. Tell me about your BCG experience and kind of like the business reason for why you joined BCG, the personal reasons and then what actually kind of happened and your serendipity as it were after and what brings you to today. - Yeah, so I really wanted to be an actor. So when I got on that Greyhound bus, I did it as a trip to New York to audition for like NYU Tish and all these schools. And I did well at that stuff, but my mom-- - Were you a writer or like a movie actor or both? - Stage, stage, yeah. I think it's good to-- - Stage. - You want to be far away from my face. I'm more of a projector, I'm more of a yapper. - I'm actually not surprised about that. Like I can see that. I can see Nathan May actor. That makes sense. - Yeah, I love it, Steve. I did business when I was in high school and we were selling custom Minecraft maps. That's how I made my first $100,000 to we sold them to famous YouTubers. And that, to be able to-- - Want me through that before we actually get to BCG because you sold Minecraft, you made $100,000. And at one point, you made much more than that, right? Your first 100 grand came from Minecraft maps. And then more, I mean, am I right to say even a million dollars came from that eventually? - Yeah, I would say I feel like the, I think the million was more luck, but yeah. So on the Minecraft stuff, so I was a video game addict, which is actually very common among founders. I feel like a lot of people ended up addicted to games or something and you just kind of-- - And when you say addiction-- - And when you say addiction, do you mean like literal, like you couldn't stop playing or like you just played video games a lot? Dude, I had a 2.1 GPA in middle school. But I would get home from middle school at like 245. I would get on the ward of Warcraft or Runescape. And I would not stop playing until 2am. I would figure it to sleep. I'd figure it to eat. And a lot of that was because our housing situation was just really messed up. Like it was a horror hat. Like there was like one path of like, when I was shit from like my bedroom to my gaming chair. And I, so I think about this a lot now. Like I think I used that in a lot of ways. It's like a crutch. But ended up turning out really good because I got addicted to this thing called Minecraft. And Minecraft people don't know if you don't know what it's like Legos. You know Minecraft at all? - Yeah, yeah. It's like digital Legos more or less, but like open world. Minecraft addiction to building, you know, six-sub and figure business from Minecraft. Like walk me through that journey and how you actually started selling them at 15. That's unique. - Yeah. So the addiction luckily became really useful because my final addiction was like building these like maps. And I got obsessed with YouTubers who were building. And I got really good. I built dragons and trees and castles, like all kinds of cool shit. And I got together with these two other guys and we formed this company basically where we would sell custom Minecraft maps to other people. And at first it was like, you know, some sweaty teenager who wanted to pay like $100 or minecraft spawn. What ended up being with these famous YouTubers. So here's how we got lucky. It's quite interesting. At the time, all these YouTubers were making most of their money from YouTube ad sense. And people were complaining that YouTube was taking too much money. They went into their own monetization. So they all started opening up their own Minecraft servers, which was great for them because they get to play with their fans. And now their fans are like, oh, well, I could be, you know, in a video with Captain Sparkles or Alie, like, well, and so you get this rush of tens of thousands of people come in. And they sell in-game benefits. And those benefits, that's 100% margin. Like you don't have to give anything to YouTube for that. So it was a really great business model. And so it created all this demand for you to have amazing maps and castle stuff that would make people go wow. And like, so you could compete and be like the best Minecraft server of all time. The other thing that got very lucky was the Hunger Games movies that come out. And there's this game mode in Minecraft called survival games that was basically like you play like a Hunger Games thing. And so now people wanted like 20 maps, 30 maps, different Hunger Games maps. And so we just quickly started working with a lot of the biggest YouTubers. We'd sell projects for $10,000, $15,000 at the peak. And it totally changed my life. Wow. So how did that lead to the leaving Ohio at 18 and ultimately back to the question originally of BCG? Yeah. So I made a good amount of money from that. How much total did you leave from that? I probably personally needed like 100 grand. And then I invested it in stocks when I was in high school and then in college. And the only stock I ever know or heard of, which was Apple. That's how there you go. It is a longer story, but like it worked out well. And it was very sad actually when we could talk about that in terms of like accumulating money, but not feeling like I had like a ton of skills. But for the BCG thing went college. I did the business school because I thought I did this business thing. Maybe I should do that. I was very lucky to get in this this Wharton School of Business. And I didn't really know much about it at the time, but I got there. And it was one of the most wild places that I had ever been to. I don't think I'd ever spat more than like, I remember my budget in like middle school, we'd go to Coles and my budget for like clothes would be like $150 for like the year. And I remember like the first I show up, I meet one of my best friends has got James on. He's like getting rid of old clothes and it gives me this like Tommy Hilfiger shirt and the shirts like 80 bucks. I look it up and I'm like, holy shit. Like I've never even like, I've ever been like an $80 shirt. Like I would wear that shirt. I felt like I was a millionaire, dude. And that's sure I felt like a baller. But so that school was why I had like Spanish class with Nick Biden, like the the trumps were there. When it was all these creases, I'd never seen anything like that. And all those people valued was Wall Street consulting. You had to do those things if you wanted to be like high status. So it's like, okay, I want to like be cool. I want to do the right thing. And so it pushed me into the consulting stuff. I loved it. There's lots of things I didn't like about it. But at job change my life. What about your life change? Why did change your life? I remember I got the internship for that company in like 2018, out in LA. And did you know a lot about these like consulting firms at all? Yeah, like Deloitte and yeah, McKenzie and all and Brandy. Yeah. The experience of an intern is crazy. They with a wine and dine. So I remember my project was out in San Francisco. And they took us to the French laundry for dinner one time, which is like one of the most prolific restaurants up in like Napa Sonoma Valley. It's like $800 a person. And do like my like just to give you a sense like I still felt very poor at the time. And like I was going to like info sessions for like Goldman Sachs. And I didn't even want to work in investment banking because they would serve like free Chipotle. Like like that to like the crazy. I was like, what is this? This is wild. Yeah. And when I got that job, I felt like I remember back then, like I think you would make like a hundred thousand dollars a year and I'm like, head that for me was like, I can never go below that. Like no matter what happens to me, I'm going to be okay. Like I'm not going to have to go back to Ohio, go back to like the way that I grew up. And that for me was like almost like a mental like things are going to be okay moment for me. I still have, I don't have an up yet, but I have my first, I actually have so in the back here, there's like, I have menus framed from like that internship because it was like special. I say that I was like, I'm going to remember to rest my life. And I have the first paycheck I ever got from BCG. I'm going to frame that up and put it somewhere to, yeah. That's cool. So now fast forward to what you're doing now, you own an agency of your own and you're managing millions, probably eight figures at least have had to spend for large media companies. And so tell me kind of more about what you do and the way that you think about money when some of the people building audiences that you're really owning that operations for spend, you know, eight figures for their own growth. Walk me through and thinking on that. So we're the largest agency for like news that are gross. We work with a lot of like cool personal brands or tweets and anger and Jay Shetty and Tyler Denk, all kinds of cool folks like that. Like they, I media companies, all kinds of folks like that. That changed. So a couple of things that are interesting about that. I was at BCG. I was unhappy with the work. I looked at the partners. They were, you know, if you become a partner at BCG, you'll be 32 years old. You'll make about a million dollars that year. And then most senior partners make three to five million dollars. And I looked at their life. And like the lack of time they got to spend with their kids, with their friends, like how much their third is were dedicated to flying around the country, to clients and just grinding. And I looked at that and I go, yeah, I don't want that. And I remember, I remember like, okay, I thought back, I did this exercise. When was I happiest? When was the happiest time in my life? It was not like, I became a million dollars when I was 22. I felt like the highest in my life. It was not any of that stuff. It was when I was like broke, you know, on Minecraft, like with these like guys we were doing these builds with, not sleeping, not eating because I just felt like I was, I was in it. I felt like we could take on the fucking world, dude. Like I just felt like we were unstoppable. And I thought, oh, what was that? Like it was like an agency basically. And I was like, well, what if I did a business kind of like that again? And the, the first thing I remember. So this came out of my job after BCG, I was helping build a big mobile app portfolio. We were buying apps from indie entrepreneurs. And these guys had scaled to one to five million dollars a year. I thought the way you build a business was you go to a 16 Z, you go to Sikor, you raise a bunch of money. That's how you build a business. You had people dropping out of, you know, Baruch making millions of dollars a year. That wasn't even on the radar for me. I was like, this is crazy. You can just like go out and do things. And two of those guys were these guys, Dave and Joel, these two brothers, they had a 12 million dollar mobile app portfolio. They did not know how to code. They were making 12 million dollars. This is before AI, all they should, they make $12 million with an app. They had this like Indian developer team that did everything. They pay that Indian developer team, maybe $400,000 a year. On $12 million of revenue, right? That's your whole cost of attraction. It was crazy. They had a newsletter that did a million dollars a year. They had like an e-commerce here with all this stuff. So I didn't know how to code. And I was like, oh, dude, they have this newsletter. That's pretty interesting. I could write, I could do a newsletter. And so I start this little newsletter and I just copy this company called the Milk Road. Because I was in a crypto at the time, like they're the biggest crypto newsletter. And Dave and Joel knew about Sean Perry and the Milk Road. They got, that's a good newsletter. You should look at that. I was like, oh, I'm gonna do that. And we still got up a little bit and I'm not making a couple grand a month, nothing big. We end up selling it to the Milk Road. And I ended up rolling into like, I hated the mobile app stuff. Like I hated, I'm not good at like talking to engineers and stuff, but I love marketing. Marketing, operating the little Facebook ad account felt like video games. It just felt like a lot of duty and like world-wrestled all over again. And so long story short, I ended up doing growth for the newsletter. It's like really enjoyed the growth part of the app stuff. And I had had the newsletter. We got very lucky that some to big newsletter companies are up and coming, like right when I got started. That was another life-changing thing for me. - That's so cool. What's your relationship with money like right now, then? What's your actual checking account look like on a given day, your personal spending? And how would you compare it now versus the story you told in Ohio where there was shaker weights and stuff at Lano over the house? Like what does that juxtaposition look like from then to now? - So in terms of like net worth and stuff, I have low single digit millions. Like if I could end this year, like you know, four million to five million dollars of net worth are be pretty happy with that. I think that's fairly-- - Is that mostly liquid cash or is it, you know, built up in illiquid assets and investments? - I keep no cash and I don't have a ton of expenses. So my mom, my mom was like a hoarder. I have noticed like I actually really don't like buying things. And I think deep like that, something got progeneral, like ownership. It was like that. I'm gonna, if I only stuff, I'm become a hoarder. So I don't really spend like a tremendous amount of money. I keep about $15,000 in my checking account, my Wells Fargo. - Real quick pause because this is important. If you're running a company, you already understand leverage. You apply it everywhere in your business. Most founders, they treat health like it's a rounding error. Inconsistent training, reactive eating, good weeks, bad weeks, start, stop, repeat. That was me. I didn't need motivation because I had plenty of that. What I needed was structure. I needed systems, better energy, lower body fat, more muscle, something that actually stuck. And not some 12 week sprint that I would abandon when things got busy. And so I hired a coach. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Training built around my schedule, nutrition, that survives, travel, clear targets, clear metrics, daily accountability, no guesswork. And so today's sponsor is brought to you by daily body coach. They are premium online coaching for entrepreneurs and executives who want their body keeping up with their business. It's run by an exited software founder who's already a Hampton member and yes, a bunch of Hampton members already use it. Everything's personalized, their coaches, they're available seven days a week. And the habits they help you build survive board meetings, late nights and back-to-back travel weeks. This isn't about looking good on the beach, it's about being strong and sharp in your 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you're serious about it, go to dailybodycoach.com/hampton. Like dailybodycoach.com/hampton. I keep about $75,000 in my business bank account. Everything else goes back into the business or into my own personal brokerage. I'm a huge saver. In fact, my little like medium-office group of friends, like we talk about this a lot, because like I, not only do I try to save every dollar I make, I take leverage on that. So I've got maybe a million dollars in leverage on my stock portfolio, because it chooses your returns a little bit and over actually 10, 20 years, that's worth millions of dollars. That's, I'm trying to get to 10 million liquid and I think that's like more than enough. And is that 10 million? I guess we'll call it a threshold number. Your number where you're at 10 million, you don't need any more. That's gonna make you happy. And you can effectively not grow any more from there and be good for rest of your life. Is it 10 million? I think so. So I put this into chat to BT and I was having it. I was like, what? Let me figure out what I could spend. Right? What's the most I think I could spend? If I got everything I want in data and all this. And it came up with like, you know, if I had like a personal trainer, if I ate out at restaurants, it gets me many times a week. I don't want like, you know, time of fancy stuff. Just like the doll that together would be something like $15,000 or $16,000 a month. So roughly $180,000 a year in spend. When you gross that up for taxes, I need something like $9.6 or $9.7 million liquid. And then what I would do at that point is I would sell about 2% of my stock each year. And that would have long-term capital gains, taxes, right? So only only 20% and I would have dividends for the other like 1% or a 1% dividend yield, which also has dividends or tax at a much lower rate. That would get me to roughly 180K of spend. And I think that is the point which I would feel like truly like safe. Like, you know, I don't have to like worry about anything. And you mentioned the media mafia a couple of times. And you told me ahead of the episode a little bit about that. Tell the listeners kind of what this group, this community is that you have outside of your business. And then what you're building with that group. And tell me a little bit more also about Hampton. It sounds like you're really involved with a couple different communities. And I'd love to know a little bit more about what those mean to you personally, how they're helping in the way that you grow your business, in the way that you just conduct your life. Just walk us through media mafia and all those things. Media mafia is like a community of like my close friends. There's like seven or eight of us. We all have companies who do millions of dollars a year. We generally use like content, like media to help get clients. I think like Sam is, I can't remember. Sam or Austin or somebody is the one. who started calling us like, "Media Mafia." It was like, "Cool, how this came about "was the group is awesome by the way. "We have an office together, we share, "what's working in each other's businesses. "We have deep conversations. "When fucked up shit happens, "those in the text chat and we're triage "and help people, it's a really close group "of my good friends." One of the reasons I really wanted this, so when I started my company, I flew back to Ohio, it caught all my expenses. I lived in a furnitureless apartment. I just reduced risk, but I felt alone during that. And I have noticed when looking back at my life, every single major accomplishment I've had, I should think I'm pretty dumb, and I don't think I'm that unique or smart. But I think what has been very helpful to me is there's always been a person who I'm around in a very dark moment that swings shots me into something that ends up being really good. So when I was in seventh grade, I told you I had whatever, some really shitty GPA. I weighed 200 pounds. I was significantly overweight, I lost 70 pounds in one years because my buddy Morgan Lye would run up it down our respective basement stairs. This has happened again and again and again for every major part of my life. I recognized to get to the next level of business. I need that again. I need people, I need to be around people. And I got introduced to somebody that my buddy Matt Epstein over the phone while I was in Ohio. I decided I need to fly back to New York. I flew back on January 1st. I need to make friends in real life. Matt and I started co-working together out of a gym in New York City called Chelsea Pierce Fitness. Eventually like five or six of us, we grabbed this kid, Shamist Medon, who's now making like almost 200 K a month, 200 K plus a month. He's 20 years old. We found him like three days after he dropped it, dropped out of college. We like, you've got to do our group and we just built our company together in this gym. That's how it all came together. - That's so cool. It sounds like you're more or less at this precipice in your own company building where you're building something really unique and really successful, but you haven't quite crossed to the other side yet. What's that like? Is that exciting, terrifying, a little bit of both? I mean, walking through how that feels being kind of right at the cusp of that threshold number you mentioned earlier in your building or business to that. - I think it depends on the day, dude. Like all of days are like, I wake up and the morning goes super raw and I'm like, I'm the man, I can do anything. And then like whatever, I have like a bad car, or something like that, I'm like, fuck, I suck. Like this isn't gonna work, da, da, da, da, da. And what's nice is like with this group, like do we all have that? Like everybody's riding the same wave and like you're fucking, you're doing the sign wave of a different times, other people. But you get to see the highs and lows everybody else and it makes it feel like it's not so bad. It normalizes that stuff. And so I would say like largely in the moment, if you caught me on my most stressful days, I feel like I know the business is gonna be successful. I worry about like how much of me that requires. I don't go on a lot of dates right now. I don't go to the gym as much as I should. And I worry about like all my eggs, like all my time this bet on this thing. I worry about not maximizing for someone like this other, or as a mother, maybe 30 in two years, man. Like I want to be dating. And so that is on my mind and I need to get to a place where I'm allocating time to that. At the macro level, I'm extremely happy. I get to like spend time around like people I never even thought I would meet. I get to like hang out with these guys and like that is incredibly motivating. I'll give you an example. It's like good and bad. They came up with this idea in the text chat where once a month everybody puts at the very end of the month. So in 13 days from now, they're revenue and their profit. Every single one of us in the medium off it in the text chat. And then there's a leader board of revenue and profit. When they first started doing that, I was like, dude, this is kind of toxic. I don't think that's like really healthy. But it is so motivating and it's so transparent. And I've just become such a big fan of like community, extreme transparency on like numbers. I feel safe with this group. - That's cool. A little off the cuff, but given you work with audiences in media, I was talking to another founder earlier today. And I think with this shift of AI right now on technology, there's just gonna be so much more community driven IRL events that really do drive the conversation. And to your point, even make the successful more successful or even the non-successful given some of these like catapulting opportunities, like, hey, shake the right person's hand, be in the right place at the right time and your life will get 10 times better. How do you think when you look at some of the businesses you work with and some of the rooms that you're sitting in in the medium off you are, but also just your agency. How are people thinking about audience in real life? Audience building online, newsletters, social media, business growth in general. But how does community and actual IRL community really drive some of this success and outcome right now? - I went to this newsletter comments thing. You and I were both there. You'll remember this. And there's a woman who had the IRL is greater than URL, hat on. - Oh yeah, I remember that. - Fuck yeah, I like that. That's my mantra this year and I'll give you some examples. So I'm trying to rapidly take the people that I'm like meeting online and bring them in person. And the office that we all have together is super conduit such that. So for instance, I don't know if you'll awesome refer now, but the morning brew guy. - He came in a couple weeks ago. We have cool people like that because there's seven of us. Like if one person invites two people to the office a month, that's 14 extremely interesting people every single month that you get to meet in real life. That is like the pinnacle like extremely high leverage. And so like for awesome coming in, he didn't come in through me. He came in through Josh, through Josh Sugs. And he gets there and he has the same reaction that many people do, which is like, dude, this is crazy. Like all of you guys are working here with your teams. This is wild. Maybe individually each of you are mildly interesting, but like together, this is like a bear in a bicycle. This is like pretty, this is pretty unique. - Yeah, yeah. - And so then he was like, we should go do a Shabbat dinner, like you know, us and Sam and like a bunch of people. - Show and tell, but that's you, is this your own tell? - Yeah. - Yeah, exactly. He's like, meet these children, yeah, basically. (laughing) That kind of stuff happens so much. And like I'm just trying to get as much of that as I possibly can, because I love like the interesting people. I get to meet, I moved here, I live in Uden Square right now. I live across Uden Square from my best friend, this guy will want. I did that purposely, because I wanna be able to walk to my best friend when I'm stressed out on Tuesday at 8 p.m. And I don't wanna deal with work for a second. I can text him, I'll be like, hey dude, you wanna play, wanna play Mario Kart? Yeah, hell yeah, dude, let's play Mario Kart. I walk over there, we play Mario Kart. I feel great. I go to sleep, I wake up, you know, I take on this stressful day again, two nights ago. I said, at Hampton Dinner Thing, and so this is, I mentioned the Minecraft thing to you, this is crazy. Talk about RL Shabbat. I'm sitting next to a guy, we start talking, and his business is in Minecraft business. And we start going, going, going. And it turns out that we were doing Minecraft build team stuff at the exact same time. He was on a competing team, dude. And he just tried to handle it like two weeks ago. And I'm like, we're having such a deep conversation, like individual people that we both knew when we were 15 years old, like building random Minecraft shit like on the internet. It's crazy, dude. And that is like such a drug, the meeting of people and feeling like you're part of like something. I'm like, I want a big head of that, like every day. I'm really enjoying that part. Tell me more about Hampton. You mentioned it a couple of times. What's Hampton and what does it do for you in your own life? Hampton's ball, dude. I think I first felt like Hampton, I think pretty early on. I think when it launched like 2022 or something like that, Hampton, oh, you got a little hat here actually. - Nice. - Hampton is a community for founders. And it's in, I mean, you'll know, right? But it's in like a bunch of like in person cities. So it's in New York, it's in like Austin. It's in Miami, a bunch of places. So I knew about it for a long time. I actually had a community already before I joined, which is our group. We all joined together. And I think part of that is we realized like, wow, look at it in just the matter of months. Like we have not known each other for super long time, like this group and I, like just by like bonding together and like hanging out and talking about like, shit, that doesn't go well, where our parents are what motivates people to like eat glass and like start a company. Like that is so useful for tactics, right? But one, like learning things I can bring into my business. Number two is mindset. Like I realize it's normal for things to be really hard. That helps me keep going and like realizing like most people who are founders are like usually motivated by some like fucked up thing that happened in them when they were like 10 or 15 years old. Like that is deeply motivating in a way. Like, oh, it's okay. Like this is normal. That has helped us tremendously. And I just see Hampton is like an extension of what we've built in the media mafia. But like I don't know how many people in New York, like 400 or something. So there's like seven of us. I'm like, okay, I can like 40 X. You know, this like feeling I'm getting from like my little group. Like, sign me up, you know, like I'll do that. Yeah, that's cool. Where are your, I guess your folks at now. You mentioned your mom growing up. Is she still in the picture or do you guys still stand touch? We don't. She passed away when I was 22 February 9th of 2020. Oh, I'm sorry. You know what I'm saying? Actually, I found about this a lot. I think one of the reasons why I'm, why I'm drawn to community is because of my relationship with my parents. I'm not very close with my parents. I wasn't close to my mom. I mean, terrible when she, the parents, you know, it's your mom at the end of the day. I remember I was working at BCG. And I wasn't like super happy. The first like net worth milestone I had ever had was a million dollars. I thought like that was the whole goal was to like be a millionaire. I had become a millionaire within, within a couple of weeks, literally weeks of her passing. I remember, she passed away from stage three of the cancer. I remember getting a call from my cousin and I was on a ski trip for BCG. And like I couldn't get on a plane. I couldn't tell anybody because it's like we were driving home that morning. So I didn't want to like tell the team that I was with. So I just had to, I learned at 6 a.m. I like crying the bathroom for an hour and then I just had to like sit with it. And I remember thinking all the stuff that people told me was going to make me happy. Totally. No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. I'm so happy. I was like, what? I'm so happy. I was like, what? I'm so happy. So I was like, what? What? What? I was like, what? What? What? I was like, what? What? I was like, what? people and now my mom had passed, so I felt like it's just me. Like that's it. I think that that has caused me dramatically recalibrate what is important to me. I quit my job. I went all in and I'm like, start up shit. I was like, if I, you know, man, when I came from this Ohio thing, like if I'm gonna do it, like, and like make it, like I need to fucking do it. Like I need to get after it. Like I need to take risk and finding people. I crave friendship. I get lonely really, and I'm like, a little going retriever. And I think a lot of that is because like the people who have like helped me in my life, it's always come from like a friend. There's always been like how my life is like progressed, like finding somebody who's like been meaningful to me and amazing things have happened after that. - Do you think there's a way to be successful without the community that it sounds like you've built around your own life? - It depends on what you think successful is to. Like I think I know I'm sure there are many people who are worth, I know some of them. There are people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars who are deeply and happy. I remember when I was in college, one of my good friends, her father was the right hand person to one of the biggest investment banks in the country, you know, Hachat, 40, $50 million, nice house, horse, all this stuff. Great, awesome. They were divorced. He did not have a close relationship with his daughter. He was working 60, 70 hours a week. That's not successful in my view. And so I think that success generally comes from two things, feeling successful. It's like, am I of service? Am I of like value to people? And that doesn't have to be like, is this you should do? In my opinion, like dude, you're a dad, right? Your father? - Yeah. - Dude, being like a fucking, - Your dad's father is like being of service to people. It's like putting your mark on the world and like, like doing something. And I think the other thing is being around people who share your values. I think that like my dad is an immigrant from Bolivia has very little money whatsoever. He and his wife and his kids, they're the happiest fucking people on the planet. It's like an open door policy in that house. I remember going, you know, when I was a kid a couple of times and like, did they're dancing until 12 a.m. on like a Friday, there's like grandma's and aunts and people coming out in and out on like the weekend, like they live in a neighborhood that has a lot of other Hispanic people. Like they don't have any money. And they're so happy. Why? To me, like that's a huge irony. And then you get really wealthy. What do you tend to do, right? You get a big house, you get a big yard, you put space between yourself and other people. You create unhappiness for yourself. I think like community and doing something that you feel isn't meaningful. I think that is successful. - I think that's a great paradigm to live with. I mean, it's success does look different to a lot of people. But I do think the whole idea of like the grass is greener when I get 10 million or 100 million or a billion, like well, it depends. If you build your life deliberately around what actually makes you happy, then yeah, more money can make you more happy. But I think a lot of people think money is the happiness and it's an interesting kind of paradigm that we use spectrum rather than we explore in this podcast. - Well, Nathan, I don't have any other thoughts for you right now, but I think this has been a really good episode. When you think of like what's next for you, is this agency you have kind of the way that you build that 10 million dollar business or do you have any fun business ideas in mind that you have a launch jet? - Ooh, that's a good question. I have a couple things. So I'm a big fan of like focus. So this agency, I think for the next like five plus years, number one thing, I'm gonna bring my time into it. I think we can get really big. I feel really good about our team. Stuff that's like really fun for me right now. Community stuff like like in person in New York City. So this is cool. I mean, I wanna hear how you feel in like three months 'cause you're just, well, I guess you had a podcast, right? But you're now doing this podcast thing. I have found, and if you know that we do a podcast with your other company that you work for, I get so much happiness from that. Like I sit down with somebody for an hour and a half. We do whatever 26 of them per year. I have like a two hour long conversation with somebody and like cover like their business and their finance and shit. But the stuff that is cool for me is like, I always do the last 20 or 30 minutes is like DMCs, like deep meaningful conversations about like their parents and like we'll get like deep with stuff. That like I would say brings me equal happiness to the agency. The podcast makes no money. (laughs) I went to the other. And so like dude, I wanna do this for like five years and like just like more of that. I just really enjoy chasing these like conversations with people. I think it makes me feel closer to people. I think it makes me feel like what I'm doing matters and it teaches me about myself. That stuff I like a lot. I think whatever I do next will be less about like bootstrap and save every dollar and you crush your competitors and more like I wanna hang out man, you know? And I wanna mix somebody as press the martini or a daiquiri or a jungle bird. Let's just hang, yeah, I like that's it off. - I think the big irony about how much AI is changing the landscape right now is that the future will look a lot more human than the past. And I think people will start to break out of this glued to a screen paradigm where they'll start to remember or realize for the first time the meaning and value they find with shaking someone's hand in real life or sharing a coffee at a restaurant. I mean, getting out into the sun and touching grass. I think we've been bottled up behind screens for you know, some of us decades, many of us for at least five to 10 years in our careers. And I think as AI starts to really automate a lot of work and you know Elon Musk would even say like a future work optional state of you know, middle and upper class people will start to really go back to friendships, IRL community, human stuff. - 100% agree dude. It's like I feel like trends like like ricochet. So like when I was in high school college like tight jeans were like cool. And now you want to be like, you know, you want to have these baggy kind of belt bottom things. - Super bag. - You want to flow with it. And I'm sure tight jeans will be cool again in like 10 years dude. IRL is coming back. - IRL is coming back. Well Nathan, this has been so good. I appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for joining MoneyWise and we'll talk soon. - How are you up there? Nice having me. [MUSIC]