Noah Kagan -- Words of Wisdom

The more I read Okdork.com and Noah Kagan's posts, the more I wonder "damn! This guy doesn't stop!"

There are so many quality in depth posts at OKdork and Noah's are some of the best.

Like my Japanese Judo Sensei - he was an unfathomable deep well of experience. Everytime you got better, he beat you, just that little bit better than you got!

If you are ever in Orange County, learn Judo from the best Judoka - Nori Bunasawa.

If you are starting a business, learn from the best business Sensei - Noah Kagan:

SHAMELESSLY SCRAPED FROM OKDORK.COM AND MY NEW ROLE MODEL NOAH KAGAN:

Why I Quit Mint.com (and lost out on $1.7 million)

JUNE 25, 2013 - GET FREE UPDATES OF NEW POSTS HERE

My friend Jonathan Abrams (a great dude who founded Friendster) and I have a running joke that if a company wanted to be super successful they should hire me…and then fire me.

First it happened with Facebook (read about the day I was let go).

Then it happened with Mint.

Mint is a free personal finance tool and was bought by Intuit for $170 million less than two years after it started. At the time I owned 1% of the company.

While I was at Mint I was #4 and in charge of all things marketing. Fact: Before we launched we had more traffic than all of our competitors combined. Here’s how we were able to grow a huge waiting list before we launched. Now it is true that Mint was and is a great product.

Marketing is easy when you have a great product. (click to tweet)

Stop. Read the sentence above again.

So why would I quit and leave money on the table? Here are four things I learned by quitting Mint:

1. Know what you want.

I wanted to run my own company and specifically wanted to be location independent. It was a dream of mine to work remotely on the beaches of Thailand. If I stayed at Mint, I would never be able to do that. By quitting, I was able to work on my Facebook games company (another story for another day) from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Chilling in Buenos Aires

2. Don’t take risks.

I am not a risk taking entrepreneur. While at Mint I started building Facebook apps at night. Until I could cover my minimum costs ($3,500/month) I had no intention of quitting. This meant many late nights, but it goes back to #1. It was very clear to me that I was going to do my own thing and it’s what I wanted.

3. Do the math in your biz.

I figured the company would sell for around $200 million. In a startup you get stock that takes four years to actually own all of it. If we sold for $200 million and I stayed around, I would make $2,000,000. Sounds sweet right? When you consider time and taxes it’s not so sweet.

Here’s what I mean by “do the math in your biz”:

• $200,000,000 * 1% = $2,000,000. (My ownership at 1%)
• $2,000,000 * 50% = 1,000,000. (The Government takes half for taxes)
• $1,000,000 / 4 = $250,000. (The total spread out over 4 years)

Plus I would have had to stay at the new parent company, Intuit. So I figured that within a four year window I could come close to making $1,000,000. After four years I didn’t quite make a million but with Gambit (the Facebook app company) I ended up making a few hundred thousand dollars (AFTER taxes).

4. Keep Learning.

When I started at Mint I learned a shit ton. The founder was extremely liberal in allowing me to do what I wanted to do. We had town halls with our users, we did user experience testing (completely new to me at the time), a content network, spending on advertising, and more. It was all new. But towards the end it was less and less new things. You could say I became too comfortable and stopped growing. And then they hired someone above me. In hindsight, it was my ego that said I had nothing more to learn and I’d be a gopher for the new person. But I probably could have learned something from her too.

I want to hear from you about a time you missed out on making it big and what you learned. Leave a comment below.

Living-n-learning,
Noah