AI Instead of a Degree: How to Build a $1B Company

You were the youngest person to become a billionaire at 20, right? Realized we thought money was free and I could make two phone calls and raise tens of millions of dollars. And I was like, how am I going to get out of school? Like, the only way I can get out of school is if I make a lot of money. Have you had any moments of regret? Like, oh, I should have just finished high school. No. College has kind of started to lose its credibility. University system now teaches you what to think and not how

to think. Your product is helping financial managers manage capital with AI. So, when a client calls and says, "Hey, Trump just announced these tariffs. How is this going to impact my portfolio?" We can just ask Vise and Vise is going to tell them what's your northstar. Now functionally brings down the wealth access gap. Understand what your superpower is. Samir is the youngest founder of a billiondoll company. He founded it at the age of 16 and it got a billion dollar valuation when he was 20. He grew up in a traditional Indian immigrant family in Cleveland.

Like many immigrant families, they valued stability and had a classic vision for Samir's future. Finish school, go to college, get a secure job. but instead he dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to start a company vice. Now it's a billion-dollar business and he achieved all this without a college degree. How is that even possible and how can we learn from Samir's journey? Let's dive deep into interview. But before we start, let me ask you this question. I want to understand you guys better. I want to understand your problems and what are

you trying to achieve. Let me know in the comments down below where you watching from and what is your biggest goal right now? What are you working on? what are you trying to achieve and how I can help you with these podcasts. I'm looking forward to reading your comments and I'm excited about building this entrepreneurial community here on Silicon Valley Girl. Samir, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. How old are you now? I'm 24. 24. I'm getting old. My knees start to hurt. Okay,

I'm not going to comment on my age, but you became uh a billion dollar founder at the age of 20. So you were the youngest person to become a billionaire at 20, right? I wasn't a billionaire but the the billion dollar. Yeah, you can you know media. Got it. Can you talk walk me through your childhood because your parents are immigrants from India and I feel like immigrant upbringing really contributes to successive people. Uh how were you growing up? Were like your parents pushing you towards traditional education? Was money an issue? Yeah. So my parents

came from India to the US. Luckily when they're a little bit old like little little younger um versus my co-founder's parents they came like I call them like they it's like they got here last year they were like fresh off the boat but they had a lot of kind of traditional you know Indian values so going to school doing a doctorate becoming a doctor um or an engineer as much as it is a stereotype it is true um they really pushed me growing up to be a doctor um and I just didn't want to do

that like I just I always loved building things so very early on, you know, like the first thing that ever got me was a Lego set. Um, and I started playing around with Legos. And I'm like, I like to build things. So, how can I express my need to build things and, you know, I eventually discovered entrepreneurship, but that was like such an unchartered path and territory uh for anyone, you know, in the Indian community that they kind of rejected it. And it's interesting because there was such like this kind of aversion to risk. So

the idea of you know spending money frivolously taking risks skipping college was a completely foreign concept to them and for such a long time they tried to push me in the direction of you need to take the traditional path you need to go down but like I rebelled on it from an extremely early age. Um and for a while I was just kind of confused until I figured out the kind of entrepreneurial path and I just thought from like kind of a first principles perspective I'm like okay what would college help me with? what would

the traditional path help me with if I want to start a big business and become really successful in that you know facet and I couldn't really think of anything other than network. So I tried to understand if I can build a network on my own outside of going to university before you would even go to a university and I could do that by cold emails um then I would uh you know eliminate any need to have to go to a university. So when did you understand this that you're not gonna college? Um, I had started

to say it at the end of like seventh grade, seventh, eighth grade. So, I was like already kind of thinking about it, you know, sixth grade, but at the end of seventh, eighth grade, I kind of knew I wasn't going to I wasn't going to do it. And I remember like the the the story was there was this um, you know, honors society. And like at the end of uh, school um, you know, they give all the kids awards for like who got first honors and second honors. And I remember I didn't get any of

the awards because I decided I was no longer going to spend my time and effort on school and my grades took a huge hit and my parents were so depressed. They're like, you know, we had a dinner after the graduation ceremony and everyone had a pouty face. I'm like, why are you guys so upset? And they're like, you didn't get first and second honors. How are you going to get into a good college? And my answer was like, I don't really care. I'm not going to go to college. And it just started this huge fight.

And you know, I eventually kind of recovered from it, but it was, you know, a a really kind of challenging thing to, you know, kind of change the conventional means. From college dropout to CEO of a billion-doll company at just 20 years old, Samir's journey proves that with the right skills, everything is possible. But what if I told you that you could access those same career changing skills completely free? If you're ready to build your own success story, check out Skill Up by SimplyLearn, an online learning platform offering free courses with certificates in today's most

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at 14. Was that some kind of a proof for your parents that you are actually making it without formal education because you started making money? No, it wasn't. Okay. Um I wish it was. It was the thing that was actually a proof point was we and this was almost right around we were funded at our seed round. Um I got Lightseed Ventures has a fellowship program and they invited us to be a part of their fellowship program. And the only reason why we were able to get into their fellowship program is because my co-founder was

going to UPEN. And a fellowship sounded really, you know, exciting and really kind of formal and like a certification almost. So they thought, "Oh, wow. This kid is getting a fellowship. That sounds legitimate." Um, and they didn't really they weren't all too excited when I raised my seed round. But it was probably five or six years into our journey that we've like finally got some accreditation where they were like excited about it. Um but for a long time until it was like so such a foregone conclusion that the business was going to work they weren't

too excited about me taking an atypical path. Yeah. What do you think? Why do you think your co-founder became your co-founder? What are the traits that you were looking for? You just connected with him on a personal level. So we became friends and we you know to the opposite end of the spectrum. So my parents had, you know, said you couldn't really do traditional summer camp as a kid. And they sent me sixth grade onwards to Northwestern to do college classes. So it was math and physics and all kinds of, you know, interesting college classes

that, you know, gifted youth, you know, got to do. And I started doing it like, you know, fifth, sixth grade onwards every year, every summer. And it was three weeks. I'd live in Chicago. And like the value to that program was I like learned how to live independently and, you know, be in my own dorm and, you know, do laundry and things that I wasn't excited to do. But um I I learned how to be independent to some extent. And the summer of 8th grade um my co-founder run was in the dorm across the hall

from me and we started to become friends and hang out. And I was like, you know what? How am I going to get out of school? Like the only way I can get out of school is if I make a lot of money. I'm like, how do I think I'm going to make a lot of money? Well, I think I could start building, you know, mobile apps for small businesses. So iOS came out with this programming language called Swift. It was easier than Objective C, their previous language. I thought I could learn and teach myself

Swift. and runick said he already knew how to program the you know the real truth was he wasn't an amazing programmer but you know he said after the course ends we can we can build apps together so it was more out of necessity than anything else but the interesting thing was he was on a path he was much more traditional than I was so you know he was doing math classes on Saturday and you know school was the most important thing in his life and I kind of like took him to the dark side and

said no like capitalism building a business is the actual path you should follow and over time I slowly kind of cracked away at him uh to the point where I was almost able to to sculpt him into the person I needed him to be in order to uh to build the business we were looking to build. So since then, have you had any moments of regret like, oh, I should have just finished high school, should have done college? No, not not a single thing. I don't I look back and I don't regret a single thing.

Um I think that you know maybe I could have moved I I could have focused a little bit more. So like I think the challenge is is that most businesses take a long long time to build. So we've been building our business for eight and a half years and I think we could have sped up time a little bit. So part of the immigrant mindset is to like conserve capital. So for a long time we were bootstrapping the company with all the money we made building apps and then we started consulting with big financial institutions

and you know we charge $500 to $1,000 an hour which is a lot but you know bootstrapping a company is also pretty expensive. So for a long time we weren't willing to spend money. You know, we weren't really willing to raise money or no one would give us money for a while. So we were always in this constant capital conservation mode. Um and the challenge with that was is sometimes money can be used if you use it the right way to speed up time. So I think that if we had, you know, spent a little

bit more money pushing growth earlier on or running more experiments or things like that, I probably would be further even further along, you know, than I where I am today. But the important thing is you do make mistakes and you have to make mistakes in order to kind of learn and grow. So it was uh it was one of those you know immigrant mindset that I had to kind of unlearn. I never I never got rid of it. How did you unlearn it? Well so I unlearned it a little bit too much because after we

raised a lot so we had backto-back financing rounds raised well over hund00 million. You know the investors had kind of said to us your job is to grow really fast and the way you grow really fast is by spending a lot of money and hiring people and scaling. And you know the reality is like hiring more people doesn't often times make you grow faster especially now. Especially now, right? Especially in the world of AI. And we actually spent a little too much and we just realized we thought money was free because people were willing to

give us money left, right, and center. And I could make two phone calls and raise tens of millions of dollars. So, you know, that kind of gave us this weird relationship with money because for so long money was such a scarce asset. You know, for six plus years we had basically no money personally. The business had no money. It was so hard to get money that you know any money we had we were trying to conserve as much as we could and then you know overnight we get hundreds of millions of dollars and we start

to think wow it was money free our equity is more valuable than our money um we should just spend money at you know whatever it costs and like that was the wrong way to think too so like the reality was it was somewhere in the middle and we had to course correct but you know some things that we've kind of learned along the way is that you know we had the right idea in the beginning and we unlearned some of those lessons and we had to relearn some of those lessons And you know it's it's

it's kind of been an interesting journey from that standpoint. Do you have a rule now of what a perfect spending for a startup looks like? There's no perfect spending, but the simple way to think about it is you should find the people like find the few people. It's usually like people are why you're going to be successful like your team is why you're going to win. So like work extra extra hard in the interview process in the you know the diligence process and finding in the sourcing process to find the few right people that you

think are going to make a world of difference and understand how to compensate them how to align your incentives with their incentives so they're going to work just as hard and be just as excited as you are. Um and I think it's worth making that investment whether it's cash or with equity and then understand what are the few areas it's important to spend money on. So like if you for example are an inerson company and you work in the office, having a nice office is really important because you're going to spend a lot of time

there. So like that's something that's really important and you should spend a lot of money on or if you know sales is a key aspect of your business and driving is probably something you should invest in. But you can't invest in every single area otherwise you're going to run out of money. You have to understand what are the few things that are really important to you and then how can you invest in those areas and then how can you kind of consistently track and understand what are your metrics for success. So think about almost everything

as an experiment. If you're running an experiment like you're running an ad campaign, you know, rather than spending a ton of money on a ton of different ad campaigns, run one small ad campaign and if it works, then put a little bit more money and a little bit more money. Think about iteratively as opposed to I'm going to take this huge pile of money and just throw it at something. Can you define a good hire? Because you said identifying that person. Is that through experience? Like you start working with them or you know exactly what

you're looking for when you start to look for a person. So it's often times I have two frameworks on this. The first is there's this idea of skills, knowledge and quality. So SKQs most people overemphasize and overly focus on skills and knowledge and they forget about those things in in in in replace for skills and quality or skills and knowledge. So I think really understanding someone's qualities. Who are they as a person? What does the 360 person look like? What are the struggles they've had to overcome in life? And how did they go through those

struggles? Because skills and knowledge if you have the right qualities can be learned. So I think that's one really important thing is like who is the person? What are their qualities? Okay. I think the other aspect is is is kind of this idea that how like how how do you think that person is going to fit in your culture? Do you get along with them? Do they buy into the overall organization? Do you feel like you have a, you know, close kind of personal connection with them? You're going to be really really invested. You're going

to be really involved with that person. So it's really important you get along and you you like each other. Um, and I would say the last is um, one of our investors, our first investors is this guy named Keith Boy and he's this idea of barrels and ammunition. So there are barrels and barrels are the types of people that can take a project from start to finish. You can give them highle directives and they can just kind of run with it, right? And you need these barrels in your company in order to kind of move

the company forward. You need people that you can trust and say, "I'm going to let you handle marketing and you're going to be able to kind of figure it out with some high level direction or I'm going to, you know, give you a vague problem. You know, you need to work on driving adoption of our existing customers and they can figure it out." Versus ammunition are people that, you know, they can if you give them a highly scoped, highly directed thing and do this specific thing, um, they'll be able to do it. But if you

give them some vague, you know, complex problem, they're not going to just be able to figure it out on your own. And not everyone is going to be a barrel. You're going to only have 10 to 20% of your companies be these barrels, but you need to find those barrels. I love it. Has your hiring changed with AI? Are you still actively hiring or you think it's going to just slow down? So, we are we are hiring, but we're hiring. I'm trying to find as many of those barrels as I can, but people that I

can give kind of high level, you know, big directives and then they can understand here's where we're going to use AI agents, here's where we're going to, you know, kind of parallel process certain things. here's how we're going to create everything scalability in every single thing we do. And I think that we can be a company that does hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars in revenue with a hundred people. And I think it's funny because we had 150 people, 160 people at one point in time and now we are closer to 40. And

we are doing 10 times better from a metric standpoint with 40 people than what we were doing with 160 people. What changed? AI. I think AI changed. I think scalability changed. Like the the idea that how do we think about automating everything we do? And I think sometimes with AI, sometimes with this kind of idea that we are going to manage 10 times the amount of accounts next year and 20 times the account the years years after. How do we figure out how do we design everything from scratch from from a from a scalability standpoint?

So a good example is like client service. So, we had a sixperson, seven-person client service team that was automatic, like they were manually sending out docu signs and, you know, doing account openings and processing and all of these different things. And now we have a threeperson team or twoerson team, but handles probably 20 to 30 times the amount of accounts we had back then. And they've figured out how to automate everything. And the first thing they did was, I'm actually not going to focus on client service. I'm going to focus on all the jobs to

be done with client service. How do I eliminate myself? Exactly. And then they're overseeing all the systems so they can be highly highly scalable. So, and those people that you hire to manage customer service are really the the barrels, right? They So, when you interviewed them, you asked them questions like, "Can you guide me because I'm trying to hire barrels for my company?" What are the questions that you ask those people to determine whether they're a barrel? Well, one, you want to understand first, you want to understand who they are as people. Understand their lives.

Understand like what what have they gone through. And some people have gone through struggles, some people haven't. Um and you you want to understand what is something that you had to take from maybe in a previous career what is something that you had to take from start to finish and you had deep ownership over and then they'll tell you a story like I built this product I was we had this problem here's what we were solving for and the thing that I'm looking for is can they operate at all levels can they operate from the

top down but they can can they understand from the bottom up which is you know the best CEOs in the world even the CEOs of you know trillion dollar companies understand every single part of their kind of call it assembly line of their production of you know the customer problem the nuances of the customer problem the way their product works people with a deep understanding of what they did typically have the agency and the ownership to be able to have a deep understanding of what you do okay I'm going to call my COO after this

interview and I'm going to change process I love it um can you walk me through your product so your product is helping financial managers manage uh capital with AI Okay. Uh I want to start with like the the basics of it. Do you think financial managers is still going to exist? Yeah. So when you zoom out, the financial advisory wealth management space is one of the biggest markets in the world. These advisers manage over $ 160 trillion globally, $80 trillion in the US. Most affluent and mass affluent wealth is managed through a human. And the

reason why we had a unique perspective is because I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Cleveland. My co-founder grew up in Detroit. We had a we had, you know, classic midwestern values, but we had um a family financial adviser. It was like a person my dad grew up with. It was like my dad's best friend. And every major life decision went through these adviserss. These adviserss were oftentimes coaches, marriage counselors. They do so much more than just managing the money. And the challenge is, you know, this idea of personalization is kind of

taking over our lives in every single thing we do. and how we shop with Amazon, how we consume content with Netflix, personalized movie recommendations, personalized shopping recommendations, personalized news. Um, but investors for the first time want personalization in their portfolios. And the challenge is advisers can't deliver deep personalization in their portfolios because it's so time inensive um to understand all their clients needs, understand what companies fit into those client needs, how to manage the asset allocation towards those client needs, and to actually scale their firm and manage a lot of clients. So our belief was

rather than advisers having to make a trade-off between managing a handful of high net worth clients versus you know uh generic one-sizefits-all solution for a lot of mass clients, they should be able to deliver deeply personalized portfolios that help their clients hit their financial goals and manage a lot of clients. And the way they'll do that is through the merger of investment management and artificial intelligence through one platform that can deeply understand their clients financial needs, goals and objectives, their investment strategies and can do the execution, do the management all in an entirely automated way.

So I think the the reality is that true AI is going to empower these human adviserss because the relationship is going to be too hard to replace and advisers need to be able to deliver a more efficient experience and manage more relationships but they have to leverage technology in a way to do that. So did you get this idea from talking to your father's friend or you just looked at the industry and you were like oh this is actually didn't I was really fascinated by AI. So the the long story short, eight years ago, right?

Eight years ago. So the long story short was we had been building apps for these small businesses and we had thought every small business should have an app. What if we use AI to automate app development? What if we put all of this recycled code we've been developing into a neural network and you could type in your app idea and it would generate you an app. So we were a little ahead of our time in that sense. But because we were ahead of our time, we didn't quite understand how the technology worked. It was too

difficult of a technical problem. The reality is maybe we should have stuck at it and we could have built an open AI like business but um you know it uh you you miss out sometimes but one of our adviserss at the time and said you guys know so much about AI and machine learning you should start consulting with these investment institutions on these expert consulting networks. So we started consulting on you know Gerson Lurman Group and Coleman Research and these expert consulting networks would connect us with big investment banks Mass Mutual RBC Royal Deutsche Asset

Management and we would teach them about how AI worked and one of those projects was with Mass Mutual and they said we have all these financial advisors they're really good at relationship management. They're not the best people at managing money. Is there a way we can use AI to kind of augment these adviserss? is there a way we could use them so they can kind of tap lean into our investment resources and AI would kind of recommend advice and advisers could deliver that advice. We thought wow this is like a super interesting idea and what

if and the the market sounds really interesting. What if we build AI and sell it to you know big banks and insurance companies and and big wealth management institutions. So Jamie Diamond was speaking at Detroit Startup Week and I told my co-founder you need to rush him on stage and pitch him vise. Um, and it was actually called FSAI, Financial Services Artificial Intelligence at the time, and see what he thinks. And he did. And Jamie said, "Look, JP Morgan has a lot of data scientists. Uh, I don't think this is too interesting to us, but

a lot of our competitors have advisers leaving and going independent. You guys can power the independent adviserss." Um, and we, you know, every day after school, I would cold call independent adviserss. How do they think, how do they make decisions? And trillions of dollars a year was leaving big institutions and going independent. And people were starting these like small financial advisory firms and we thought wow we could power these firms and that's how we uh we first started. And how many nos have you heard when you called them? Oh I mean we got an unbelievable

amount of nos but we get more nos from people we tried to recruit and people who tried to you know pitch to give us capital. A lot of what kept us going was kind of talking to these adviserss when we could get them on the phone and you know them talking about how interesting this idea could be and how transformative it could be for them and their lives and understanding the problem and seeing that this is where the industry is going. So the one area we didn't get nose on was kind of customer insights and

that's why we kept going like that was the fuel every time I talked to a customer that was the fuel that kind of refilled the tank. So I kept going and kept driving forward because you know I got a ton more nos in a ton of different areas but the one area that I found success was you know learning talking to my customers and that was super important to kind of continue moving forward that that's amazing. Can you um also talk about the AI itself? Can anyone use it? Maybe like tips for portfolio building in

this age or can you just upload your portfolio and AI will tell you what to do? Yeah. So you can functionally upload your portfolio and understand where your financial goals. We're going to understand who you are as a 360 person and what portfolio should be kind of and what asset allocation should fit for you and then understand how to customize that portfolio and the individual nuances. Is it going to do the rebalancing? Yeah, it'll do the rebalancing tax management. So every single day we'll look for tax harvesting opportunities. So when a client calls and says,

"Hey, Trump just, you know, announced these tariffs. I'm freaking out. How's this going to impact my portfolio?" the adviser instead of having to understand what the client was in and how Trump tariffs were working and you know how their portfolio might have been impacted, they can just ask Vise and Vise is going to tell them here's how the Trump tariffs impacted your portfolios. It really hit shipping companies and those shipping companies are only 3% of your portfolio and we actually rebalanced out of shipping companies and your, you know, tech positions are not hit all too

hard and you're still on your portfolio goals and you're going to be okay. And the adviser can ask Vise and we'll tell them very quickly so they can you know build more trust with the client and tactically answer those questions and handle in real time and be proactive in areas they couldn't have scale been proactive before. It's interesting you're talking about this like a financial advisor understand the market. How did you learn the craft of investing without a college degree without going to high school? So I spent a lot of time reading. Like I spent

an unbelievable amount of time reading. I spent an unbelievable amount of time watching YouTube videos. I was lucky that I grew up watching YouTube videos. Some some of yours actually. And just trying to understand how do how does the markets work? How do how do advisers think like how do you like just all these like you know interesting kind of historical you know backdrops to the industry? How has the industry evolved? But the most important way I learned and the like way I learn best is just talking to people. Like learning from all these different

advisors, watching them work. Like the most interesting way to actually learn from someone isn't just to talk to them, but it's to shadow them. It's to observe them. So, I actually do this with with new hires, which is instead of just trying to teach them things, I just have them follow me around and shadow me for a month or shadow my co-founder for a month or shadow other people on the team because you will learn by observation and you'll pick up new insights or takeaways and you know things that you know someone might not have

thought to teach you but you'll see it and you'll realize it anyways. So I think books, YouTube and talking to people is have way any backlash from the industry like hey you don't have a formal degree why are you building this for financial advisors? So, for a while, um, I was really scared about the, you know, my age. Like, I would basically lie to people or not tell them my age. Yeah. You weren't even like I would video off like I would, I would, I would try and avoid the conversation as much as possible. I

think until I turned 20 and we' raised a lot of capital, um, I I wasn't I didn't lean into it all too much. Once it was like 20ish, I started to talk about it more and then people actually started to like like us more because we were young. Um but for a long time I was very scared but I think the big breakthrough was it doesn't your credentials your status um as a byproduct of credentials doesn't really matter what matters is how how in how much detail or how much depth how much understanding can you

talk about a industry a set of problems and perspective solutions to that and if you do you will build a lot of credibility as a result so I just tried to understand how can I know more than anyone else in this industry and have a differentiated perspective and I will build credibility as a result and that worked. Um people were like okay this kid is smart and he seems to know something we'll give him a shot and then all of these learnings all these wins start to compound on on each other. The other aspect was

credibility by association. How can I surround myself with people that are really smart with people that have credentials that I can kind of rely on and people will say okay those people are associated with him so he must be you know he must be good he must be okay. And surrounding you mean your clients your investors? investors, clients, and most most importantly my team. So, you know, we might run the company and we might be the youngest people at the company, but our co-CIOs have been both working, you know, in the investing world for 20

plus years running. We have a lot of, you know, I call them high Y intercept people or high experienced people that have pedigree and they have, you know, experience and status in the industry and they can kind of lend that credibility to the overall organization. Mhm. And when you were building this in the course of eight years, have you ever had thoughts of like this is not the right industry for me. There are so many things happening like you mentioned building an open AI. Uh another another all the time I've wanted to quit 15 times

at least like I've just like been this is so hard. I had a bad client call some issue with an investor like a bunch of my team members quit. the platform broke and like I would just come home super duper depressed and like put my head in a pillow and just like beg wish I was quitting. But the reality is like every business is really hard. You'll feel that way about any business. It's just it's hard until it's not and you just got to keep pushing forward. And I think when was the last time you

felt it? Maybe like a week ago. I probably usually goes away pretty fast now. But I think the the challenge is it takes a long time to build these businesses. And if you really want to be disruptive like everyone, you know, if it was kind of easy, everyone would do it. And like the your your true alpha is in your resilience, your ability to stick it out and continue learning and iterating and growing where no one else will. Um, and I think that very few people are willing to do it. Very few people think on

long time horizons. So I think the most important thing is you have a vision for yourself. You have a vision for your business and where you're going to fit into it and where your company will fit into the vision for your industry and you're willing to be stubborn about that vision. And for the most you can change it on the margins, but if you have a vision, you will fall through into that vision. If you don't and you're just trying to make money or you're just trying to kind of get rich quick or you know

build something that attracts attention very quickly, you're not going to stick it out when times are tough um because you don't have a vision. So what's the phrase that you tell keep telling yourself when you feel like quitting? I I come back to two things. I come back to one like I believe it's kind of my destiny to be to be successful in this. Like I've it's very rare you're able to build a business when you're you know in your teens and kind of stick it out through today with the same fundamental vision, the same

fundamental business. And I think it's this idea of how the world's going to look different with VIS in it. I believe the world's largest asset manager should be a technology platform that can deliver true personalized portfolios across every asset class all in one place that functionally democratizes wealth. It functionally brings down the wealth access gap. It allows, you know, the same advice that the ultra wealthy had to go to everyone and set them all up for an advantage to hit their financial goals and to win. And I think that, you know, that vision, that mission

really inspires me and it always has inspired me. And as long as I remember what's the big picture, what's the thing, you know, what's the destination I'm heading towards, you know, the bumps along the journey will will all get smoothed out. Can you give advice to someone who's 17, 18, deciding whether they should go to college or not and they do realize that college gives you network, but also this credibility? I think that college has kind of started to lose its credibility. Um, and I think the, you know, university system now teaches you what to

think and not how to think. And a lot of students that are coming out of college now are realizing they wasted so much time there and they didn't really learn as much as they could. So I I would say that the best way to grow yourself is to find someone who you think is really impressive and you want to be in five years and 10 years. Shadow that person, learn from that person. And the way that person will take you seriously is you do the work. You learn about their business or you learn about their

their job. You, you know, get introduction, get a warm introduction to that person or send a really thoughtful cold email and like really show that person, I'm going to go above and beyond for you and you hustle and like they will take you seriously and then you will get credibility as a result and then those things will compound over and over again. And when you're ready to do their your own thing, you'll, you know, start to build your network. You'll start to have a little bit of experience and that'll help you carry forward. And then

I would really say that it's important to like think long term of like who do you want to be over, you know, a 10- year period, over a 15 year period. Like I had an idea when I was 15, I had written down a set of things what I wanted in my life to look like when I was 20. And I had accomplished every single thing on that list other than getting a dog. Um that was on my list and I do not have a dog. Um and I have another version of that for when

I'm 30. And you know, sometimes you're going to miss it on the margins. But when you have this kind of vision, this thing you're working towards, this north star that that that'll guide you to some extent, you will you will fall into that. But you really have to be introspective and understand what are the things that I care about? What are the things that I'm good at? And where's the intersection? And am I willing to like make this my life's work? What's your north star now? What's my on your list on your 30-year dream list?

What's my north star now? I mean, I think it all fits back to that vision of like how do I build a truly u generational transformative company that can have a positive impact on the world but as a byproduct of you know how do I bring down the wealth access gap? How do I how do I democratize the entire investment industry but how do I how do I transform the investment industry from what was a pure people business into a platform business that's empowering people? And it sounds kind of vague at its highest level, but

at the end of the day, it is a your north star has to be a bit broad, but you will start to sort out the details. You're not going to know all the details when you first start. You will start to sort sort out the details and the picture will become clear. The puzzle pieces will be all fit in over time. What What would be your advice for everyone who's investing these days as a person who's deeply involved in the industry, especially in the current economic climate with with tariffs? don't like investing in stocks or

investing in private companies or all the in general like what should we do with our money. So if I upload it like this question great TED talk called where are the missing billionaires and why should you care and the reason why I like this TED talk so much is because it starts out with this story that in the 1900s there were 4,000 millionaires. So like not as many as there are today but there are 4,000 people with a million dollars or more. And if you had looked and they all that that those 4,000 people had

just invested their money in the US stock market over a, you know, hundred-year period and they had kids at the standard birth rates, they paid taxes at the standard rates. They spent at the standard rates. There there should be based on their descendants now today 125,000 billionaires, but there are not. There's like 3,000 billionaires. So the question is is like where are all the missing billionaires? And it's all a byproduct of we as humans are really bad at financial decision-making. We make short-term decisions. We try and chase the hot thing. We try and, you know,

we can't necessarily think about long-term compounded interest. And the correct thing to do with your money is to, if you care about multiplying it and leaving money behind for your children and their children and, you know, creating truly generational wealth. The right thing to do with your money is to invest it in the US stock market or a broad-based index. um rebalance that index a couple times a year. consider taxes and fees and try and optimize for taxes and fees and just continue to contribute and there will be ups and downs in volatility but over

you know a long period of time that index will go up 8 to 10% and if you compound every year and if you compound it year over year over year you will have and continue to contribute to it you will have a significant sum of money uh by the time you are ready to retire or the time you need the capital or the time you want to pass it on um rather than constantly doing what most people are doing which chasing whatever hot thing, whatever, you know, bucket of upside they think they can have in

the shortest possible time. No one wants to get rich quot quick slow. Everyone wants to get rich uh quick and getting rich slow is a sure way to get rich. So S&P 500 basically that will be your Yeah, but it could be the S&P 500. It could be a combination of the S&P 500 and maybe you believe in emerging markets. You can build your own index based on what you care about. But the key is you want to get the value of diversification across whichever indexes you feel are you know exciting and I think you

can take some specific bets. Maybe you really believe in AI and you'll overweight to AI companies or you really believe in you know telecommunications or space like I believe in space. I think SpaceX is a great company. I think this the space industry is going to be a huge industry. So I overweight a little bit of my portfolio to there. So you can take some call it active bets in your index because it'll keep life a little bit interesting. Um, but for the most part, you want to index and you want to invest in a

lot of companies and stay invested in a lot of companies over a long period of time and continue to rebalance and manage that index. It's a lot of what VI does. I think that some people have the insatiable need to chase short-term gains um and to chase the the hot thing, whether it's AI or memecoins or whatever is exciting in the present time. Um, but I think the idea is for the vast majority of your money, you should have it in this long-term index and you can have a small kind of a little bit of

money to play with. So, I have a little bit of money in Robin Hood. I like to play with and if I lose it, it sucks. Like, but it's not going to impact my life and I have fun with it. It's gambling at the end of the day. You can have your gambling money. What percentage of your portfolio is that the gambling part? Probably 50 basis points. Oh, so zero. A very.5%. So, very small amount. Yeah. Cool. Are you going to open wise to uh general public or as part of democratizing? Part of the idea

is can you allow advisers to service clients they couldn't have serviced before. So if you could only service a million dollar plus client now with vise you can service a $10,000 client. So more people should have access to a financial adviser and hopefully we'll give more people access to a financial adviser. But at some point the idea is how do we meet a client at every single step in where they are in in their journey? How do we meet them when they are, you know, just starting out and maybe don't want to have a financial

adviser? So, at some point we probably will. Um, and the idea is we'll service advisors, we'll service end consumers, we'll service institutions will be at every single step of the client journey. Love it. Uh, are your parents happy now? Yes, I think they're happy. Yeah. Are they still like maybe PhD like go back to college? No. No. No. I mean, I don't think I don't think college makes sense, but I think for the first time they're kind of starting to realize that college is not what it used to be. And it there's tons of different

paths in life. And the other interesting thing with AI is that information is going to be basically free and accessible to everyone. And most people aren't necessarily like in college, they teach you facts. They teach you things that you learn and you memorize and like you know about different things. And I think that that's no longer going to matter. The thing that's going to matter is how do you like how do you learn how to learn? How do you learn how to um you know be a good person and communicate effectively and build things solving

problems, right? And like how do you how do you dynamically problem solve? And like the only way to do that is the real world. You can't learn how to problem solve in a class. Like entrepreneur classship classes make no sense to me because the only way to be an entrepreneur is to go be an entrepreneur. So I think that there's tons of different examples and a ton ton of different segments. So I saw Palunteer is now looking to hire kids right out of high school and say skip college, come work at Palunteer. you know, join

as an apprentice. And I think there's going to be a number of companies that start to take that on of like, let's find the best and brightest high school students and let's have them skip college and let's have them shadow us and they will learn more on the job in a 3, four year period than, you know, exponentially more than they would have learned in college. So, do you think there's still room for college in 10 years? Would are there any types of people who would benefit from it? I don't believe that I would send

my children to college. I mean, if they really want to, great. Um, I think it's a great way to be independent, but I think if you have a job and, you know, you live with your friends, I think that's also another way to be independent. Um, so I think there's other ways to get the same benefits you would have gotten in college in the real world. Um, I don't really know if I think there is a tremendous amount of benefit to go to a non-top school if you're looking to start a company. Uh, if you

are looking to be a doctor or a lawyer, you kind of have to go to college and that's the path. But you think is AI going to remove that as well for those professions? Maybe. I think it'll it'll change the bar. It'll change how people are taught. Um, but if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to start a company, I think just starting a company is the best way to do it. And back to building a company. Yes. Exactly. How interesting. Because I'm coming from this background, you know, bachelor's, masters, study abroad.

But I totally see the point in what you're saying. And I feel like my daughters when they're going to grow up, it's not going to be a traditional path path. It's going to be something different. Uh, probably some type of education, probably like AI simulated. Yeah, probably. It's like how do you work with AI? How do you communicate? Who knows? I mean, maybe there's a super intelligence and we don't exist by then, but hopefully that doesn't happen. Um, but uh we'll see. We'll see. So, let's wrap up this interview with one uh advice for everyone

like everyone who wants to stay ahead in the new AI environment. What is the one skill that they should be learning? Adults, kids, everyone. understand how to like what your area of like what your superpower is. What's your area of competency? What's where do you spike? What's the thing that you are best in the world at? Um and you feel like you can be best in the world at how do you understand it? Ask your friends. Ask the people closest to you why are you friends with me? Why do you why do you like to

work with me? What makes me great? And those people were are all going to coales on one thing. You're a great communicator. You're a great salesperson. you're great at thinking about complex product problems and you'll find the one thing that makes you great and become the best in the world at that thing. Forget about your weaknesses. It's really hard to like, you know, compensate for your weaknesses. If you're really lucky, you can get a little better on your weaknesses, but on your strength, you can get significantly better because I think that too many people jump

from thing to thing to thing. And the reality is like all of the alpha comes on sticking at one thing for a long period of time and reaping all of the compounded rewards because careers compound no different than capital does. Is there a number of years? Because I I I've recently made this video. I think it's five to six years. I think that there's the whole like 10,000 hour thing,000 hours. I think there's some truth to that. I think that for most companies, we get the maximal value out of an employee or a team member

in years like three and five, three to five um so probably takes a few years to really kind of understand the business and understand where their area of competency is and really kind of hone hone that in. So I think years three to five, but I think really like I think it's like a seven to 10 year thing. It's like it's like deep mastery of craft. It's like the best sushi chefs in the world, you know, learn exactly how to craft the rice for a decade before they, you know, you know, can really be a

head sushi chef. So, I think like think about yourself as a sushi chef. Like, you want to really understand that deep mastery of craft, that deep, you know, details and all the nuances of it because it's more than what it looks like from the outside. I love it. There's so many layers. Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree with you. Thank you so much. It was so inspiring and I think it's really actionable like everything you said from hiring to changing mindset to focusing on one thing instead of jumping to the next shiny thing. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. It's really great. I just want to thank you so much again for watching this and I actually have a newsletter that goes out every time we have a new video where I share most actionable takeaways from every interview because whenever I have a guest like Samir after the interview I just call my team and we tweak some processes within the team. I'm going to definitely um slightly change the process of hiring. So if you want those tips that you can put into action right after reading the email, please subscribe. The link

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