#78 What 5 Exits Taught Me About Business | Mike Koenigs

I asked Joe Hegner, a PIMCO alum who now runs his own hedge fund, what the pension funds and central banks he advised get wrong, and his answer was not what I expected. He explains how the same portfolio can look safe or dangerous depending on who sets the assumptions, and why the downside he thinks is least likely gets extra weight in his own fund. We also get into the helicopter over Athens that tracked down Greek tax dodgers by their swimming pools, and why he doubts the EU lasts another decade. The moment that stuck with me was his dad, a former Wall Street CEO, telling him right out of college that he knew nothing and needed 10 years first.

Mortgage consultant Anthony Marinaccio, 23 years in lending and still writing his own loans, sat down with me and hit me with a claim I couldn't shake: he does the same volume of business today in under six hours a week that used to take him sixty. We got into the system behind that, from cutting 253 referral agents down to 14 to the consultant who stopped taking his money and told him he was at the wrong company. But the part that stayed with me was a man who built all of that, coming home at the end of a long day to photograph his own housework as proof, and what it finally took for him to file. He was winning awards and getting written up in Forbes while hating every day of it, and what he did next took almost every referral partner he had with it.

Sebastian Ness, the 25-year-old CEO who built Sure Leverage Funding out of the wreckage of a competitor that went under overnight, sat down with me and hit me with a claim I couldn't shake: some of his traders have strung together 50 or 60 payouts in a row without ever breaching an account. We got into how his risk team catches "reverse hedging," where a trader bets both sides of the same trade across two different platforms, and how his wife's credit card, not his, funded every account he traded before Sure Leverage even existed. But what stayed with me was him telling me, flat out, that two different people broke into his house trying to get into his Bitcoin wallet, and that he still doesn't see the point of holding the coin at all.

He doubled a company's revenue to $150M once. Then he got called into an office and told it was his last day. If that has ever happened to you, you already know the feeling. Chris Mader ran an $85M company to $115M as interim CEO. The board had already promised him the job in writing. Then the founder needed $4M in payroll cuts, and Chris got the call anyway. I asked him how you rebuild after doing it exactly right and still losing the seat. Chris was Player of the Year in the minors. The next year he led his team in every offensive category and still got released. He turned that into MTA Consultancy, built on a rule you will recognize: he will not work for a leader he cannot believe in. You probably cannot walk away from a bad boss tomorrow. Chris built a business so he never has to again.

I tore up my Wharton MBA on camera a couple of months ago, so I was curious what Joshua Lindsey would say about his. He was making 50 thousand dollars a week at 25, had already helped put close to 30,000 ATMs across the Western United States, and then went back and paid his own way through an Ivy League executive program at 28. He hung the paper on the wall and told me he still isn't sure it did anything for him beyond letting him tell his friends he'd done something too. We get into how he went zero to 12 million in his first year on his own, what it cost him when his partners went rogue, and why he thinks a first-time entrepreneur is better off buying a business than starting one. If you're weighing a degree against a few years of actually doing the work, start here.