Millionaire at 23 - AMA

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@ivankiss Thank you man

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@Lucasxp64 0) There are two approaches: the first is finding a market inefficiency and iterating directly with customers to solve it. This is “Y Combinator” style. They have a lot of recourses you can go through. The downside is that there will be a lot of other people who try get there before you so it’s all about speed and execution. A dog fight.

The second is what I am doing, which is going after a strong belief of where technology should be going far in the future. Here, you are trying to crystallize a murky and sometimes illegible vision. Those bets are “deep tech” and require a lot of technical execution, because you are essentially creating the foundations from scratch.

Approach 1 never interested me, approach 2 is what I have always been drawn to. I thought my first company with the cryptography was approach 2, but it was actually approach 1, which is why it didn’t blow up. What I am working on right now is as approach two as it gets.

1) You try and give it to customers as early as you can. Working in isolation is a risk, but if you know the field well enough, you will know the biggest pain points already.

1.1) I saw the problem first and then I built the algorithm. It was very much I saw a gap and went after it.

1.2) The first company was fully bootstrapped, the second also was for quite a while. I recently took on an investment from Sequoia.

1.3) No longer working on cybersecurity, but when I did, it was mostly cold outreach to CISOs through email and LinkedIn.

2) No one at Harvard is holding your hand for anything, but I did meet a lot of people who are building businesses on their own, some of which are now billionaires.

2.1) Harvard was absolutely instrumental. In more way than one. I could totally have done it without it, but it most definitely accelerated my path significantly.

3) I do not. I prefer the technical work, because that one is the crux and the most rewarding, but I can do a lot. Of course, as we scale, I will be delegating more and more of the operations.

4) Steve Jobs and Elon Musk’s biographies were very influential. Study Khosla, Thiel, Alex Karp, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc. 

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@LoneWonderer Thank you man. I never had a silver spoon, I’ve starved many times in my life, as recently as this June when I was trying to make this happen. Forget the money for now and figure out what have you been put on earth to do that no one else can.

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On 10/4/2025 at 2:59 PM, Yimpa said:

Do you eat fast food? (e.g. McDonald's)

Have a personal chef?

Eat at restaurants often?

I don’t eat McDonalds, but I do occasionally eat fast food like chipotle, Bosnian grill or Popeyes/fried chicken sandwiches.

I don’t have a chef, I cook myself mostly.

I didn’t use to eat at restaurants that often, but now I am trying different cuisines.