026: Tech Careers and Money: Financial Freedom Strategies

Christopher Nelson [00:00:00]:

The thing that she said to me was, sometimes it just takes a single conversation to change your life because you're not always aware of what are the possibilities, what's out there. That made me think this conversation that she and I had needs to be bigger and we need to take it to our people, the technology employees. You when? Welcome to Tech. Careers and money talk. I am your host, Christopher Nelson. I've been in the tech industry for 20 plus years, and after climbing my way to the C suite, working for three companies that have been through IPO and investing my way to financial independence, I'm here to share with you everything that I've learned and open up the books and show you exactly how it's done. I am super pumped to be with you today. It is episode 26.

Christopher Nelson [00:00:53]:

Yeah. Can you believe it? I am just thrilled. I'm excited beyond means. Episode 26. We're publishing an episode a week. So this is our mid-year review. Yes. Like many of you who are working in technology companies, this is the time of year when you actually get a review.

Christopher Nelson [00:01:12]:

You see how you're doing. So we wanted to do the same thing with our podcast. I was literally having breakfast with my friend Brian Weiss the other day here in Austin. Brian, if you remember, was on episode three where he was breaking down how he works for technology companies and their equity as a wealth-building strategy, one of our most popular downloads. But as I was sitting down with him saying, I'm getting ready to record this episode, he just looked and said, mid-year review. So I've broken it down like that. I think today what I would like to do is the first half of the show, I am going to give our mid-year review. I've made some notes.

Christopher Nelson [00:01:52]:

I have some interesting data points. I've also got some feedback from people. And we're going to talk about what we've been doing, how we are in regards to our goals, where we're going. And that's the first half of the show. In the second half of the show, I do get questions inbound people do hit. I do mention it occasionally. I'll mention it again right now at ask@techcareersandmoneytalk.com. I know that's a mouthful, but you can do that.

Christopher Nelson [00:02:22]:

ask@techcareersinmoneytalk.com. People ask me questions. I get multiple per week coming in. It seems like they are, as we continue to publish the show, they get more and more frequent, more and more interesting. So, in the second half of the show, I'm going to answer some of those questions and I'm very excited to do that because that is where I really get the value from this, being able to share the knowledge, the tips, the tricks. However, I do think it's important. This podcast was created for you. I want you to understand how we're doing, and how we're progressing, so that you can also know what we're planning to do next because it's exciting.

Christopher Nelson [00:03:09]:

We really want to continue this educational journey on career money, unlocking how it all works together so that you can meet your financial goals and live the life that you want. That's ultimately what we want. So, mid-year review, where are we? So we're six months in and we're averaging around 1000 unique downloads a month. It's trending over that, but that is what we're getting through our syndicated network, they're letting us know that we are trending up from 1,000 unique downloads a month. That is an amazing number because our mission here is to help 1000 technology employees get to financial independence. Because I believe that if there are 1000 technology employees financially independent on this planet, they're going to help solve the world's biggest problems. Because as technology employees, we see problems and we want to fix them. That's why in my financial independence, I am building a median education platform, educating people on careers and money and how to do this.

Christopher Nelson [00:04:20]:

This is my impact, and contribution to the community, if you will. So the 1,000 unique downloads a month listennotes.com gives a really good metric. It's called a listen score. It lets you also know where your podcast ranks across all of the podcasts globally. So if you go to Listennotes.com, this is public information, you can go look this up our Listen score is 30. It may have been 31 the last time I looked, but it's slowly clicking up, and that Listen score puts us in the top 5% of global podcasts. Not where we started, but that's where we are today. So we've been gaining not just in popularity of unique downloads, but also in listen time.

Christopher Nelson [00:05:07]:

People are listening to the podcast all the way through and that is the most important thing, is that we are trying to provide valuable education. I'm having conversations with people that I wish I would have been able to sit down and have conversations with when I was earlier in my career. And I want to share that information, I want to tease out that information so that you yourself can continue to grow your career, focus on building wealth, and meet those financial goals. So it's important to understand that tech Careers and Money talk, which is to have transparent conversations, unlocking career and money, and how it all works together to reach your financial goals. This is not just about having a conversation. This is about starting a movement. And for those of you who see what I post on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the major social platform that I share on. You'll see that the movement that I want to start is people thinking differently about careers.

Christopher Nelson [00:06:20]:

Make sure that they're using their career for their own purpose, which is focusing on their finances outside of work so that they can choose. To work towards their own mission, whether that's something that's inside their family, whether that's something for the technology community or the world at large. And so we're not just publishing a podcast here. We're starting a movement. Let's get further into this review and see how we're doing, and then get to the feedback or the questions in the second episode. So when we think about a mid-year review, I go to a very traditional after-action review. What did you want to happen? What happened? What are you going to continue to do? What are you going to stop doing? And then what are you going to start doing? So what we wanted to happen is we wanted to launch an audio podcast and a video podcast at the same time we've been publishing in the email that comes out with our podcast that we do have a YouTube channel. But for those of you who don't know, many of you may have discovered us through YouTube in the search engine there, we have an audio podcast that you'll find on Apple Podcasts Spotify.

Christopher Nelson [00:07:43]:

Google's going away, but it is on Amazon. Google's being folded into YouTube. So YouTube, we do have our audio podcast over there, but we also have a full video podcast, too, if you want to watch it. We also do highlight reels, and we also do shorts for all the episodes. I have some of those shorts I bring into LinkedIn in the afternoon, and I also share those on Instagram at Tech Careers and Money Talk, if you want to follow that. And so we wanted to hit a quality. It's really important for us. People always comment, hey, great audio quality, video quality.

Christopher Nelson [00:08:21]:

It's important because I just didn't want that to be distracting to the message. I wanted people to be able to focus on what we were communicating and not be distracted by poor audio or video. And so we've hit that cadence. We also wanted to build a loyal following of financially focused technology employees. Ultimately, our goal was we thought that we would get to five or 600. We didn't think that we would be at 1,000 by now. Our goal in the first six months was really to establish our production cadence, to make sure we were establishing quality before we went into growth. So we're excited that we could do that.

Christopher Nelson [00:08:59]:

The other thing that we wanted to happen was to launch a meetup, and I wanted to finish my book. So for those of you, I haven't really talked about it a lot on the podcast, but I am writing a book. It's called 'From No Dough to IPO'. In fact, I have right behind me here, I have sort of the faux cover I'll show you. It's called ‘From No Dough to IPO’. It's my inspiration, a proven playbook for how to trade your time and talent for tech equity. More than anything, I have been inspired by Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and the way that it gave a concept to the world of how you think about liabilities and assets. I thought the cashflow quadrant was very impactful to the community of financially focused technology employees. I want to deliver a book that is similar to Robert Kiyosaki's book, but also different.

Christopher Nelson [00:09:58]:

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a book that I love. I definitely recommend it. However, I make sure and add a caveat for everyone today that says when you get through reading this book, you're going to wish that there was then the how-to at the end, the breakdown, the instruction manual, and you want to know something, it's not there. You have to then go figure that out. And that could arguably be part of my last 20-year journey, which was not just figuring out how to work for equity, but also how to go and execute Robert Kiyosaki's plan of being a passive income investor or a private equity investor, where my money is scaling for me. So From No Dough to IPO, a proven playbook for how to trade your time and talent for tech equity. My book that will be right now, we're on target to publish sometime next year because I need to finish it. It's going to be a book of strategies, with a number of chapters that are going to cover high-level concepts like Robert Kiyosaki did in his book.

Christopher Nelson [00:11:08]:

Here are the strategies, and the things you need to understand. The second half of the book is going to be plays, sets of tactics that you can go execute yourself so that you can take that book and run with it. It can be your playbook for how you go and leverage tech equity to build wealth. It's something that is just really important for me. That is what I've learned and what I have friends and colleagues that are executing right now that we create this book that we can put out there so that everybody else can follow and practice those strategies and plays as well. So that's what we wanted to happen. Launch the podcast, video, and audio, and build a loyal following. We wanted to finish the book and launch the meetup.

Christopher Nelson [00:11:56]:

Well, what do we do? The podcast, audio, and video are going very well. I was not able to make much progress on the book and the meetup. We had a couple of meetings there, but the meetup, we ended up shelving that there were 70 people who had signed up for the meetup. We'd been in communication with them through some very specific emails and we made the decision to discontinue that for now because I'm going to talk about what we want to do going forward. I think the lesson learned was how to launch a product. Stabilize it as a team? It's not just myself. I do have members of my team that are helping with different sets of operations. Podcast, productions, graphics management, globally diverse team. And so as we were settling in and launching the podcast and trying to do it very well, arguably we should have just focused on it and maybe I could have continued with the book, but trying to do both, we ended up doing nothing.

Christopher Nelson [00:13:04]:

So that was the lesson learned. So what are we going to keep doing? We're going to keep producing this podcast. We're going to continue with more episodes. We're also looking for other exciting, I think, valuable pieces of content that we can add in there. Whether those are some very specific instructional videos that go onto YouTube, whether those are live panel discussions about what is happening in the market today. When it comes to hiring, when it comes to skills that are most valuable, when it comes to managing your money, we really want to provide more content of bringing experts together, having conversations, career money, and how it all works together. And then we're going to keep introducing new and valuable content. The more I get questions that are so valuable, again, ask@techcareersandmoneytalk.com, the more I get insight into what people want, things that I know, or things that I know of.

Christopher Nelson [00:14:10]:

Then I'm able to leverage my network, bring people in to have conversations, to learn more about those things. So we are going to keep producing the podcast and keep raising the quality. We are just trying to get 1% better every week. We want to just keep consistently improving week over week and then we're going to keep introducing new and valuable content. It has to have value. We're not here for entertainment, we're here for education and we want to make sure that this is adding real value. What are we going to stop? What are we going to stop doing? We're going to stop launching more than one product per quarter. We're really clear on what we're going to be launching.

Christopher Nelson [00:14:53]:

We now have a clear path, again, based on feedback that we're getting, based on what we're seeing in questions we're being asked. We're clear on products that we're going to be launching, at least for the next two or three quarters. I'm going to talk about that at the end of the show. I'll give you a highlight reel as to what's coming next, but you're going to have to wait for that. And then our team is small and so we just want to make sure that we're going to ensure that we're taking quality products to market. I think that was the note there. So what are we going to start doing? Well, we're going to start getting in front of more audiences. To this point, we've been producing a backlog of content.

Christopher Nelson [00:15:36]:

I have not gone on a podcast tour. I haven't done as much speaking as I usually do throughout the year at this point in time. And I actually got some television, some press. In June, somebody heard about my book and reached out. I did a television interview. And so I'm going to get in front of more people. I want to let more people know what we're doing at Tech Careers and Money Talk and be able to bring people in. So that they can understand that there is a home here for them.

Christopher Nelson [00:16:10]:

When you want to talk about career and money, and how it all works together for financially focused technology employees, there's a place for you. We are then going to understand that we're not just building products, we're starting a movement. And so this is where we're going to start shaping a broader set of products around Tech Careers and Money, which is our parent brand. We have Tech, Careers and Money Talk, but then we're going to be layering on some additional brands, some additional ways that we can bring this education to people going forward. So that's what we're going to start doing. So in a nutshell, we've exceeded some goals we missed on the meetup, and we missed delivering the book. We're going to keep going with the podcast. We're going to keep going with increasing the quality.

Christopher Nelson [00:17:10]:

Just 1% every week over week. We're going to stop launching more than one product a quarter. We're going to make sure the team has time to consume things, and we're going to start getting in front of more audiences, and we're going to start our steady quarter over quarter dripping in new products that we can maintain quality that we can continue to deliver for you. We're here to start a movement. And I have to say, that was the quantitative side of the update in the mid year review, right? And I know you're listening, Brian, and I know that this is how you do your mid-year review. You look at Brian as my manager. I've taken reviews from Brian before, and they're great, by the way, as far as how he lays it out, right, is, okay, here. Let's look at the quantitative, let's look at what happened now.

Christopher Nelson [00:18:05]:

Let's give the qualitative overlay. What are people saying? What are people saying about the podcast? Well, at this point in time, we have 24 written five-star reviews. If you go on to Apple, I think it's 4.9. There are some people that gave us some lower star reviews. They didn't write anything, didn't give us anything of value. I don't know why or where, but obviously not worried about that. But what's more important is what people are writing, what people are telling me. What people are saying are things like, finally there's a place where we can have this conversation about career and money and how it's all supposed to work.

Christopher Nelson [00:19:00]:

People are asking insightful questions, what am I supposed to do in these junctures? That's giving us ideas as far as new content, and it's allowing us to answer when I get those emails, I answer those emails. I answer those emails with looms, and I get feedback. Well, thank you. I didn't think about it that way. We're starting to ramp up people being aware of the fact that we can get uncomfortable and we can have these conversations. I started this podcast because I wanted to create something for my past self, for my peer's past self, where we were starving for this information. We were starving to have the opportunity to connect with other executives, other successful entrepreneurs, and other private equity investors, to ask these questions and say, how does this all work? We saw the pieces on the puzzle. Pieces were on the table.

Christopher Nelson [00:20:07]:

Okay, I can go get some equity. I can make some real wealth, and I could potentially get it to work for me so that then I can own my time and I can choose. Do I want to work for somebody else? Do I want to work for myself? Do I not want to work at all? I can make these decisions, but I don't know how. And I have to say that the inspiration for this podcast came from a conversation that I had with a woman probably about two years ago. I was still working in tech, but I was also growing my private equity company. And we had an open investment. And I was in the Bay Area. We're sitting down, having coffee, and she hadn't heard of these different types of investments.

Christopher Nelson [00:20:56]:

And she'd been creating some equity or she worked for a public company, still works for a public company, been getting RSUs, had a good trove of equity. And we just sat down and just had a conversation. And I just explained to her I wasn't giving her advice by any means. I was just explaining how everything worked. Here's the bigger picture of how you take equity. Yet you want to diversify it. You want to diversify it into a diversified stock portfolio to give you downside protection. That is one of the strategies.

Christopher Nelson [00:21:31]:

Again, I was just giving strategic advice, to then take portions of that, turn that into private equity, where you get income from that, you get checks. You can start replacing your paycheck. And just started mapping this out. And when she walked away, the thing that she said to me was, sometimes it just takes a single conversation to change your life because you're not always aware of what are the possibilities, what's out there. And so starting that made me think this conversation that she and I had needed to be bigger. And we need to take it to our people. The technology employees who have a front-row seat to the future love what they do. But it's really hard.

Christopher Nelson [00:22:24]:

And you can ultimately burn out, or you can let the money start leading your lifestyle and you can go from what I call the golden handcuffs, to the golden jail, and you never get what you want. So that's why the conversation is so important. And so when I reflect on six months in, where are we? What are we doing? Regardless of all the numbers, regardless of how great the audio and video are, knowing that there are 1000 people a month, becoming more aware, and understanding what it takes to build expertise, how do you strategically work for Equity as a wealth-building strategy? How do you think about creating and making your portfolio your business, that's truly your business, that's your focus because that's what you want to graduate into. And then thinking about what's their personal exit plan? Maybe it's an exit from the current role they're in. Maybe it's the exit from full-time employment to consulting. Maybe it's an exit altogether to a sabbatical and they just need some time away. But I get so excited knowing and I feel so fulfilled.  know that my purpose for this second half is to build tech careers and money as an education and media company to help technology employees move forward, understand how to grow their careers, build wealth, meet their financial goals, and live the lives they want.

Christopher Nelson [00:24:14]:

So that was the mid-year review. We are going to take a pause right now. We're going to take a little pause. I'm going to press the pause button here, go get some water. Then I'm going to come back. And I have here I also have some on this piece of paper, I have some of the I'll see how long it takes. But I think I have five questions, career questions, and money questions. I want to answer your questions.

Christopher Nelson [00:24:39]:

You ask them. I want to answer them. I'm here for you. Hold on. We're going to be right back. And then after I finish that, I'm going to tell you about some exciting things that are going to be coming your way. Brand new products. I'm going to give you a little bit of the roadmap - product roadmap.

Christopher Nelson [00:24:55]:

Get you excited about that. So thank you so much. Thank you for an amazing first six months. Could not be here without all of you, all the listeners, all the support. Thank you for your reviews. Thank you for all the encouragement. Asking the questions is encouragement. Reaching out and sending me a DM and saying, hey, thanks for the content on LinkedIn is encouragement.

Christopher Nelson [00:25:18]:

Appreciate all that. We're going to be back right after this. Okay? We are back here for the second half of the mid-year review. Thank you so much for joining us for the first half of the mid-year review. Second half, I am going to be answering questions that people sent in to me through ask@techcareersandmoneytalk.com. Now, I didn't get permission to use their name, so I'm not going to. However, in the future I may do that. Please.

Christopher Nelson [00:25:49]:

Now I would ask if you're okay with that. Just send me, hey, I'm okay. If you share my name, send me in the questions ask@techcareersandmoneytalk.com and I'm going to get into this right now. Question number one, what are the most important factors in career growth? Growing your career in technology can be difficult, but it gets a lot easier if you have mentors. Mentors are so important and they're around you everywhere. And many times people do want to lean in and help, but it's asking, it's also understanding how do you create a good, healthy relationship or how you can support them. Help your mentors so that they can then create space and lean in and help you as well. But mentors are invaluable.

Christopher Nelson [00:26:37]:

They'll help you see around corners. They can coach and guide you in very challenging situations. I think the second thing I wrote down is self awareness. And arguably, you want to be self aware to actually go and pursue mentors. Meaning you want to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, how you may sound to people in different ways. How do you manage stress, how do you support the wins? Where do you want to go? Like, being self aware, understanding these things is very important when you're pursuing mentors. And then also growth in your career. Because if you look across even articles and studies out there, when you start getting into leadership and management, one of the biggest things they look for is self awareness.

Christopher Nelson [00:27:28]:

And if you're interested in learning more on that, I have a great interview with Margaret Andrews of the Milo Center. She's an instructor at Harvard. Milo stands for managing yourself, leading others. She gets into a lot of detail in that particular episode, but check that out and then study two levels above you. It's important that if you really want growth, you need to understand how you're supporting your manager, what you're doing to support their book of business, and then what they're doing to support their leader. Always be looking two levels up the chain so that you understand this transaction. Because if you're looking to move into that next level, you want to then understand what that relationship is going to be like. Too many people want a promotion, but are not looking and understanding what comes with that.

Christopher Nelson [00:28:18]:

And that's so important that you understand. And start asking your manager what they're doing, what their responsibilities are. Trying to get a skip level meet. Ask for a skip level meeting with the next level asking the vice president or director what they are working on, what are their strategic initiatives. Make sure that you understand how that business hierarchy is working and how people are executing. What advice would you give someone? Question number two, what advice would you give to someone who wants to advance to the executive level? First thing, focus on managing yourself. I know it sounds crazy. The first time I heard this, I was at a dinner for people who want to become a CIO, a Chief Information officer in Silicon Valley.

Christopher Nelson [00:29:15]:

We're sitting there and I heard a Chief Information officer at a very large chipmaker state. He spent 80% of his time managing himself, 20% of his time managing others. I thought this gentleman was crazy. I said, how could that be? I sat open minded, aware I didn't know everything. So I listened to his complete talk and I realized I had it wrong that if you actually manage yourself, the majority of the time, you're going to make your life easier, you're going to be able to manage and be a more effective executive. And more is caught than taught, right? People see more by an example of how you manage yourself by what you tell them. So it's also very effective management. And so this means that when you're managing yourself, how are you creating your boundaries? What is your management style? How do you direct your day to day tasks and manage your calendar, et cetera? You need to be clear on how you're managing and being effective yourself and then pushing that discipline out.

Christopher Nelson [00:30:30]:

Also, if you want to advance to the executive level, you need to learn to manage up. You need to learn to manage the expectations of who you're reporting into, how to have healthy negotiation, and healthy conversation. How do you set boundaries? Because if you don't have that in place and you continue to ascend your career and have more responsibilities, that's a path to burnout, that's a path to taking on a lot more. But then you don't have a structure and a way to manage that. That is not something that you really want. Trust me. Trust me. I've been there.

Christopher Nelson [00:31:12]:

I think the third thing, if you want to advance to the executive level, learn to become a coaching leader. As a leader, as you ascend the ladder, there's an expectation that you're going to be able to coach people up to develop themselves. The sooner that you can work on that skill and understand, how do you bring strong people along in their career to support you, to support others, to move on, et cetera, when you can learn that skill that will help you advance? Because the more your career sends in technology, any company but we're talking about technology companies here. As a leader, your expectation is to build teams, and of course, you want to skill them up in whatever hard skills or soft skills they may need to do their job and where to get the training. But your overall responsibility is going to be how do you build and grow that team. So you need to be able to establish yourself as a coaching leader. So that's the advice I would give to somebody who wants to advance to the executive level, is focus on managing yourself. Learn how to manage up and become a coaching leader.

Christopher Nelson [00:32:24]:

Develop that particular skill set. Um, then it's then the question was, what are some of the most you know, what are some of the largest career lessons that you've learned in your 20 year career? You like to quote it at the beginning, after 20 years. Give us some lessons. That was a good question. Well, one of the most profound lessons that I've learned is that it's better to move towards joy than it is to run from fear. Let that sink in for a bit. This one's a little you may feel like it's tangential, it's not direct, but it is.

Christopher Nelson [00:33:13]:

Stick with me. It's better to move towards joy than from fear. We get put in a lot of high stress situations. We can get promoted quickly. We do get promoted quickly. Inside of technology companies. If you're performing well, you're in a growing company, you're going to get promoted. You have all these responsibilities and one day you experience burnout or you're just mentally fried and you don't know how to deal with it because many times our skills what is it? Our roles and responsibilities grow faster than our skill sets.

Christopher Nelson [00:33:52]:

This is one of the gaps, this is one of the education gaps that I see and I'm excited to try and help fill in the next couple of years. But our responsibilities grow faster than our skill sets and our abilities to manage it. And so what happens is we get burnt out and we want to run from the situation, let me move to the next role, let me take another position. This money isn't right. It's not right for me. And we start labeling it. The reality is if we then follow that instinct, that reaction, we're going to find ourselves in the same situation eventually. Now, we may move to a new spot, it may not be the same right away, but after a year or two, we're going to find ourselves in the same situation because we haven't solved the problem.

Christopher Nelson [00:34:40]:

And so this is an indicator and we want to look for this, is that if we're feeling this fight or flight mode and my friend Eugene Choi, who's an executive coach, and he looks at a lot of neuroscience in technology, we spend 80% of our time in our fight or flight brain. We're reacting to a lot of things. We have to be very intentional, leverage, mindfulness to be in our executive brain. I mean, average and many people are not in that executive brain. More than 20%, some even ten. But if we're reacting to this and we're moving away from it, we're not going to make good choices, we're not going to make good career choices, we're not going to make good family choices, we're not going to make good life choices. So this is why the biggest career lesson is that if I'm not moving towards joy, if I don't have some clear reasons why I'm making a move, then I really don't need to change my situation. I need to change myself.

Christopher Nelson [00:35:42]:

I need to improve my skills. Like, what? Am I not managing well? Am I not managing something in my personal life? Do I need to go and address some relationships, resolve some things? Do I need to go to work? Do I need to get better at boundary management? Do I need to get better at managing up because I'm taking on too many responsibilities? But we need to check that because just following that instinct is going to lead us. And that's something I learned the hard way. That was something that it was really that burnout that had me leave Accenture, leaving a lot of mentors and getting myself into a really bad situation. And I realized that, okay, now moving forward, I need to make sure that I am moving towards joy, something that I want to do. And that doesn't mean sometimes you can leave a bad situation, but it's just like a relationship. You don't want to just rebound into something that looks great. You want to make sure that you're in a clear state of mind and making those decisions and you're not running from fear, but you're moving towards joy when you're making big career decisions.

Christopher Nelson [00:36:52]:

The other big career lesson that I've learned would be to build the career that you want and not always the ones that your mentors want. Now, I know a few minutes ago I said, well, mentors can help you accelerate your career. They can and they will. The thing that's important to understand is that your mentors may be guiding you in something that they're really good at, but you need to look at them holistically. I remember for myself as I transitioned out of Splunk and I was looking what was next for me. One of my closest mentors said, you're ready? Go for the Chief information officer role. I was very pleased at the time. I was feeling a lot of kudos.

Christopher Nelson [00:37:52]:

I just had had a great run, five years, it was a home run at Splunk, and I felt like, okay, that's the next step for me and taking that step. But I didn't look at my family. My family at that point, I had three very young boys. We have an older son, and then we have identical twins born very close together, a wife that was needing a lot of support at that time for me, emotionally, physically being there. And then I went and took a CIO role. And then I had to reflect and say, oh, wow. My mentor, he didn't have a balanced family life. He ended up in his career, had gone through a divorce and gone through some other things.

Christopher Nelson [00:38:42]:

And I was like, wait a second, I don't want that. I don't want that for myself. So I had to go and make a series of different decisions. I had to ultimately end up leaving that role of a CIO and taking on a different role and changing my lifestyle because I wanted a different career. And it was a huge learning point for me that I did not want just the titles. I wanted to be able to deliver good work. There was a role and a responsibility that I really enjoyed when working in tech. And all of a sudden, moving up another level, things get a little bit more political and I'm not doing as much work.

Christopher Nelson [00:39:31]:

I'm removed from it didn't feel right for me, it also didn't feel right leaving my family at a time where they just needed me and I needed them. I wanted to be with them. And so I'm telling you this detail to say that's an example of where you have to figure out what your own career path is. Mentors will give inputs. And this is also why I think having a community like the tech careers and money talk community, where reach in, ask questions, have conversations. And this is why I'm trying to bring people on. I always talk about career stories and how people went and how they want to build their careers, how they want to have a family, how they want to do it all together because it's so important that we talk about it. But you need to find and carve out your own career path. If there was a big career Nelson that I learned is carve your own path.

Christopher Nelson [00:40:31]:

Don't let anybody define it for you. And whatever you do, don't be driven by, oh, I have to climb the next rung. I have to climb the next rung. Because what I've observed from now, my vantage point outside, speaking into the industry, talking with a lot of executives week over week, is that so many people climb the ladder and they don't know how to get down. They haven't looked at the other side. And it can do from just focus and ambition and this concept of a ladder that we're programmed in. Make your own career, spend some time. I drafted mine out.

Christopher Nelson [00:41:12]:

Like, what do I really want to do? Where do I want to spend my time? I realized for myself, I love VP senior Director roles, where I was managing and owning a team that could come in in a middle stage startup company, take over business applications, add a lot of efficiency, help teams quote faster, help teams close books faster, help teams pass socks, audit. In these types of things, I got a real joy because I knew that I was making the business more effective. We got a chance to use a lot of really great technologies and advance the business forward. Find your own. Let's go to the money side. Okay, if that wasn't awkward enough, let's go to the money side. What? It's important that we talk about our feelings. We do talk about family.

Christopher Nelson [00:42:02]:

We do talk about how all this stuff is interrelated and we'll talk about that in a little bit of where we're going to go moving forward. This podcast, because I want this to be personal. It's really important. So, money questions. What is the most important money skill? There were some questions that I sort of rolled up. What skill do you think is really important when it comes to managing money? And I think sometimes it's hard when we're just trying to understand. We come into technology, many of us don't come from wealth. We start building considerable wealth.

Christopher Nelson [00:42:45]:

Money starts coming at us faster than it ever has. Especially as you're working for equity, you start getting RSUs coming in on top of paychecks and bonuses. What? So the most important money skills, I think is number one is your money mindset or your relationship with money. If you have a bad relationship with money, if money is a solution that fixes a lot of emotional wounds. And you take money and you go buy things because you're needing to fill some things inside, you're going to have to fix that or it's just going to get worse. Right? And this is where the money mindset is so important. And what's your relationship with money? What does money do for you? What has been your history with money? Do you have a history of saving it? Can go the other direction too. I know for myself, sometimes I go on the hoarding side.

Christopher Nelson [00:43:42]:

I feel scarcity theory. Like, okay, I have to hoard it. I don't know how to enjoy it. And I've really enjoyed Ramit Sethi his I will teach you to be rich where if I were to give that book a subtitle, it's like, I'm going to teach you how know regardless of how much money you have, I'm going to teach you how to use it responsibly and how to enjoy it. I think he has some great insights there. And this is where anyway, but that's money mindset. We all come into this with some predisposed ideas and frameworks that may be programmed. And this is where you want to become aware of what yours are because if you don't know it, it can sabotage you.

Christopher Nelson [00:44:27]:

I think the other thing is you need to be able to build a team of professionals around you. So I think one of the key professionals that we need working in tech, getting all this equity is we need a tax professional. You need to be able to select that person, understand what you need, what does a good tax person look like in tech? And you then have to go vet them, select them, more than one, and who's going to work for you. But ultimately, as you continue to grow in wealth, you have to build a team around you. And so the most important money skills are how to build a team around you, how to know who you need and know how to select them, number one. And number two, the money mindset and relationship, I think I presented them in the opposite order, but those are two critical ones. Okay. Somebody was very defensive and they asked what are the biggest financial mistakes to avoid? What do I have to skip here? Well, not taking action, too many people that I know, I mean, that I've had conversations with as I run my private equity company, talking about portfolios and just having conversations again, not giving advice, but just listening.

Christopher Nelson [00:45:59]:

So many people that I talk to amass this wealth and they don't know what to do with it. They're just inactive, like, oh yeah, I got this big chunk sitting in this. I have high six figures or seven figures in a single stock, and it's just sort of sitting there. I don't know. That type of inactivity can cause a lot of pain, and just amassing that wealth is not good enough. You actually have to know what to do with it. Inactivity the second one, I would add, is sleeping on diversification, which is part of this whole thing. One of the most profound stories that I heard from a guy that I got to know was that when he was in his mid 20s, he'd graduated from school, started working for a tech company, and started accumulating RSUs, the RSUs. After a few years, the company was getting some tailwinds, and I think there was some type of significant contract written or something big spike.

Christopher Nelson [00:47:09]:

And he opens his account one day to see that this account he's sort of late 20s, had $2 million was the value and his line of thinking. And this was, again, he's remaining anonymous, but quota is my best thinking. Got me here, I'm just going to leave it there. It's just going to continue to grow. Right. Stock market goes up over time. Well, what happened is in the subsequent twelve or 14 months that followed, the company got into a legal argument over some intellectual property. It was litigation.

Christopher Nelson [00:47:53]:

Stock price starts plummeting, and so when it's worth $200,000, he sells everything. $1.8 million in value just vanished because of this. Inactivity. And I always think about conversations and lessons that I can learn from other people. And hearing this just made me realize, and I know it's true, is that diversification is then that's the protection against it, right? Everybody wants to sit on it because if the stock is doing well, they see it going up into the right, it's just going to keep going. And I had this experience too, when I was at Splunk. We came out of a window, things were going up and to the right, oh, we have time. And then all of a sudden, as it starts coming down its first hill, it's gut wrenching.

Christopher Nelson [00:48:50]:

We had at that point 90% of our net worth in a single stock, and it drops by like 30 or 40% even more. It was just brutal. And so diversification is the solution to that and also having a clear plan and understanding to take action on it. And so I think the other big financial mistake to avoid is turning over the CEO or the ownership of your financial future to somebody else. I'm not advocating that you don't bring in professionals. I surround myself with professionals. I surround myself with tax professionals, with legal professionals, with financial professionals who understand things. I'm constantly talking to them, and I have different relationships with them.

Christopher Nelson [00:49:41]:

Ultimately, though, I'm responsible. I see them as my team. I see myself as the CEO. Those are my heads of different heads of tax, heads of legal, heads of real estate, whatever. And then ultimately, though, I'm the decision maker, and I need to evaluate them on performance level. I may need to fire them. I may need to double down, invest more in them, bring them more resources or not. But ultimately, when I turn that over and I hear people say this, where, well, what's going on? How's your retirement plan? Things coming along? I don't know.

Christopher Nelson [00:50:23]:

My guy's got that, or my gal, she's working on that. She has that. I'm not really sure. I don't look at it. Okay, well, then you have turned over your future and its responsibility to somebody else, and you've positioned yourself to become a victim, not an owner. So that's one of the things that I avoid, is I'm not saying don't bring in professionals. What I'm saying is you are the decision maker. You make sure that you get clear.

Christopher Nelson [00:50:53]:

You should have a reporting cadence where you're looking at things where you're understanding what they're doing and shop around constantly. If you have somebody who is managing your money, go look over their fee structures, what they are doing for their clients. Keep people on their toes when somebody feels like they're comfortable and they're able to just constantly. Let's talk about other stories. I've heard you have so many stories that I've heard. I was talking to somebody. It was a technology employee that was having conversations around real estate, around investing. We were talking, we're just sharing portfolios.

Christopher Nelson [00:51:37]:

And they shared with me that I think it was their father or their uncle who had recently retired, and this was, I'd say, four or five years ago. So they recently retired. So they had worked through the 90s, early 2000s, and had some ups and downs. And when they got to retirement, they finally went in and looked at the portfolio that this guy had been running for. His financial advisor had been running for him for 20 years, and he'd been taking an active management fee, but literally had him in a single fund the whole time. And the guy never really looked or never really said anything. The gentleman who was retiring who had this person run it and again, I'm not trying to say that having something in a single fund your whole time is a bad strategy. It could have been the best fund ever.

Christopher Nelson [00:52:30]:

But the point is what your expectation of the service is, is your expectation of what this person is doing, is that all aligned with the fees and everything else? Right? Could you have switched over to, well, if you're just letting it ride, could you be done? Let me pay you for what I need. And it can just go over there, and there's negotiation. There's management that goes into this. And so I just think that my response to the biggest financial mistakes is to avoid not taking action, sleeping on diversification. You need diversification. Don't be overexposed in a single position and turning over results to somebody else. I love this one. Okay.

Christopher Nelson [00:53:23]:

Christopher, you talk all the time about working for equity. How do you negotiate for more equity? Let me start that off by saying you have to understand the company and their equity philosophy. If it's a public company, sometimes the equity philosophy can be pretty set in stone, pretty straightforward, but just understand what that is. But the fundamentals of negotiating for more equity come down to three steps. Broke it down. You need to make sure you're building your skills to deliver value, you ultimately have to be this rare and valuable resource that you're delivering value. Value is then results, right? So you have coding. You then contribute by working on projects, which then are results we dropped in a new feature or we're adding patches every week.

Christopher Nelson [00:54:20]:

You're in a direct line to a result that they want to see and how you're delivering to that result. We're early. We are 20% early. Every time, one day early, something like that. How does that align up? But if you need to make sure you're delivering the value, you have to be able to tell your story in a way like you're negotiating for more equity. Okay? Knowing the person that you're talking to, you have to be able to articulate the value you're getting the buy in. They see those types of things. And then you also have to know the market of who at your level understands your skills.

Christopher Nelson [00:55:00]:

Where are you? Because again, this is all positioning. You're positioning yourself as rare and valuable to say, I'm getting more equity, because it's that simple. It's a negotiation. Positioning yourself as rare and valuable to get equity. There's no tricks here. You're not going to trick somebody into giving you equity. You want to be able to display value. You want to go to the negotiating table and say, look, I prefer ownership shares versus something else.

Christopher Nelson [00:55:29]:

Again, the caveat is that you want to understand what their philosophy is, their compensation philosophy, so that you could speak into that. So that you can make sure that you're negotiating in and around what their philosophy is. Right? You're not asking for anything that's outside. Asking for exceptions can be hard. There's a ton more questions here, but I know that we're at sort of the hour mark with the entire podcast overall. So I'm going to pause right there. I'm going to save some more for laters. If this is something that people like, please hit me up at Ask@techcareersandmoneytalk.com.

Christopher Nelson [00:56:11]:

I do enjoy this. If you want me to answer more of these questions, I'm happy to do so. I love doing it as well. But now as we get to the end of the show, I want to tell you what is coming next. So I mentioned earlier, as we have the mid year review that Tech Careers and Money is now our parent brand, and we're shaping this up to be an education and media brand. Meaning media, meaning that we're going to be producing podcasts, we're going to be producing YouTube videos, we're going to be producing educational media content, and then we're also going to be putting together courses eventually where we can actually train people in the things that I'm teaching. How do you build expertise? How do you strategically work for equity? How do you build an evergreen portfolio and different skills that go along with that? There is an educational gap here that is just so apparent, and people are asking for it. They want education.

Christopher Nelson [00:57:18]:

And so Tech Careers and Money Talk is live and we're six months in. We're now launching this quarter in Q Four of 2023, Tech Career and Money News, which is going to be a publication that is going to come out via email. We're moving that or launching that on the Beehive platform. That's also going to come with some different long form content as well. But it's going to be a publication that is going to give people news and it's going to give people skills and education that's going to be delivered weekly so that it becomes another resource that we can continue to educate on and also looking to before the and of this calendar year, finish the book and get that over to the publishers so we can get that in your hands next year. Q one 2024 is tech. Careers and money live. We are targeting to do a live virtual event where we're bringing in some other educators.

Christopher Nelson [00:58:20]:

Some of them will be people that I had on my podcast and other people. But we want to do a live virtual event and we want to speak in and give some different educational training seminars to just help you prepare better for the coming year. I'm Christopher Nelson. I'm the host here. Tech careers and money talk. I appreciate you so much. Thank you so much for listening. My ask today is that if you enjoyed this podcast, please go.

Christopher Nelson [00:58:54]:

Leave us a review. As we continue to grow your voice, what you take value from is so important to us. Please leave us a review. And we're excited because in November, coming up, we're going to have a month of just some very concentrated, deeper educational content. People have asked for it. We're looking to provide it. See you in the next episode. Bye.