087: 2024 Lessons Learned and the Pivot to Managing Tech Millions

00:01 - 24:15 | Christopher Nelson: 2024 has been an amazing year at TechEquity and MoneyTalk. We have had the chance to help so many different people, technology professionals. We've loved it. But we also realized that for us to reach our mission to help 1,000 technology professionals get to financial independence, we're going to have to change everything. Scaling wealth is more than just investments. If there's one thing that I learned in 2024, it's the importance of being able to manage your portfolio as a business. Here at Tech Equity and Money Talk, we've been educating people on how to build wealth, trading your time and talent for tech equity. How do you manage the money that comes with it? Well, the reality is, we've been doing a good job at both, but we haven't been doing a great job at either. And sometimes if you want to be great, you have to give up something that you love so that you can be great at other things. And in 2025, we're going to change everything to serve you better. Welcome to Tech Equity and Money Talk. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson. And 2024 has been an incredible year for us here at this podcast and our YouTube channel, as we have been diligently executing our mission to help technology employees feel confident and comfortable answering their biggest questions when it comes to how do I work for tech equity compensation as a wealth building strategy and how do I manage the money that comes with it. I'm looking forward to 2025 to be a year of incredible change. Because as I told you before, many times when you are moving forward in building a business, building an educational platform, and you want to do something great, sometimes you have to drop something that you love that has been good as well. In 2024, we started off the year as Tech Careers and Money Talk. That's how the podcast started in 2023. And at that point in time, when I started the podcast, I knew I just wanted to have this conversation. Like there were so many, I just, I remember in my career that there were so many questions that I had and, and there was nowhere to get answers or I had to go seek out the answers, but ultimately there was no, There was no place that people were sitting down and having conversations about money, right? That we know so many Americans feel uncomfortable about money. There's a Pew research study that states that 75% of Americans would much rather talk about religion, politics, and sex than talk about money. And so for those of us who are working for tech equity and trying to build a better future for our families, Where do we go? So that was the impetus that had me start this podcast in 2023. And I just wanted to have a conversation about tech careers and money. As time went on, and I was having these conversations, I realized that the topic was too broad. And we were talking about careers, which has career coaching, getting jobs, a lot of these different elements that weren't really salient to this point that I was really focused on, which is equity compensation and managing the money that comes with it. So then in May of 2025, the team and I got together and decided to serve you better, to provide you clarity and answer better questions for you. We had to change the podcast from Tech Careers in Money Talk to Tech Equity in Money Talk. because that would allow us to have this clear conversation about equity compensation and managing the money that comes with it. As we continue this year, I've really enjoyed all of the conversations, a lot of the teaching that I've been able to provide for you, especially, I know we did the last series of episodes on from equity to exit, which is my framework of how do you strategically work for equity compensation, Build expertise to get more leverage around that. Then you build an evergreen portfolio and then you get to your exit. So I've had a chance to share this framework. Also had an opportunity to interview a lot of different case studies. If you think about David Banks, I also interviewed this year. Bart Finelli, I've interviewed people that have worked for equity compensation as a wealth building strategy and have had some level of exit. There's even more people to talk to as well. So we've had that conversation, but ultimately there's still so much more to do. And so in this episode, I really want to reflect on, you know, where are we? What is, what is this mission that I'm on and how can I best serve you? Cause that's why I'm here. I'm here to serve you. This is my purpose project. That's part of my exit plan. And I'll tell you about that in a moment. And then I wanna reflect on what we will do in 2024? How did we really serve people? And what are we doing in 2025 that's going to be radically different? We're gonna be making some very dramatic changes. And I wanna make sure that you understand everything that we're going to do because all of this is about being able to serve you better. So what was my mission? When I first started, I really had this vision that if I could help 1,000 tech professionals get to financial freedom to the point where they had a portfolio providing them income and they didn't need W-2, that being who they were, they were problem solvers, that they would go and solve some of the world's biggest problems. And I still fundamentally believe that. I still fundamentally believe that if there were 1000 technology employees that had financial independence, they would be out trying to solve some of the biggest problems that we have. The mission is still there. That is still fundamentally my mission. Now, I know as part of that mission, I am really focused on education. How do I help people get comfortable answering some of the biggest questions around career and money? But I ultimately have not deviated from this purpose of getting a thousand employees to financial independence. And so if you think about how I'm going to do that, part of that has to do with my story, right? Everything that I have been teaching here has been my story. As I started my career in technology back in 2002, entering a crazy job market where there was the dot-com explosion, implosion, whatever you want to call it, the dot-com bust, and working for eight years for a consulting company, building incredible expertise around cloud software, especially salesforce.com, I was able to leverage that experience to go work for equity compensation. Now, for those of you listening to the podcast, you know that my first swing was a huge miss. I worked for a company and I made a very emotional decision, a heart decision, not a head decision. So that ended up with no equity. But after that, I started to create a framework. I started to write down and track everything like I was an investor with my time and talent. And I created due diligence processes. I created a network to then go and research companies to work for. After that, what was the result? Three out of the four companies they worked for after that first failure went through an IPO. I made a decision to go work for private companies that were 18 to 24 months before going public because I knew that there was more upside. After I did my first one at Splunk, I created a specialization around helping companies get their business applications, their CRM, and financial systems through a SOX audit. And it was with that specialization that I had very clear opportunities come to me. In that process, I had the opportunity on April 19th, 2012, went through my first IPO and went through a multiple seven-figure payday that unintentionally brought with it, it's called Sudden Wealth Syndrome. So it came with, you know, anxiety, depression, not knowing who to talk to, not knowing who to trust, a lot of challenges. And out of that, you know, my wife and I came together and really crafted a plan that we were going to figure out how to steward, how to manage this money that we'd been blessed with. And so that became sort of another part of the journey. how do we take this money and turn it into a portfolio? Because at that point it became clear I wanted to be able to exit full-time employment technology companies to walk with my sons into manhood. That was important for me as they were growing from boys to men. And I know that there is a band by that name, too. So for all of you guys thinking that, boys to men. So as part of that journey, I ended up building a private equity company that helped create some investments for people. But what I realized is that I wasn't able to serve technology employees by giving them just one or two investments a year. That was not going to help people get to financial independence. As part of this journey, it became clear to me that as I exited from my W2, where my purpose was to help companies grow and scale quickly to get through IPOs, initial public offerings to make money for investors that I really wanted to serve you. That's right. I wanted to serve you because who I'm talking to right now is my past self. I'm talking to the technology employee right now that is working that 24 by seven lifestyle, right? The phone won't stop ringing. The emails won't stop coming. You're not a hundred percent sure what to do. You got this great equity compensation, but ultimately you don't know what to do with it. You've got a lot of money in the bank, but you don't know how do I unlock that to actually get the future that I want? Well, that was me. And my process was to then go and take that equity and to build it into a business. And that's what I've been talking about for the last half of this year. And ultimately, when I think about what has been done to date, 2024 was an exceptional year for us here at the podcast. Also have newsletter tech equity and money news. as we've been growing the lists. And we have been able to help a lot of people. So let me double click on that. I want to walk through a little bit of where we've got to in 2024. But ultimately, it's important that everybody here understands that I am here in front of you, because this is in my exit plan. I wanted to exit with a purpose. I could be sitting on the beach. I could. And sometimes I wonder if I should. But I'm not, because ultimately, I want to help people who are just like me, who were confused and curious, and who didn't know where they could raise their hand and have a conversation about money and how to manage it. Because I didn't come from money. I wasn't raised on how you manage money. But I've, I've learned it. I figured it out. And I'm still growing and learning today. And so I'm excited to share with you where we're going in 2025, because we are going to be answering a lot of those questions. We're going to be solving a lot of those problems very specifically. But first and foremost, let's catch up on what we did in 2024. 2024 was a big year for Tech Equity and Money Talk. While we started off as Tech Careers and Money Talk, Tech Equity and Money Talk that we transitioned to in the May-June timeframe really took off. I mean, even today on our YouTube channel, we're almost at 4,000 subscribers at the end of the year, and we're probably getting 100 new subscribers a day. We have the audio now around 200 downloads a week and continuing to climb. So we're excited about our growth, but what's most important to me is who are we helping? And I can say that 2024 was exciting for me because I was able to spend time on the phone coaching some executives through negotiating equity compensation packages, allowing them to get 20-30% more. I was even able to have conversations with technology professionals just like yourself who were evaluating new equity packages at different companies and being able to understand, should I stay or should I go? It was around halfway through the year that I really started educating and running some small webinars for people that wanted to understand how the ultra wealthy thought about their portfolios. And we were running the five secrets of the ultra wealthy to understand how they thought about money differently. We had, I mean, we kept it off at around 10 people per, webinar, but I was getting so much feedback and so much excitement that from there, I took the way that I managed my portfolio and turned it into a framework called WealthOps, which is a systematic way for people to run their portfolio as a business. In addition, I've continued to publish every week, you know, and this is I think one of the biggest things is that we have been on the air publishing a newsletter for over a year weekly. And then we've been around a year and a half publishing the podcast, dropping every Tuesday, just like clockwork, delivering value to you. And ultimately, the most exciting thing for me is when people After we've had conversations, not in the middle, but afterwards when they've had a chance to reflect and they're feeling more confident and more comfortable about their decisions. Just say, thank you. And just let me know how much more confident, how much more clarity they have in their decisions because of the information that they have. Because ultimately that is this thing that brings me joy is allowing you to see you be successful in negotiating and building wealth with equity compensation, and then also getting clarity on how to manage your portfolio as a business. And so, 2024, we're excited. We're putting a pin in it. But when it comes to 2025, we knew that we had to make some hard decisions. Some of the things that made us good in 2024 were not going to make us great in 2025. And ultimately, to serve you the best, to be able to provide you a real opportunity to get to financial independence, I knew that I had to mix things up. I had to change things. And so what I wanted to do first is reflect on what was the biggest lesson that we learned in 2024. The first half of the year, tech careers and money talk, what I realized is that talking about career and everything that can go with career, like finding a job, publishing a resume, career coaching, how do I grow in my career, and then money, are just two really big topics. And so we had to get clarity. And I wrote this down when we went through this exercise in June. As I said, clarity builds confidence. And when you have that confidence that builds commitment. And that was really what drove us through the second half of the year to really focus on how we give you more case studies? How do we give you more frameworks? How do we give you more skills that allow you to work for equity compensation to build wealth and manage the money that comes with it? Ultimately, I felt though that we did not do enough. We didn't do enough. We did not really move the needle. I think we put a lot of great information out there. I think that we started a lot of conversations, but we didn't finish them. We didn't give people the clarity that they needed to understand how they were going to get to financial independence. So this is why in 2025, we are making another dramatic change. I'm telling you here today on the 31st day of December 2024, that moving into 2025, there's no longer going to be tech equity and money talk. It's going away. We are going to put that brand on the shelf. Now, is it going to be deleted? I don't know. I'll tell you later. But the reason is, we know now that we have the clarity that if we want to serve you, we need to put it on the shelf. How do you build wealth working for tech equity? Now, this is hard for me. I wanna make sure that you realize this is not something that is just easy . Oh yeah, that's the right thing to do and I put that away. I have literally been writing a book since 2019 on how do you strategically work for tech equity as a wealth building strategy, putting that on the shelf, right? I've worked and written article after article to support that. So it is going on the shelf and I wanna tell you why. The reason is that the people that are coming to this podcast, the people that are coming to the newsletter, the people that are showing up to the webinars are people that have built the wealth they have from 1 million to 20 million in equity and in investable assets. And they want to understand how to turn that into a portfolio business. that can get them to financial independence. Essentially, there's a set of people that are knocking on the door of financial independence and want to know how to walk through. That's also personally where I am. I'm in the right smack dab in the middle of it. I have been managing a multiple seven-figure portfolio for a number of years and continue to do it. That is ultimately my first job outside of what was my W-2 is to manage my portfolio. That is a generational asset that needs to be continued to create income and grow for the next generations. I'm passing that on to my kids. So what's going to happen next? Well, coming into 2025 tech equity and money talk is now going to become managing tech millions, managing tech millions. That's the new brand coming to you. It's going to be on the same channel. If you've been listening, you don't have to change the title and everything is going to update. Same thing. If you're subscribed to YouTube, we're just changing the name. It's going to be me, but it's going to be focused on how you manage your money as a business. I'm going to be introducing and inundating you with my Wealth Ops, which is the systematic way that I manage my portfolio month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. And that has been driving results year in and year out, providing income for me and also growing as well. I'm going to be giving you more and more detail. Why am I doing this? I believe that by doing this, by eliminating tech equity, focusing on managing tech millions, I'm going to be able to help accelerate people to financial independence faster. I also believe that I'm going to be able to understand what it is to truly serve people with a content educational platform that will help them achieve their goals. Because that's ultimately what I want to do. I don't want to just be somebody who's sharing what I'm feeling, building a big audience, but nobody's really able to do it. I want to help people move into action. I want to help people understand what it feels like to transition from a money maker to a money manager. I'm also going to be launching the Wealth Ops Collective, which is going to be an application only community. So we're going to admit people into a community so that we can be managing our portfolios together. They're gonna be deep into implementing Wealth Ops. I'm gonna be walking them through everything in a single step. And the people that are admitted to the community are going to watch me invest and manage my multiple seven-figure portfolio in front of them as I grow up from seven to eight figures. They're gonna watch me on that journey and understand the good, the bad, the ugly. And it's gonna be a conversation with astronauts and not astronomers. Right, this pivot, while painful, I truly believe is going to be able to help more people get to the exit sooner. Now, how do you build wealth working for tech equity? I'm not finished with that. I do believe that there is an opportunity and a product around making those tech millions that still lies there, but I can't address that. I got to put that on the shelf for now so that I can serve you and help you get to financial independence as well. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a big pivot. I know my team and I are working on the rebrand right now. The one thing that's also gonna happen, I wanna make sure that everyone is aware of is that the podcast, the newsletter are gonna have the same name, Managing Tech Millions. There's not gonna be talk and news. It's just gonna be one brand. We're gonna be moving it to a single platform so that everything is there to serve you. And then we're also gonna be giving some free masterclasses throughout the year that you can sign up for and you can attend these masterclasses because I want to give away education. And in the process, I want to understand who wants to take that to the next level, who really wants to take that education and really then start applying it and building something that they can manage for multiple generations. I am incredibly excited about 2025. I have clarity. I have so much clarity that it gives me energy. And this is what I talk about. Clarity gives you confidence, gives you commitment. And that's truly what I'm feeling. I want to make sure that you are excited about this journey too. If you have questions, go to the YouTube page, comment under this episode, or go to the newsletter makingtechmillions.com, subscribe there, reply to one of those newsletters and ask me why. Ask me what's going on. Ask me what you can do. You can always go to linkwithchristopher.com. You can link with me on LinkedIn. Ask me questions there on my DM. I'm here to serve you. And ultimately, this is at the end of 2024. We are signing off from Tech Equity and Money Talk for the final time for this year. Who knows if it'll come back later, but Tech Equity and Money Talk, I want to sign off. And next time I'm going to see you on Managing Tech Millions. Thank you so much for being a listener, a subscriber. Thank you for all your feedback as we've been on this journey. And I look forward to seeing you in the next year.