| Chapter 1
Just Fu**ing Start
Begin Before You Are Ready
Noah, today's your last day."
That June day in 2006 was just like any other. I woke up at the Facebook house where I lived with the other guys who worked in Mark Zuckerberg's dream world.
That morning, we all drove to the Facebook offices in Palo Alto. I sat down and began playing around with some modifications to a new feature I had helped invent called Status Updates. Suddenly the guy who'd hired me-who's now worth $500+ million-said, "Hey, let's go to the coffee shop across the street to talk about work."
It had been nine months, eight days, and about two hours since I was hired as Facebook's thirtieth employee. I was just twenty-four years old, and here I was among the smartest collection of people I'd ever been around, led by a man-child who seemed even then like he was the smartest of them all. Ivy Leaguers. Big brains. Coders and entrepreneurial savants. All of us doing what we believed to be the most important, impactful work in the world. I got 0.1 percent of Facebook in stock, which in 2022 would have been worth about $1 billion. It was heaven.
Life moves fast. In a matter of seconds I went from living my best life ever to a feeling of deep shame and embarrassment.
Matt Cohler (early Facebook, LinkedIn, and a general partner at Benchmark) called me a liability-a word I've heard echoing in my nightmares ever since.
Most notable: While I was partying with colleagues at Coachella, I leaked Facebook's plans to expand beyond college students to a prominent tech journalist.
I was self-promoting, using my role and experiences at Facebook to throw startup gatherings at the office and write blog posts on my personal website. As the company grew from baby to behemoth, the talents that allowed me to thrive in startup chaos became, well, liabilities in the structure of a corporation.
"Is there anything I can do to stay? Anything at all," I pleaded. Matt just shook his head. In twenty minutes, it was done.
I spent the next eight months wallowing in grief on a friend's couch, dissecting every bit of what had happened. It was a defining moment. A before and after.
Part of me had expected something like this from the moment I'd been hired at Facebook, surrounded by these super-nerds always talking about changing the world. It made me insecure about who I was and what I had to offer. I was not a member of the same club those guys came from, a bitter fact I'd swallowed years earlier in high school.
I was born and raised in California, grew up in San Jose. My father was an immigrant from Israel and didn't speak English, at least not well. He sold copiers, and I knew I didn't want to do that. Lugging around a copier is heavy, sweaty hard work. My mom worked the night shift at the hospital as a nurse, and she hated it. I didn't want to do that, either.
It was pure luck that I ended up going to Lynbrook High, one of the top 100 high schools in the United States. I was an average kid in a competitive Bay Area school full of the sons and daughters of America's tech elite. My best friend Marti would go on to work as a senior developer at Google; another of my best friends, Boris, was number twenty at Lyft. Other guys sold companies to Zynga for millions. Being around these people in school opened my eyes and elevated me.
But it didn't make me one of them. To get into Berkeley, I had to sneak in the side door. I got into Berkeley's spring semester doofus class (they called it extension), solely because another freshman dropped out and their spot opened up. Worse, during my freshman year I, a native-born American, was placed in ESL (English as a Second Language!) because I tested so poorly in English on the SAT. Honestly, I don't know how Berkeley let me in.
The early years of my career were filled with "almost successes." I got an internship with Microsoft my junior year. Normally, anyone who gets an internship with Microsoft gets a job; I was rejected because I performed poorly on interviews. Then I had a job offer at Google pre-IPO. Google rescinded my offer because I couldn't do long division. LONG DIVISION!
And then of course Mark Zuckerberg fired me.
At that point in my life, I felt like I was not worthy of success. I was not good enough. It felt like I'd already lost the game, and that everyone around me was better than me. I still struggle with those feelings at times.
And yet, even then, I knew I had something, a spark-or really, the ability to create sparks-but my gift was rough, messy, a talent that wasn't yet a skill. I had this incredible knack for choosing great opportunities, but I kept failing.
On that couch after my Facebook firing, I tossed and turned under a blanket of shame. I couldn't imagine anything worse happening to me the rest of my life. I'd been just three months away from being partially vested (don't remind me). My confidence was shot. Maybe they were right? They said I was worthless, incompetent, inferior.
They being the voices in my head.
Though I couldn't have told you this then, the best thing that emerged out of that period was a realization: I have got to figure out how to do entrepreneurship my own way and share those experiences along the way.
And so I no longer hid anything. I told everyone about my "failure." Years later, it even became a calling card. "The guy who was fired by Facebook!" And people loved it! My fears about what other people thought of me were totally overblown.
Deep down I felt liberated by my failure-not liberated to keep getting fired and lose billions of dollars, obviously. But liberated from the fear of doing things my own way; liberated to play and experiment, to find my own path.
And as a result, it lit a fire under my ass to get going on my own.
Experimenting
Show me an experimenter, and over the long run, I'll show you a future winner.
-Shaan Puri
And so I started again.
The next few years I tackled every business opportunity, no matter how random, that came my way-daydreaming about some big, splashy score that would redeem my self-worth and, more important, allow me to show Mark Zuckerberg what a mistake he'd made.
I was young, stupid, and reckless, but I was also learning fast-cue the montage music. I'd quickly start an online sports betting site, realize I hated sports, and then find myself suddenly traveling South America and Southeast Asia for a stretch. It was an endless experiment of launching side hustles, website ideas, and adventures in lifestyle design. I . . .
？ Taught students online marketing on Jeju Island in Korea
？ Consulted for startups like ScanR and SpeedDate
？ Set up a startup versus venture capital dodgeball tournament series
？ Blogged for my site OkDork and launched Freecallsto
.com to cover the emerging internet phone call industry
？ Launched peoplereminder.com, a personal CRM website
？ Started Entrepreneur27.org happy hours and local events like chess meet-ups
？ Created a conference business called CommunityNext that started pulling in $50,000 per event doing what I would have done for free-bringing together emerging business stars, like Keith Rabois, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Tim Ferriss
It was during this time that the variables to the Million-Dollar Weekend formula came together . . . and not just for starting a business, but for creating a life that felt free and fulfilling thanks to entrepreneurship.
Each day a new experiment, a new lesson learned, living for the rush that only possibility can bring, until one day a friend showed me a product in development from an unknown company that was then called My Mint. The founder, Aaron Patzer, had created a tool to help people manage their finances, and the prototype he built blew me away. At the time I was blogging on my site Ok |
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