My Teen CEO Mentor From A Multi-Million Dollar Company
10 years younger, miles ahead
We met at a Japanese tech company where I had been working as an intern for months. After joining as an advisor and writing the white paper in the first month, the young person then flew in the next — this time as CEO.
The contradictive prodigy framework
You did your hair for more than 3 hours…
to make it look like you just climbed out of bed?
Yes, pretty much.
-Marhsall and Ted from How I Met Your Mother
Everything looks effortless, yet there is obviously a grind behind it. The world is not black and white, but binary instead. Enigma right?
A LinkedIn message comes in with an offer to speak at an event. A simple “sure” is sent as a response and minutes later my mentor is listed as a keynote speaker. This would have cost any other company tens of thousands of dollars, but not our youngster.
How Does it Work?
This little fox built a personal brand value by spending countless hours sending custom messages on LinkedIn, creating custom content, and inhaling knowledge like it’s air. Let’s start from the beginning.
Interested in tech, lending some money caved a path to go to a Hackathon. There, the youngster met a Japanese start-up and offered to help out with this new technology called Blockchain.
After working remotely at first, the now new person in charge made it a point to also constantly go way beyond what was asked for. When prompted to write a draft document, what must have been the 20th version got handed in, almost everything was done before anyone had the chance to ask for it.
How much would you ask for as CEO?
$10,000 a month
Ok.
Later I was told with a chuckle they had just randomly spouted a high number. We are talking about a minor, yet I believe a lot more could have been asked for and it would have been worth it for the company. The youngster restructured the company, closed hundreds of deals in months yet approached everyone with humility.
I just want to make a good product.
The backbone
Templates, LinkedIn Learning courses, and writing an absurd amount of emails and messages. Pragmatic and efficient. A framework enabling a newcomer to compete with the big dogs. Not doing anything the traditional way. It wouldn’t work.
I need to follow up with this person, but I need to send value with every message. I will write a Forbes article for them first. I will write a meaty article for a Forbes editor so he or she publishes the first one for me.
In a course about cold messages, the youngster would learn about getting an introduction from someone else first. Young took it as offering the person they wanted to reach out to connect with someone from their own network. This fox had flipped it. It flipped everything.
Cool! John McAfee got back to me about the podcast I suggested with Guy Kawasaki. Maybe Roger Ver wants to join too.
Everything this youngster does feel natural. It’s not celebrities. It’s just messaging a bunch of friends about going to a party. I have to remind myself that these are incredibly hard to reach multi-million dollar tech giants yet I watch this prodigy play it smooth like milk-first-cereal.
The Art Of 😊
Young always confirmes any assumption, including their own. Works over 100 hours a week, but doesn’t do anything that is particularly hard or not very enjoyable. Also uses every asset at their disposal and on top of that, creates synergy wherever possible.
I could make millions with day trading. I made $10k with it last month, but it was so boring so I’ll stop. How? I practiced it for many years when I was younger.
Young was referring to when they were a kid. They had been paper trading with simplified interfaces for fun for a long time. This is what guides and self-help content doesn’t tell us. It’s never just a talent, there is a lot of work and interest behind it all.
6 figure mindset
- Gets paid to run the company,
- but also gets commissions from closed deals.
- More pay for doing the company’s content marketing — articles on big outlets
- but also from the publishers themselves.
- This in turn keeps increasing Young’s brand and SEO making more people reach out — brilliant
Who reads boring PR anyways? I will write about a lot of cool new tech stuff and link to our prototypes in between
Now Young writes a book, several articles a day, manages the company with their streamlined process, and still has half of the day to read. Young reads a book worth of carefully selected articles every other day.
On their first month on Medium, Young immediately made over $2000 aside from payroll and commissions— not that Young needs any of that. If this was any other person you would think it’s a scam. I have witnessed it all with my own eyes. Young aims high and puts in a lot of effort, but Young’s biggest strength is filtering.
Conclusion: Literally off the charts
This youngster is to study what Henry Ford was to manufacturing. Videos run at 2–3 times the speed, half a book is skipped until the valuable gem chapter appears and mastered the art of knowing when to keep going and when to cut your losses and try something else.
You hear too much about what worked. Oh my god did I waste many hours trying stuff. Like holy sh-
Young’s ways are contradictory and impressive. Did you notice how not once age, color, or origin mattered? I even purposefully avoided even mentioning the gender. There is a certain point at which you are too far ahead for anything but your skill to matter.
But it’s not Young’s ability I can’t keep up with, it’s the mindful approach. It’s a blessing to be able to work side by side with this 10 years younger prodigy that defies all common standards.
