This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.
Noah Kagan always wanted to be rich.
As a school-age kid, he sold Costco pencils at a mark-up to his classmates and as a preteen, he pocketed the money his mother gave him to spend at his summer camp’s canteen. He tried out the usual carousel of teenage jobs: retail gigs at Macy’s and OfficeMax, counseling at a computer camp, selling popcorn and candy at the baseball field.
But as a native of Silicon Valley, Kagan knew that the pathway to riches ran through the world of tech. “My dream was Microsoft. If I could be around Bill Gates, who at the time was iconic … that’s the path that I wanted to follow,” he says.
Kagan’s parents took him to visit the campus in Redmond, Washington, for his 17th birthday.
In 2005, at age 23, Kagan found himself working for what would become another tech giant with an iconic founder: Facebook. And in a story that everyone in venture capital and tech circles has a version of, he could have been very, very rich had things worked out. Kagan’s position paid just $65,000, but also came with a 0.1% stake in a company that’s currently worth about $947 billion. Do the math.
Facebook fired Kagan in 2006 after he leaked company information to the press at Coachella.
“I was shocked,” Kagan says. “I’m 24 years old and working what I believe is the most important thing on the planet. I lived in a house with six other Facebook people a mile away. So it was my entire, frankly, existence.”
With he benefit of hindsight, though, Kagan, now age 41, admits that the firing was not only justified, but also put him on a path to where he ultimately wanted to be.
“It’s a good experience to get fired and realize, you might want to take control of your own destiny and be an entrepreneur, and you have that option to do what you want to do,” he says.
He’d go on to do just that, founding discount software website AppSumo in in 2010….
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