How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years

A Couple of years ago I wrote a post about how it was the year you had to quit your job. I gave the reasons why.

It wasn’t a gung-ho “you have to be an entrepreneur” article. It was more: bad shit is happening in the corporate world and bit by bit you’re going to feel the urge to quit.

Correctly, many people asked, “well, what’s next? What should I do?”

I’ve begun asking people who did it.

What did they do? How do you quit your job and basically, make a million dollars?.

Not everyone is Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. Not everyone is going to drop out of college and create an iphone or a time machine or a toilet that resizes itself automatically depending on who is sitting on it (although that would be pretty cool).

Some people would simply like to quit their jobs and make a good living. Some people would simply like to quit their jobs and make a million dollars. In that movie (the Justin Timberlake vehicle), JT says, “A million’s not cool. A BILLION is cool.”

Well, actually, very often a million is pretty cool. Not everyone is going to be a VC funded $100 million hotshot.  Sometimes it’s nice to make a million dollars, be your own boss, and use that financial freedom to catapult to success.

So  I called Bryan Johnson, who started a company called Braintree. You might not have heard of Braintree but you’ve heard of their customers. They provide credit card transactions or payment services for companies like  OpenTable, Uber, Airbnb, etc.

I’ve never spoken with Bryan before. I am not an investor in Braintree. As far as I know I’m not even an investor (unfortunately) in any of the clients of Braintree.

I like to call people who I think have interesting stories and hear what they have to say. That’s the way I build my network of not only financial contacts but potential friends. I’m shy and ugly and don’t have many friends.

But I knew Bryan had an interesting story of how he set up Braintree and I figured it would fit this category of “what do I do next?”

In 2007, Bryan was a mid-level executive at Sears. He quit his job and within two years was making over a million a year for himself. Eventually Braintree grew much bigger and raised $34 million from Accel and others but that  wasn’t what was interesting to me.