The $12.6 Billion Lesson I Learned at Age 19

The early 1990s were some of the most exciting – and confusing – years of my entire career.

I was just 19 years old, a kid trying to make it on Wall Street… When the analog world I grew up in suddenly collided with a future no one was prepared for.

To understand the magnitude of the shift we’re seeing today in crypto, you have to remember what life was like back then.

Back then, our offices were still stacked with paper filing cabinets. We used typewriters and fax machines. The personal digital assistant (PDA) – the grandfather of today’s smartphone – didn’t exist yet.

The internet was still called the “information superhighway,” but hardly anyone understood what that meant. I didn’t know a single person who used email. And we still rented our movies on VHS.

Yet even amid that “stone-age” environment, a handful of tech visionaries were making outlandish predictions.

They theorized that one day, we would all be able to:

• Afford our very own cell phones

• Own personal computers

• Do all our shopping on the internet

To most people, this sounded insane. The leap from the world we lived in to the world they were describing was just too big.

But I could see it.

So as a 19-year-old broker, I pitched a company called McCaw Cellular to one of my clients. I told them that within 10 years, everyone in the Western world would have a cell phone and McCaw would explode in value.

To realize how difficult a pitch this was, you have to understand the context: Back in the early ’90s, cell phone service was spotty and very expensive. Only businesspeople used them. And they could easily pay $2,000 per month for service.

Yet, I argued that cell phones would get so cheap, even children would have them.

My older clients couldn’t get behind the idea. I might as well have been telling them we’d all be flying around in cars.

But the ones with open minds opened their pocketbooks… and reaped all the rewards.

In 1990, McCaw’s estimated valuation was $7 billion. AT&T bought it in 1994 for $12.6 billion (about $28 billion in today’s dollars).

McCaw taught me that when transformational technology is mocked, misunderstood, or dismissed… That’s exactly when you want to invest because it’s always mispriced.

Bitcoin, and crypto assets in general, are following the same story – just with far bigger stakes.

Disruptive Tech Is Always Volatile