Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire?? (#510)

TL;DR

Ishan, Sean’s former intern hired at 18 for $30k/year, built a multimillion-dollar portfolio through high-risk crypto bets—most notably buying shares of delisted Animoca Brands at an 80–90% discount, which later rose to a $6B valuation. He subsequently co-founded Shuffle, a crypto casino that reached a ~$50M monthly revenue run rate within months of launching.

Key insights

• Hiring inexperienced people means they lack conventional boundaries and will launch experiments quickly without hesitation, but also require more management.
• Many entrepreneurs misuse the word “experiment” by not defining a win condition; they try random things without a clear success/failure metric.
• The crystal e‑commerce experiment had a ROAS of ~1.7–2x, which seemed bad because the founder had heard a 3–4x benchmark, but in retrospect that was actually a good result for the niche.