#101 Nothing and Nobody Will Ever Hurt You Again - After This.

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0:35Respect is earned, not given. I wasn't deserving of respect, and if you're not getting respect right now, it might be because you need to have a little bit more dangerous of a demeanor. Sometimes a chip on your shoulder is worth more than a pat on the back. Stay cool on the surface, baby. Paddle like hell. Never apologize for trying really, really hard. Having a job is hard. Having a business is hard. Choose your heart. That thing in front of you at this moment that you think is going to break you might actually be the thing that is going to catapult you to the next level of the game.

1:06Welcome back to the Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez. I want to talk to you vulnerably today about all the ways I've lost, the lessons I've learned in it, so you can get more comfortable with the truth and thus win more. If you're not failing enough and big enough, you'll never really win. So without further ado, welcome to the official Cody Sanchez low light reel, where I can teach you all the lessons and you can skip my scars. If you didn't get into the school that you wanted to get into, don't worry, I was the exact same way. In fact, I applied to all the big names, you know, the Harvards, the Stanfords, the Yales.

1:39And shocking, I got into none of them. In fact, I barely got into Arizona State University, Harvard of the West, some might say. I think the only reason that that didn't cripple me at that time was I had no money to go anywhere else. And so I went to Arizona State and that actually ended up being the biggest win that I ever could have. What do you mean by that? Well, 60 ,000 students meant that I had to navigate not being that important, being a number, nobody cared about me, nobody was checking up on me. You know, I wasn't special at all. And that meant that I worked really hard. I had three degrees by the end of it.

2:17I got a grant from the Howard Buffett Foundation because when you're not special, but you have a chip on your shoulder, you have the opportunity to prove everybody wrong. And sometimes the chip on your shoulder is worth more than a pat on the back. So then, you know, you might think, well, maybe it gets better afterwards. And once you're done with college, you're going to figure it out. Everything's going to be fine. Well, if you're like me, I had no jobs. You guys, senior year of college, I had no jobs. I was too busy partying, doing things I shouldn't have been doing, going to frat and sorority things.

2:45And the only people that wanted to hire me were like the Associated Press for$18 ,000, which even back then was not enough money. And I was pretty scared. I thought I was going to have to move back in with mom and dad. I was super embarrassed. But maybe that thing that is your biggest fear leads you to do the irrational thing you would not have done otherwise. If I had an easy job come across my plate, maybe I wouldn't have pushed myself to do the irrational thing, which is I went to a finance conference. I sat next to a woman. She ended up being a recruiter for one of the biggest companies in finance in the world.

3:18It's called Vanguard. And I just got curious. Your willingness to ask questions and look stupid while everybody else tries to position themselves, especially when you're young, is what's going to make you stand out. The more you realize you don't really know anything. And the younger you are and the more you try to look like you know everything, the more foolish you actually look. So I sat next to her and was like, I don't understand anything. What do you guys do? How does that work? How does this go? What happened? She gave me a job offer. That job offer made like 3x more than my 18k, which was a lot at the time.

3:49And every single other person in this program, it's called an accelerated development program, every single other person in it, they went to the Harvard's, the Stanford's, the Yale. I was the only public school little kid nerd who was also a sorority girl in it. And if you've ever seen how like ducks look really calm on the surface, but they're paddling like crazy underneath it, that was me. So if that is you right now. That's okay. Stay cool on the surface, baby. Paddle like hell. Never apologize for trying really, really hard. That's what I certainly did. And I thought maybe I'd made it at Vanguard, but then what's going to happen is you're going to feel like this client that you're on, every single time you get to the top, you hit the first peak, there's a big cliff on the other side.

4:28There's a ravine you have to go back down. My ravine was at the end of that year process, you had to find your own job inside of Vanguard. And so they didn't just like give you another job after you went through the program, somebody had to choose you inside of the company to come stay and work in their division. And I came up with an idea for the company. I brought it to the head of my division. The guy's like, cool, this seems like a cool idea. And then what happened? Well, he pulls me back in a couple hours later. I think I'm getting this job. He's like, we've cleared it. This is going to be awesome.

4:58You're going to go do this thing that you really want to do at our other campus. I'm like, great. He pulls me back in and he sits me down. I'm all excited. I've called my parents. I've told them already, like, what if I have to move to this new place, do this thing. And he goes, what do you think your colleagues think about you? And I was like, what? I thought we were talking about this job that I came up with and this cool thing that I could do. It's like, what do you think they think about you? I'm like, Ron, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, can you explain to me? And he goes, well, your colleagues think that you would leave dead bodies behind you to get ahead.

5:27I was like, Jesus Christ. Like metaphorically, physically, I was like 110 pounds soaking wet back then. And I'm trying not to cry, candidly because I don't know what to say to that. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about. And he basically said, well, you know, you never come to the group lunches, you know, you never plan group activities. Apparently, when people come to your desk, you're like too busy to talk to them. They think that you're too good for them. Little did he know that the reason why I was doing all those things was because I was drowning. Like there were all these smart people who had finance degrees.

6:02I was like a journalism background trying to figure out how to keep up with Harvard and Stanford and Yale. and so yeah I wasn't like party planning because I was dying on the inside so so at the end he said so that job that you want to have we're actually going to give it to this other person and I remember going home and I was crying I was super embarrassed I didn't want to tell my parents because I had like proactively told them I was going to do this whole thing but what's fascinating about that is if you flash forward seven years that same person who took that job from me who's awesome and a friend now she became my COO at another company she worked for me and so thankfully the fact that they had been like, no, because you're not nice enough.

6:38You don't smile enough. You don't party plan, Cody. We're not going to gift you this job. I was like, fuck you guys. I'm out then. Okay, fine. Not even like a couple of weeks later, a recruiter calls me for the best company in the world in finance and investing at the time. It's called Goldman Sachs. And when I tell you that like normal kids like me didn't work at Goldman Sachs, like you don't, you don't have like a, like a dad who didn't go to college and a mom who was a special education teacher and go to Arizona State and go work at Goldman Sachs. That just does not happen. So when the recruiter called me about this, I was like, yeah, I'm going to take this call.

7:13And I had such a big chip on my shoulder that I went ham through the interview process. I did everything you could humanly imagine. And I ended up making 3x my salary again. And that took me to Chicago and New York for one of the best investment banking firms in the world. What I learned from my mentor at Goldman Sachs that helped me get the next job was that no matter what you do, if you do one thing right, which is control what gets into your brain, control the inputs and what you consume, that leads to your outputs, aka how you succeed. And since I learned that, I've been obsessed with making sure I only listen to things that feed me.

7:53Things like this podcast. So if you're not already subscribed, this is your moment to do it, to steal all of my Rich Mentor's homework, like my mentor from Goldman Sachs, and make sure that you're not filling your brain with things that aren't going to give you the success you want in life. And so if you aren't already subscribed, if you're not already following us, if you're part of the 60 % of humans that never achieve what they want to achieve fully, I would change that. And I would subscribe to the podcast. The lesson is when you can get around people who are smarter than you, do it every chance you get, especially when it makes you uncomfortable.

8:28You become what you surround yourself with. So if you surround yourself with a bunch of people who aren't winning, who don't make any money, who aren't happy, who aren't married, who aren't having sex, guess what you ain't doing? None of those things. So thankfully I went to Goldman Sachs and again, it was a group of people who lived in worlds I've never understood. That was the first time I heard the term, we summer somewhere. I was like, we summer? I was like, I think everybody summers. There's like a summer and it's a fall. There's this, this is like a thing. What are you talking about. Then I heard all these fancy words and people live lives where they went to international schools.

9:02I didn't leave the country except to go to Mexico, probably when my parents didn't know it, until I was well out of college. I start working in Goldman. I climb my old man up the ladder and I'm the kid, I'm the little duck paddling underwater like a crazy person. And what I learned there is half the time, it's not what you know. It's not how you're doing. It's who you know and even more, who knows you? I was working like crazy. And when I went to go get promotion from kind of the miserable job that it is when you become an analyst, that's the low guy on the totem pole at Goldman Sachs, to trying to get to the next level of the game, it was like rejected, rejected, rejected.

9:39And I remember all these people getting ahead of me and they were really good at a thing you should never feel bad for doing, which is self-promotion if you are good for real things you did. And I remember being pretty jealous at that time about a bunch of people. And I was like, man, maybe it's me. Maybe it's not everybody else. But thankfully, that led me to do some pretty crazy things. I ended up not asking my boss for permission and going to another boss in another division in another part of the company and saying, I want to come work here. I want to come work there. When I kept getting turned down, I kept going.

10:13Finally, one of them says yes to me. I'm like, sick. My boss sucks, but this person sees I'm great. And my boss shuts it down. He's like, I don't care that that other person wants you. Again, I'm going to fill it with somebody else. I was like, son of a gun, I'm really doing something wrong here. So what happened? I leave. But where do I go? I'm like, well, this time I am apparently relatively unemployable. And so if you are also unemployable, just know that most entrepreneurs, the reason for your success will be a bad former boss. and so it's okay if you're semi-unemployable if you don't like the people that you've worked with before have a little introspection to make sure if everybody's an asshole what do we know you you probably are so I'm sure I was in many ways back then um but then I went to uh State Street and the way I went to State Street was different this time I was like okay I want to be a boss not the boss but a boss I want to manage people I want to lead a team and I want to see if I'm any good at this?

11:10And are they bad or am I like unleadable? And so I wasn't really qualified for that at the time. And the best way to get something you were unqualified for is to show, don't tell, is to do proof of work, not proof of resume. And so what did I do? I went out to State Street. I looked at all these jobs they had outstanding. There was one that I thought I could do, which was in Latin America. And I put together an entire business plan. Here's how I would run this division. Here's the client list I would go after. Here's the scripts I would use. Here's the product I would sell. Here's the people I would hire for my team.

11:42Here was my budget. I just put together, like I did all the work and I still didn't get the job. And then I did it three different times for three different people and three different roles at State Street until I swear to God, one of the guys finally called me and he goes, are you this Cody Sanchez girl that is calling all of us? And I said, yeah. I go, can you imagine what I'm going to do for you when I do this, when I don't get paid? What do you think I'm going to do for you when I do get paid? And he was honestly like worn down like a sad dad, you know, after the kids just beating him up. And I was like, okay, cool.

12:13Let's do this. He gives me a job. That job was pretty incredible because that was the first time I got to run my own little team. I got to have people report into me. But if you think I was good at it at first, you're out of your mind. I remember the first time I had to fire somebody, which was like my first employee too, whose name was Ryan. Sorry, Ryan. And Ryan was like straight up Bostonian. I lived in Boston at the time. And I remember nobody respected me. Like respect is earned, not given. I wasn't deserving of respect. And if you're not getting respect right now, it might be because you need to have a little bit more dangerous of a demeanor.

12:42It might be because you're not that impactful of an enemy. So you can't be a very good ally. And that was me. I wasn't really, I wasn't really dangerous on either side of the coin. And so Ryan respected me about as little as a human could. And I remember one day we're at an event and he looks at me and I'm his boss. And he's like, you got any tattoos? And he's Bostonian, so he has an accent. And I at the time did not. I'm like, I do not, Ryan. And he's like, I got one. I'm like, that's cool. I'm excited for you. And he's like, you want to know what it is? I'm like, I feel like you're going to tell me?

13:18And he responds, it's a squirrel reaching right up towards my, and I was like, Ryan, what the, did you just, are you, he goes, my nuts, my nutsack, you get it? I was like, I do. I in fact do get it. Then he proceeds to ask me if I slept with anybody to get this job. And at that point I'm like, we are, we're backsliding here. This is not working out very well. He also proceeds to like not come in with these elaborate stories about why I'm getting in trouble because I got this liability on my hands. And it took me having the balls to do a thing that's like not very well lauded on the internet, which is tell somebody they're not a fit for your company.

13:55Like if you want to get hated quickly, go tell somebody that was hard for you to fire somebody on the internet. It doesn't go over very well. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

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15:06The more difficult conversations you have, the higher the bank account you will eventually have. So that was my first little lesson. I was like, all right, now I got to figure out how to get somebody here who would actually, who I could be worthy of their respect. And I got to live up to that. So then I'm looking to leave State Street, Boston's amazing place. What up, Bostonians? Tell me if I got any of you guys who listen. But it's cold as fuck. And I'm from Arizona. And so I was so cold. I had lived in like New York and Chicago and Boston, also highly recommend. If you stay in the place that you were born, it is really hard to change the human who you were.

15:42Move often. See who you are. You can always go back, but at some point it's hard to leave. So see what it's like when you uproot your tree. So I was ready to leave Boston because I'm a wuss and it was too cold. And I'm looking for my next role. And so I want to switch into a different part of finance. And for you guys, I don't know if you've ever, like, you know you want to get to this next level, but like you can't see the bridge between the two. It's too far. Like you're like, how do I get this ladder from where I am to what I want to be? What I want to be is like not reasonable for where I'm at, but I want to get there.

16:17And that was me. And that's when I really wanted to break into private equity. And so there's one firm at the time that was doing it really well. They're called Credit Suisse. They're not as round as much anymore. But I wanted to work at Credit Suisse and I wanted to run this division there like I was at State Street. and I had to interview it in three continents with 12 different people. I had to pay and fly myself out to those locations to get the job. I remember, I still remember the way the guy laughed at me when I told him that I went to Arizona State. He thought it was a joke. He was like, because I made the Harvard of the West joke.

16:48He goes, ah, oh, you did go to Harvard? I'm like, no, no, bro, I did go to Arizona State. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got three degrees. He goes, do all of them combined equal a real one? I was like, this is going well. I think he likes me. I think we're probably gonna get hired. Shocking, I don't get the job at Credit Suisse. And I'm actually kind of ticked because at that point, I was really qualified. Like I already had the client list. I spoke multiple languages, English and Spanish. I knew the territory. I was already covering it. And they hire this other person. And I'm like devastated. But inside of the thing that I wanted more than anything else was that line from the Garth Brooks song, which is sometimes you should thank God for unanswered prayers.

17:26because what that led to was me building my very first billion dollar in assets under management business in Latin America. I could have gone and been somebody else's employee or I could have built my own company. And the reason why, again, a chip on a shoulder so big, it feels bigger than any back pat. So I go to a company called First Trust, which is awesome. And I'm loving it and I'm building like crazy. And then I get divorced and I'm like, everything's going so good. Total destruction of my life. Lose all my friends, lose my house, lose a bunch of money, feel awful. I'm so embarrassed. We work together at the same firm.

18:13That was a real blast. I'm like the only female, not to play the woman card, but it is true. I'm the only female that runs a division there and all the rest are dudes. So who do you think they like more? Spoiler, not this one. So anyway, they all side with him. I'm still there. It's a total nightmare. And yet I've built this big, huge business where like nothing had been built before. So I was like, you're gonna have to pry this out of my cold, dead fingers. I was like, what do I do? Now I have to like walk away from this huge thing that I built or I have to like see him every day and kind of get these comments.

18:45And I remember like one of them in particular, one of the MDs, I will show it to you. We'll put you, if you see this in the YouTube video, I'll put it up there. I keep it to this day. One of the other, you know, kind of directors like I was sent me an email real late at night, one night, and it just said, you are dumbing down the firm. I'm glad you're happy, but you're ruining the mission that we're on. Something to that effect. You can see the exact words here. You're dumbing down the firm. That's the part that I remember more than anything else. I remember thinking, motherfucker, like, I'm too tired for this.

19:19Like, I'm tired. I'm beat up. It hurts. My heart hurts. I like, you know, I just feel like I'm getting kind of attacked on all sides. And I'm like, I'm just going to give it up. I'm like, I'm going to leave. And I talked to a couple other people at the firm. They're like, you're crazy. You can't leave. You bought this all up. Like, you already lost all this other stuff. You're going to lose this too. So instead, I start dabbling in my side hustles, my little side hobbies. And like, they start growing. And I started like, that's when I start buying companies. If you know anything about what I do online now, I started buying up these little companies.

19:54And I realized one, whoa, thank God I didn't buy these while I was married because that motherfucker would own part of them. So I was like, that's sick. Okay, now I got these side things that are actually making me a ton of money, that helped because, you know, I'm expensive. And so I was like, I can't leave this firm and not have any money. And I don't want to live on my couch. And I like nice things. And I think they lie to you guys when they say that you have to live on your couch in order to have success. I do not think you have to do that. I think you have to do very hard things, but I don't think you have to go to the point of bankruptcy and breaking and all of that in order to win.

20:30And so these things are like making some money. I'm like, this is cool. What to win. If I hadn't gotten divorced, if him and I hadn't gone through that, if all those people at the firm weren't really mean to me, I wouldn't have tried to like get a little safety raft going. Then of course, what happens? I start getting a little notoriety. Like they're covering Cody Sanchez doing this in Latin America. I'm on a magazine cover. That's cool. Well, the CEO comes to me and says, I want to take a walk, which spoiler, you guys, not a great sign ever. So I'm I'm like, oh God, I'm fired. And he takes me on a walk and he basically says, at this company, we get rich quietly, Cody.

21:07And I thought, why can't we like get rich together? Why can't we all talk about what we're doing? I totally disagreed with him. He's like, well, listen, I got a boat and on this boat, we're rowing left. And if you wanna row right, you gotta get your own boat, but you can't stay on mine. And now as a CEO, I understand it back then. I was like, who do you think you are? But I get it, he's right. Those weren't my chips, that wasn't my boat. He has every right to go the direction that he wants. So I had to leave the company. I basically got pushed out. But you know what that led to? I went to another company.

21:36I raised$100 million for that company. And we had a huge fund in an industry that historically didn't. I got three new partners. I was no longer a director, which is like a level here. I was a partner, baby. I was like in the game. I was a player. And that was awesome. And we had one fund and it had incredible returns. And then we have another fawn and it's doing great. And I think I'm kind of like on high, right? And at each stage of these, you guys, my network stacking up, stacking up, stacking up, goes down a little bit, goes back up higher, goes down a little bit, but even higher. And then at this stage, I do a thing that I really hope you do consistently, which is I tell them, I think we need to take money off the table.

22:19We're winning. We're like winning big. And if you learn one thing about money, it should be save some for when it stops shining. You need to have a little cash for a rainy day. And so I was like, man, guys, we're doing so well. We're crushing it. I don't think this is sustainable. I think we better put some cash on the side and move it over. And I remember I was the youngest of the three. I was, there were two ladies at the time, but I was the youngest by far. And they were like, you're out of your mind. Like, this is going to the moon. We're going to crush it. Don't keep talking. We have more experience.

22:55We've seen this before. and I push and I push and I push and they wouldn't listen to me. And so I was pretty upset and I let that be known and I thought I was right. And then one of my employees calls me and he's, what's up LJ if you hear this. LJ's the man. And LJ calls me and he's like, hey, I think they're going to fire you. I was like, they can't fire me. I own part of this place. What do you mean fire me? He's like, they're like digging up, trying to find something on you so that they can push you out because you think that we should do X and you're really pushing for that investment committee.