32m. Founding engineer. Sold my shares and now at 12 million USD. Very excited!

Rags to riches story. Founding engineer at a startup that blew up.

I come from a lower middle class family in India. Never was really good in studies growing up until I went to a bad college where I decided to work hard and fix myself. Fell in love with programming. I was very addicted to it. I couldn’t think of anything other than coding all the time. After college in my first full time job I met the person who went on to start his own company which I joined super early. I used to work 15 hours a day in the early years. Ended up moving to the US in 2 years when the company started to show signs of growth. Company went to Nasdaq and now recently the stock blew up like crazy. It went insane. I was holding all this time.

Finally, I sold recently. 1 month ago. Most of it. Not everything. After selling I had diversified 12M in safe stocks. I have been thinking about selling since IPO but I never did and it finally happened. Couldn’t believe.

After paying taxes, I am now sitting at 12M including my 530k paid off house, an EB5 visa investment of 800k, 230k in 401k and a 65k apartment in India.

I have no debt anymore.

Sent 550k to my sister as soon as I had the money. Also configured a Ferrari for myself which will arrive later. I love cars but I had decided early that I won’t rent one. I will buy when I can or I won’t drive. Recently test drove the car I am buying.

We are happy with our house so won’t move until maybe in many years when this goes to 20 million or something with time.

Thanks for reading my story. I got really lucky while working my ass off. Most people who work extremely hard don’t get lucky and I realize it very well. I am figuring out ways to give it back.