However long we go back, you've only seen me in one place: the game of business. Dozens of companies scaled to millions a month, and the most recognizable names in business on the client list. My secret ingredient was my mentor, Oren Klaff. Oren is the guy who wrote Pitch Anything, sat on more than two hundred and fifty deals, and raised over two billion dollars. Oren taught me how to pitch. Then he showed me who really gets paid when the pitch works. Together, we play the game of money, and this time we have all the cheat codes. He opened the door for me. I'm holding it for you.
Hear the whole thing from him
Oren's Game of Money, twenty-five minutes. Everything on this page comes out of it.
The board
The game of money has rules, just like every other game. Rule number one: not too early, not too late. Every company that makes it draws the same line, revenue going up and to the right. You want in when that line starts to accelerate and out when it starts to flatten, and you want that to take 18 to 36 months, not 7 to 10 years.
Most people get shown the 100x stuff, crypto, options, no money down real estate, or ten percent slow money in the public markets. Neither builds wealth. The middle is where family offices live.
The board looks like this.
The players
You've changed seats once already. Out of the paycheck, into the business.
If you've played a video game you know the difference between the player characters and everyone else on the screen. These are the player characters in the game of money, and the rule that runs the whole game is the one you already know: position is everything.
Paid for time. Trades hours for a salary, owns nothing on the table, and finds out what the table was worth by reading about it later. Everyone starts here. You did.
Paid for results. Builds the company, carries the payroll, and takes home whatever is left after everyone else gets paid. The number in the press is never the number in your account. This is where you are, and you're good at it.
Paid for the position. He doesn't run the company and doesn't need to. He owns a piece of paper that says what he gets, in what order, and when. What he makes was decided the day he bought in, by how early and how clean, before anyone worked an hour. The paper is only as good as the person who wrote it, which is why this game starts with people.
Paid for the terms. The banker sets the rules of the game and coordinates the play. He creates a security and sells it to the other players. He didn't find the deal. He built it: picked the company, wrote the structure, priced the paper, and took his fee on the way in, whether the company wins or not. His name is never on the pitch, and you have never signed a term sheet he didn't shape. Every deal gives you structure or terms, never both. He knows which one he's handing you.
Paid for the decision. Approves the plan, approves the raise, and votes on the sale. Five seats decide everything, and whoever holds three of them decides who gets paid, in what order, and whether the founder keeps his job. The board never shows up in the pitch. It shows up at the exit.
Each new character is a new level of wealth. We've unlocked all of the characters in the game.
The game of money is played on a board you have never seen before, by players you are not familiar with, using rules that only insiders understand.
Oren Klaff
What I'm doing with Oren
Start with the default, in numbers. Two hundred grand in the index for ten years has historically come out somewhere around six-eighty. Take ten years of inflation out and it's more like five-forty. That's the plan most people are on, and nobody ever says it out loud to them. It hedges inflation. It doesn't build anything.
Ours is different, and it isn't everybody's. We're here to 3x our money. Not beat an index. Not chase the 100x lottery ticket. Ask yourself how many times you'd have to 3x your money before you could say, if you need me, call the satellite phone. Not many. Three, maybe four. That's the whole idea. You stop looking at a deal and start looking at an endeavor. The deal is move one. A 3x is the target we underwrite to, not a forecast, a projection, or a promise of any return, but that is our target and thesis. Positions miss. We say that out loud because the people who don't are selling something.
I'm from Detroit. This city built more than any city in America and owned less of it, because the work was here and the paper was somewhere else. I'm not spending my life on that side of the line, and neither are the people I bring with me.
How does anyone get in? Relationships. The people who funded these companies early are sitting on enormous positions, many times what they paid, and at some point they want to take some off the table. They can't do it on an exchange, because there isn't one. So they sell quietly, in blocks, to people they already know, at a price the two sides agree on in a room. Nobody lets a stranger into a private company. They let in the guy they've done ten deals with, and he brings a few people through with him. Oren has spent twenty years in those rooms. That's the edge, and it's the only one there is.
The first name was Databricks.
Every company is sitting on twenty years of data it can't actually use.
Customer records, transactions, documents, sensor logs. It exists, but it's scattered across systems that don't talk to each other, in formats AI can't read, with no one in control of who can touch what. Databricks is the software that takes all of that mess, puts it in one place, cleans it, governs it, and makes it usable, so the company can actually run AI on its own data.
The software the world's biggest companies use to organize their data, and build AI on top of it.
It's private, so there's no ticker, no market, and no way in unless someone already at the table lets you in. The last round was full before it was announced. Here's what the price has done in twenty months, straight out of the newspapers.
Sources: company statements, August 2026; Forbes, August 13, 2026; PitchBook, August 14, 2026. Reported figures. Nothing projected.
The other side of those numbers: at a hundred and ninety billion, that's roughly twenty-seven times revenue.
When a 100x story finally gets to you, you're not early. You're the exit.
Oren Klaff
Getting into the room is step one, and it starts with a single deal. Databricks is just one example of the level we are playing at.