From $4/Hour to $4 Billion Net Worth

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
If I told you that a kid flunked out of first grade, I don't think the first thing you would say is, that's a future billionaire.

**Hayes Barnard** (0:05)
You probably would have joined the crowd of people that made fun of me for being dumb.

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
Today, he's known as this guy you see on the cover of Forbes, tech entrepreneur, this billionaire, sun god because of all the work he's done in the solar industry. But the crazy thing about Hayes is that his story is very much a started from the bottom story.

**Hayes Barnard** (0:23)
A lot of great leaders that are level five leaders, there's daddy issues, there's learning disabilities, there's a near-death experience.

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
Hayes pretty much never does podcasts. I pulled the friend card, I asked him to do this because I think he's got a story worth telling.

**Hayes Barnard** (0:35)
I've never told that one before, definitely on camera, but...

**Shaan Puri** (0:39)
You're in the eye of the storm, right? Like, oh wait, some prime mortgage crisis, you're in the mortgage business.

**Hayes Barnard** (0:44)
I would like literally throw up in my driveway before I could go see my family every night.

**Shaan Puri** (0:48)
You said the difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it.

**Hayes Barnard** (0:52)
A lot of people quit when it gets hard. Sometimes you don't even know you're quitting, you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit.

**Shaan Puri** (1:00)
What was it like meeting you on the first time?

**Hayes Barnard** (1:05)
Well, when I met Elon for the first time...

**Shaan Puri** (1:16)
I think what's interesting about your story, because I have all the research here, and if I just zoom out and I just think about it, I think, how does a guy who flunked out of first grade end up one of the-

**Hayes Barnard** (1:26)
Miss Macy's class.

**Shaan Puri** (1:27)
Yeah, shout out to Miss Macy. How does that guy end up where you are today? Super successful, you've built a $10 billion company. You're doing what a lot of entrepreneurs want to do. If I think about how I got into entrepreneurship, what would have been the win? The win would have been, I'm having fun, I am building a company that matters, I'm having the success, I'm doing it with talented people. One of your co-founders is a fourth grade friend.
So that is winning to me and you've done that. And so I think what's exciting to me is to hear, I guess, how you approach this, how you've gone from the guy who can flunk out of first grade to make that happen. If I had met you when you were a kid, maybe 12, 13 years old, 14 years old, would you call yourself like, were you really ambitious then? Were you really smart?

**Hayes Barnard** (2:11)
Oh, if you would have met me in grade school, you probably would have joined the crowd of a lot of people that made fun of me for being dumb.
I would go to this room called the resource room, and the resource room for kids that couldn't read. So then I would go, and I would write all my letters backwards, and they would give me a Dick and Jane book to read in the third grade and I would struggle through it, and it was soul-crushing.

**Shaan Puri** (2:37)
You're dyslexic, right?

**Hayes Barnard** (2:37)
Yeah. I have dysgraphia and a form of dyslexia.
No one knew what it was in those days. People just thought you were stupid, and people just thought that you just couldn't read and you couldn't keep up, which is why I flunked the first grade. So it's not fun when you flunk the first grade, when all your friends that go to the second grade make fun of you every year for basically 12 years of your life, to know you're the kid that flunked the first grade. Because, oh, we were all friends in the first grade, and then you didn't go with the rest of the kids. And so I had a lot of self-confidence issues, I would say. I had a lot of questions about whether or not I was even going to be able to provide for myself at that moment in time. I overcompensated with sports. I guess I overcompensated with, you know, trying to be a dynamic person. I don't know that I overcompensated in the best ways, but I had a couple teachers that took me under their wing. There's this one guy, Ron Edwards, he was the gym teacher. He was this amazing guy, man. And, you know, you gotta imagine, I don't have a father, I'm raised by a single mom, and he kind of stepped in and he would be like, he knew I loved football. And he would say, look, Hayes, do you want to go in at the time the St. Louis Cardinals were there? And there was this quarterback, his name was Jim Hart, and there was this running back, his name was OJ Anderson. And that was like my outlet, that I was like a fast runner, you know, cause I wasn't good at school.