From making $6/week selling worms to making $110M+

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
So, you went from selling worms to... How much money does NFX have under management now?

**James Currier** (0:06)
Close to 1.6 billion.

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
Does that blow your mind?

**James Currier** (0:09)
Blows my mind. Blows my mind.

**Shaan Puri** (0:10)
What are the traits of a savage founder?

**James Currier** (0:12)
Speed. School taught you what time looks like, and now you think this is how the world moves. You're wrong. Your speed bar is wrong.

**Shaan Puri** (0:20)
So, if I'm a founder, what are the most common emotional blockers slowing me down?

**James Currier** (0:24)
The big one is just fear. We have these mindsets bred into us by the normies. Why is it that 85-90% of all returns in tech have come from the Bay Area? It's because the mindsets here are slightly different.

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
So, can you make me smarter as a founder? Because it seems like this is important.

**James Currier** (0:39)
Don't think of yourself as choosing a job or choosing an industry. Think of yourself as choosing a network.

**Shaan Puri** (0:44)
What do you think of people who are investing in OpenAI or the models? Is that where the value is going to accrue?

**James Currier** (0:49)
Yeah, I don't get it. I don't get it. I think they're making a big mistake.

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
What do you think is the juiciest opportunity, whether you're an entrepreneur or an investor?

**James Currier** (0:56)
There is going to be an opportunity, and...

**Shaan Puri** (1:11)
Can you tell your high school story? Because when I was doing my research, it looks like James, Harvard, Princeton, Exeter. You went to the top high school, the top college, the top business school.
So I just thought you must either come for money or just prestige alumni or something, but I guess you were telling me before we started, that's not the case.
I love the phrase you said. They got me out of the mud. I love what you said.

**James Currier** (1:35)
Yeah, they plucked me from the mud. I grew up on the dirt road in Hampshire, about a mile from the nearest paved road. My mom was a music teacher. She made about seven bucks an hour, and my dad was a carpenter. Sometimes she was a hostess at a nearby restaurant. And we had 12 cats and two dogs. We lived in the middle of nowhere. And I would sell worms to fishermen who would be fishing nearby. That was my first job when I was sick. Now, my first job, my first startup was when I was six, and they would come by and they'd need worms to go fishing. And so I would dig them out from under the apple trees that were nearby and put them in the empty cat food cans that we had in the house and sell them for 50 cents. And I would make six bucks a week during the summer because they would come up the driveway and I would just sell them worms. And then I went on to do all sorts of other businesses.
But what happened was in sixth grade, I got beat up by a guy named James Cody. I hope he's doing well, but he was kind of brutal. I'm sure he did not have an easy life because he was making my life hard too. And as my friend Lance Casey picked me up off the ground, he said, don't worry, James, we're going to go to prep school. And I said, what's prep school? And he said, it's where the smart kids go. And I said, do they fight there? And he said, no, they don't fight there. And I said, well, then I want to go there because I'm a small guy. I still weigh 165 pounds. I mean, as my sons call me, who are all now taller than me, they call me a victim weight. Dad, you're still a victim weight. So anyway, fighting wasn't my forte. And so I went home to my dad and I said, I want to go to prep school. And he's like, how did you hear about prep school? And I said, well, Lance told me. Now Lance's dad was like the local surgeon and Lance was half Iranian and half Italian. And the kids kind of picked on him too and whatnot. So he and I were sort of bonded together. And that really changed my life. And so my dad figured out that I needed to take these SSAT tests. So I took the test and then I applied and they let me in. And we didn't have any money. So they just paid for it. So Exeter paid for it. And so that really set my whole life off in a different direction. And I had used clothes from Goodwill and everybody else had fancy clothes.