How I Built a $20 Million Company While Still in College

Entrepreneur

5 days ago

Wealth-building in your early twenties isn't about playing it safe; it's about exploiting the one time in life when having nothing to lose gives you everything to gain.
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At 22, I've built two multimillion-dollar companies, raised $1.5 million while taking finals and convinced Miami University to pay me $200,000 to stay enrolled. While my classmates were buried in textbooks and partying, I was burning through sleepless nights and betting on ideas that seemed insane to everyone around me ... until they started to work.
Before those bets turned into a repeatable strategy, it was easy to write me off as just another kid playing entrepreneur. Early twenty-somethings are constantly told to play it safe: Graduate, get the first decent job you can find, stash away 10% of your paycheck, and start slowly building wealth over time. Well, I did the opposite: I ignored all conventional wisdom about how young people should approach money and treated my early twenties like a one-time window to build real leverage.
I didn't stumble into that mindset. I earned it the hard way.
Related: How 15 People in Their 20s Built Million-Dollar Businesses
Your biggest advantages aren't what you think
When I was 19, I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch Step Up Social (now Candid Network) with no credit score, no assets and no real backup plan. You could say I was reckless, and I wouldn't disagree with you in theory, but I would add that the riskiest time to take a swing is also the safest. Had it all gone up in flames, what were they going to take? My dorm room furniture? My favorite sneakers? When you have nothing to lose, you can afford to take the kind of risks that would terrify someone with a mortgage and family.
That freedom is an incredibly precious window of opportunity, and I believe it's the single most overlooked advantage young entrepreneurs have. Everyone talks about surface-level elements like youthful energy or fewer responsibilities, but the real edge is asymmetric risk tolerance. Every year you wait, you accumulate more to lose: relationships, reputation, lifestyle expectations.
The second thing I learned is that diversification protects existing wealth, but what you need to focus on to create new wealth in your early twenties (or anytime!) is concentration. The world tells you to keep your options open? I closed mine — deliberately. I could have spent college doing internships at different companies, building a broad network and exploring various career paths, but instead, I spent four years going deeper into social media marketing and workforce development than anyone my age. That obsessive focus made me better at those things than anyone else my age, which gave me a clear edge when I launched companies in both spaces.
Related: Why Your 20s Is the Perfect Time to Start a Business
The negotiation framework that paid me $200,000
Traditional career advice also gets negotiation wrong. Most people think negotiation is about being aggressive or having leverage, when it's actually about understanding what the other side values and delivering it better than their next-best option.
When I negotiated with Miami University to cover my tuition and pay me for additional work, I didn't lead with what I wanted, but focused on their need for credible student entrepreneurs to showcase their program to donors and media. I knew I could provide that more authentically than any marketing agency because I was actually building companies on campus. I gave them what agencies couldn't — real credibility — and that alone was worth the $200,000 they paid me to stay enrolled.
Most young entrepreneurs undervalue what they can uniquely provide, but the best opportunities always come from thinking like a solution provider, not a supplicant. This works whether you're negotiating with universities, clients or investors, and it works whether you're 21 or 99 years old.
All of this comes down to a different kind of math. The standard path grows linearly: $60K job, 3% raises, maybe $200K if you're a standout by your thirties. Entrepreneurship doesn't follow that curve. You might make $0 for two years and then $500K in one, so while the average return is not dissimilar to that of the traditional job-seeker, the distribution is completely different. Most people can't stomach those early zeros, but young people can.
If you're 22 and living on ramen for two years while building something, that's just an extension of college. If you're 34 with a family, that same scenario is understandably impossible for you to replicate.
Related: What's the Biggest Lesson to Learn As a Young Entrepreneur?
The compounding effect nobody mentions
Wealth doesn't come from predictability, and the biggest mental shift I had to make as a young entrepreneur just starting out was to get comfortable choosing optionality over certainty every time I could.
Instead of optimizing for certainty and steady progress — which leads to building income, not real wealth — the model that twenty-somethings should follow is one that sees them chase optionality and asymmetric outcomes while they can still afford to. Because the biggest advantage of starting wealth-building early isn't compound interest on investments, but compound learning on business skills.
Every deal I pitched at 19 made me better at raising money at 21. Every bad hire I made in college taught me how to build stronger teams later. Every mistake I made early on saved me from making bigger ones when the stakes became impossibly higher. These experiences stack up, transfer across every business you'll ever build and can speed up your growth in ways no traditional job ever could.
Don't expect it to be easy, because it's not. I gained 80 pounds my first year, slept three hours a night and took on projects that could have crushed me if things went wrong. But that's exactly why choosing the uncomfortable path can be so rewarding.
If you ever question betting on yourself as a young entrepreneur, consider that the traditional path will always be there, but the asymmetric opportunities won't. In that sense, your early twenties aren't just a good time to start, but they're the best shot you're going to get.