In 2010 Ryan Graves Responded To A Tweet From The Future Uber CEO Of Uber. Today He is Worth $1.4 Billion!
ByBrian Warneron May 10, 2019inArticles›Entertainment
In my experience, nothing good comes from responding to people on Twitter (or any social media platform for that matter). On the rare occasion that I decide to reply to a critic on twitter, it pretty much always devolves into a series of mud-slinging nasty tweets that do nothing more than waste time and make my blood boil. Even when I respond to a friend over Twitter, I usually end up saying something stupid because there’s only 240 characters. I feel like most people would agree with my opinion on responding to tweets. Most people. Definitely not everyone. Definitely not a guy named Ryan Graves . Responding to a single tweet, turned Ryan into a BILLIONAIRE …
Back in 2008, Ryan Graves was working as a database administrator for GE Healthcare. A job that he would later describe as “not glamorous.” In his words, “the corporate career, 20 years in the same company, was not really my thing. I can’t be the GE guy.”
As unglamorous as GE may have been, at least it was a stable, high-paying job at a time when the world economy was imploding in the wake of the global real estate and financial collapse. Most people would hold onto that database admin job as if their life depended on it. Ryan Graves is not most people.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In 2009, he decided it was time to make a change. He applied for job at the social check-in app Foursquare, but was rejected. Instead of giving up, Ryan took it upon himself to cold call restaurants and bars in his hometown of Chicago, to explain the benefits of signing up for Foursquare. He simply pretended to be an employee!
While working his new dream job at Foursquare, Ryan used his free time to network and connect with everyone he could meet in the startup industry. He paid special attention to anyone doing anything interesting in the app development world. One of the people he ended up following on Twitter was a guy named Travis Kalanick .
GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP/Getty Images
Travis had made a bit of a name for himself as the founder of a handful of companies, most notably a peer-to-peer file-sharing company called Red Swoosh, that was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $19 million. In late 2009, Travis and a friend named Garrett Camp set out to create a new application. Their idea was moving along, but they needed help. It was time to bring a new person onto their team. So on January 5, 2010, Travis posted the following message to his Twitter account:
“Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location based service.. pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved — ANY TIPS??
Within a few minutes, Ryan Graves (from his Twitter account @ryangraves) replied to Travis with the following message:
heres a tip. email me 🙂 graves.ryan[at]gmail.com
As it would turn out, that single tweet reply is by far the smartest thing Ryan has ever done with his life. The “location based service” that Travis, Garrett and Ryan would go on to create, is a little app called Uber .
For his services, Ryan was awarded roughly 3.4% of Uber’s equity. Travis and Garrett each held on to 13% of the company.
Earlier today Uber went public with a rock IPO. At the end of the trading day Travis was worth around $4.9 billion and Garrett was both worth around $3.4 billion. Ryan Graves is officially worth $1.4 billion!!! And it all happened because he responded to one Tweet!
How crazy/awesome is that story?! Good for him!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go respond to some Tweets 🙂
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Future’s Next Big Career Goal: Become A Billionaire
ByJoseph Gibsonon November 30, 2022inArticles›Celebrity News
Reaching billionaire status is a goal that few entertainers reach, whether in the hip hop world or anywhere else in show business. To do so requires not just the good fortune of success but a generous proportion of business acumen as well. Which is why only a few artists have managed the feat. Now, Future says he wants to join the club in an interview with Billboard.
Future released his ninth studio album earlier this year, and the Billboard interviewer asked him what his plans are for his tenth. Instead of delving into his creative ambitions, Future put his goals into purely financial terms:
“My main focus right now is just to do something I never done. One thing I never done is make a billion dollars. I ain’t done that, so I’m focused on that.”
Jerritt Clark/Getty Images
That almost sounds like it could be bragging or self-promotion, but apparently Future is taking the goal of being a billionaire seriously, elaborating that he’s asked unnamed billionaires for advice on how to attain that rare status:
“Sometimes I ask questions, if I meet a billionaire, like, ‘How’d you get to where you got?’ Or, ‘How’d you accomplish everything that you have?’” he explained. “I have those conversations with different people, successful people. But the way I get mine might be different. It just helps me to understand that I’m on the right path when I talk to people that have billions.”
He continues, saying the billionaires he’s gotten advice from seem to think he might just make it into the club:
“When I hear them talk, I be like, ‘OK, I’m on the right path.’ They reassure me that I’m doing the right thing. No matter what my music career is, I want to just be able to have that friend, somebody that always has my back, [and] just priceless individuals getting me wherever I need to go. Even when it’s going crazy for me, I know I have priceless people around me. I got unconditional love.”
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that even music billionaires like Jay-Z or Rihanna didn’t reach billionaire status purely through their recording and performing careers, investing heavily in other industries in order to make it happen. So it’s unlikely that Future would become a billionaire just on the commercial strength of his next record, even if it’s a massive smash. And it’s also unlikely that Future doesn’t know that, so it’s a safe bet that if he’s serious about his billionaire dreams they involve a lot more than just making music.
Future has already seen plenty of success in the music world with a very respectable net worth of $50 million, but he’ll have to see quite a bit more to hit the billion dollar mark. Stay tuned over the next few years to see if he actually makes it.
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