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Hy! I am Mike Costache.
R: Tell us some about your career path from T1 until T0. How did you get where you are now, how hard it was, what did you find relevant up until now?
R: Tell us some about your career path from T1 toT0. How did you get where you are now, how hard it was, what did you find relevant up until now?
MC: First of all, everything is hard. It depends from which perspective you are looking at the situation.
My first job was when I was 11, in Israel, when I arrived with my family in 1988. I wanted to buy a 100 dollars bike.
Because I did not have money, I decided to get a job and make money by selling tomatoes and onions in an open market.
So that's how I earned money for the first time. However, I didn't buy that bike, but several broken and cheaper ones and I made one bike out of 6.
So this was my first job. If I were to skips just after graduating from university, my first real job was in investment banking in a company in L.A, where I actually graduated from university.
Afterwards I moved to another investment banking company and so on, until somebody told me that 5 years were enough working for other investment banking companies and that I should create my own company.
Because at 23 years old I was to young to open my own investment banking company, I opened a Search Engine Optimization company with a friend during university years.
This grew into a larger company with 26 of our own websites. We stopped optimising for others and we were doing it only for ourselves.
When we made a quarter of a million per month, in the 24th-25th month, I sold my shares and started coming more often in Romania.
One of my wishes was to come to Romania with a foundation and help disadvantaged children from orphanages.
This was the path that brought me back to Romania.
Here I obviously couldn't stay for more than a couple of months doing only charity so I started little by little to bring world known brands from the US in Romania.
R: How old are you now?
MC: In 2012 I turned 35 years old.
R: What did you find relevant throughout your path? What difficulties did you encounter and how did you overcome them? What motivated you to move forward?
MC: The most difficult thing was realizing at a young age, that I was, probably, the worst employee somebody can have, because if it wasn't explained to me or I didn't understand why I have to do a task, i wouldn't do it.
As a consequence, I couldn't get along with my employer. That's why I was always looking for an alternative to being someone's employee. For this reason I have worked only in 3 companies.
At Pizza Hut when I was 18, I was a delivery boy in New Jersey.
I worked for my university in Los Angeles as a lifeguard and several other jobs or internships.
And I've worked at Marriott when I was 17 as a lifeguard. Well, I've also been Santa Claus, worked at the front desk, as a bell boy and so on..
Otherwise, even in the investment banking companies I wasn't their employee.
I realized that it was better to be a consultant, to have my own company and make a contract between me and the client.
To come back at your question, the most difficult thing was to overcome this mind set that I didn't want to be somebody's employee.
Because if I am somebody's employee, I have to give my time to someone in exchange of a relatively fix sum of money.
Time is a commodity that you will never get back. Once the seconds are gone, you cannot do anything to save them.
You can only invest them in acquiring intelligence and do something with it. For you, your family and obviously for as many people on this planet so you can buy, what I call "buying your eternity" while you are still on this earth.
Because this physical body will die.
If I don't eat for 20 days, I die.
I am on the street and a tram hits me, I die.
If I do everything right, by the time I reach 100 years old, so in 65 years, I will die.
So whatever I do, this body will stop existing one day.
And by understanding these things at 19 years old, when I studied intensively psychology and philosophy, mostly the Greek philosophy
I decided to do something with my life, more than I can consume
because by constantly consuming, by buying a house bigger the previous one, and the one before that, you will still end up in the same place. Dead.
so if you will eventually die, what do you want to leave behind?
what do you need to do to have your statue build in front of the town hall? I am not referring at a statue per se, but rather at what good did you do for people to remember you.
so by understanding this at an early age, 19, I did my best not to be someone's employee
knowing that when you are someone's employee, you give time, receive money, time goes by and you are left with that money that you actually have already spend to insure a lifestyle
R: You said you have been working from an early age. Did your parents have significant financial resources?
MC: when we left my mother was a Physics and Chemistry teacher in a high school in Bucharest.
My father was an engineer at ICRAL (the Company for Building Repairing and Administrating Locomotives)
so I don't come from a rich family, but a normal one. In Israel when we arrived, my parents got a job and they were making enough money to have a decent living: an apartment, a car and so on.
I cannot say my family had no money at all. But when I wanted a $100 bike when I was 11 and my mother's salary was $800/month, rent was $350, it's easy to tell your child I don't have $100 to give you
And if you tell me that it's not possible, it doesn't exist, or you don't have, I have to find a way to have..
R: How big was your parents' influence on the way you think today?
MC: I don't know how to define it exactly but it wasn't to big because they were all the time occupied and preoccupied to leave from Romania in Israel and after in the US
I remember clearly that until I was 18, when we got the Green Card and knew we can stay indefinitely in the US, that we had the right to work and that nobody will kick us out
until that moment my parents had always been extremely preoccupied with making possible to stay in the US and work there legally. And we have always did it legally.
R: What does education mean to you? How did the formal and informal education help you?
MC: I have helped several people in getting into university, especially the one I graduated from, Pepperdine University in Malibu.
And I always tell them, it doesn't matter the name of the university written on your diploma nor the classes you took.
What matters is how you developed as a person during those 4 years of university and what friends did you make, because those friends can be your future employers, employees, investors, lawyers, accountants etc.
That's how I define education.
You are in a system, you have to pay some money or if you have as I did a scholarship and a loan. This is how I define an educational environment where you develop yourself.
I find very important, not necessarily the education but the environment.
During my presentations to students, I show them 2 pictures: one of a hen and one of an egg. And I asked them what was first, the hen or the egg.
And I leave them to debate until the majority reached the conclusion that it was God, and the game ends.
And the next slide in my presentation is the picture of a nest. So I tell them that without that nest you wouldn't have had the place to put the egg.
It's not relevant to keep looking to the absolute truth, because I personally think we will never find it.
Today, in 2012, the evolution of our brain doesn't help us reach that conclusion. So the conclusion I have reached is that the nest should exist from the beginning.
That the nest has to be built by someone else it's beside the point. We won't get into that discussion.
The nest is the equivalent to the environment I had mention previously, where you develop yourself
R: If you were to give 3 advices to someone that comes to you and says "I want to develop, to grow", what would those advices be?
My first advice would be to read a book written by Napoleon Hill in 1938 called "Think and Grow Rich" which means thank and you'll be rich.
And rich doesn't necessarily mean wealthy, but also spiritually and personally rich.
And rich doesn't necessarily mean wealthy, but also spiritually and personally rich.
It's a book recommended to me when I was 17 and I have read it several times since.
Well, as you evolve, it's better to re-read it because you discover new things. So this is my number one advice.
The second one would be to apply what you read in the book. And the most important thing this book teaches is that if you wish to become an important person, you firstly need to believe, to visualize yourself there
You have in a way, to lie to yourself every day and to use 10 minutes per day to reflect on your wish.
It's like when I was little and wished for the bike.
Daily, I was constantly repeating "I want a bike, I want a bike.." And your brain reacts immediately by saying "Are you crazy? Why are you repeating this over and over again? It won't do you any good"
But at some point, your brain gets bored with you saying the same line over and over again, and helps you find, not the final answer (the bike), but the path to it!
So to get there, you need a job. To get a job, you need to go and find it. Knock at some doors: that's what I was capable of thinking when I was 11.
I knocked at a couple of doors until someone offered me a job.
To sum up, advice number one is to read the book. Advice number 2 is to implement what you read there, to visualize what you want and make some steps towards it.
Small steps. At the beginning I wanted a bike. Later on I wanted to make $1 million, to do business with Donald Trump, to help more than 1000 orphans in Romania.
You have to set up some goals!
And lastly, you have to realize that you cannot do anything without mentors.That nobody will help you and you cannot develop on your own.
The third advice is to realize that without mentors you can do nothing! That no one will help you and you cannot develop.
And all these advices are actually in the book. If it is the 2nd best seller after the Bible than it has to mean something..
So read the book, implement the mentality of lying to yourself 10 minutes per day and find mentors!
Maybe today you say "I want to know X" but now you cannot reach that person because so far you have only read about him in the newspaper.
You have to find a way to reach that person!
I have succeeded in knowing a lot of billionaires that I wished to have as mentors, to be able to call whenever I want and when I call for them to know who I am.
Not just to call as an idiot and have no answer.
R: How important is the ethic for you?
The most important find in life is to be an ethical person and to be around people that are ethical as well!
Because it's very easy to be in a society, country, city, where being ethical has no value
and say "well, if it's possible and it works for them, it can work for me too"
The hardest thing is the implementation...
it's easy to take a class about it, or read a book, or for me to talk about it.
The hardest thing is when you are sitting there and you're about to lose some money. Moreover, when you have already invested it!
You think "should I take or give this bribe?, "should I lie?"...
And if you already thinking about it into details, you are already on the wrong path..
We take the Romanian and the American dictionaries. These are the 2 societies when I lived all my life.
I have same several time before: we should take the dictionary and look up the definition of success.
Both the American and the Romanian dictionaries. These are the 2 societies where I have lived half and half all my life.
in the American, success is something you have thought, planed and tried whereas in the Romanian one success equals results.
Basically, they have skipped all the steps to create, plan and try something.
so, if we look again at ethics, if you start thinking how to juggle or if you should be ethical or not, you are already heading towards the definition of success or failure.
Because you are overthinking the situation and probably you will start planning and trying to find ways on how to remain ethical but you'll end up not being one.
So you have to stop that thought and move on, without thinking about it a milion years
As the books says, if you are thinking to much and all the time about something, you'll end up doing it.
R: Did you ever fail?
MC: Sure! I think I have at least 200 ideas that went from being a thought, to doing the research and the business plan, that after spending $ 20K I said it wasn't the time
or I wasn't the right person, or I was not ready.
I had huge failures. For example I had shares in a company , that I didn't sell and that went from 50 cents to $80 in 13 months and then it fell at $0..
The company stopped existing. Those share were worth $4M and I was 22 years old...
It didn't cross my mind to sell them because I was under the impression the price will go even higher.
This is an idiocy that can be overcome only by the experience in knowing when to sell.
Another huge failure is when I had 5% shares in a project under development. It was not my project nor my idea, but I was invited to participate.
I was the most active because the other shareholders were already financially stable, had made a couple of millions of dollars. So they were just playing with this idea.
And that idea became YouTube...
YouTube was sold in August 2006 to Google for $1 billion, the value of Google's stocks at that time.
The 2 YouTube co-founders, who are my age, had worked for my Technical Director when they were students.
The Technical Director said he knew about them, "they are just some kids with a good idea. we are following our own path".
So I listened to him! He was 40, I was 24 at that time. He brought me into the team, I would do what he asked me to do. I just wanted to speed up the project.
So there are big and small failures, and sometimes it might not be your fault. You just listened to someone you respected.
In time you realize, you can have a lot of respect for somebody, he/she can be older than you are, but maybe you had a vision or a feeling and you should have taken action.
This comes in time!
R: What's the percentage of successful over failed ideas? Have you ever did the math?
MC: No, I didn't! I try, as I get older, to have less ideas. And if they come, to stop them fast because I know now, after having lived 1/3 of my life, that time goes by fast.
I don't know if you have the same feeling, that when you get older time goes by faster. Or at least you feel that one year went by faster.
I don't know why we feel this way. It may be because we realize, consciously or unconsciously, that we won't be here forever.
But I don't have a percentage of failures or successes.
R: In order not to get depressed, as I had my share of failures, I say I now do marketing research.
MC: Yeah, I cannot give you a percentage...
R: And a closing word for those watching this video?
MC: Just a single closing word is hard. I have several, the slogan "Just do it!"
We all have a lot of ideas but few of us really try to think them through, plan and try them!
Thank you!