I needed $20 million or I was going to die. That’s how I felt.

I had a business, $20 million was invested in it, and then my investor went broke and needed the money back.

But that would put me out of business. And then I would go broke and die.

He threatened me. He threw a chair at me. He yelled at my one employee and picked up his computer and threw it. He cried.

He needed the money back because I knew, and he didn’t know I knew, that he had done something illegal so he had to return the money to his own investors before anyone figured it out.

That’s life on Wall Street. When the dominoes start to fall.

Dominos are always falling on Wall Street. Most of the time nobody notices. Sometimes people notice.

We visited my lawyer, who tried to make some peace between us. But he ended up running out, crying.

My lawyer is now being sued, ten years later, by all his ex-partners and losing his own home because, according to the ex-partners, “his wife used the law firm like her personal bank account”.

Dominoes.

But I wanted to get my investor his $20 million so I could stay in business without being sued. I was afraid to get sued even though I had done nothing wrong.

That’s when I came up with a plan: I bought every book about the philosophy of Star Wars.

I was going to surrender to The Force and see what happens.

Plans like this are probably why I am not a great success on Wall Street.

—

I’ve had a stomach ache since 1995. In 1995, America Express was making a website. I was doing the website for them.

We had a deadline. We missed it. Then we had a new one.

Every night all night, my two business partners and I were trying to correct every color, move every image, jump when every bullet was fired into the air by some marketing executive at American Express.

They paid us about $225,000. My salary at my full time job at the time was $40,000. I was 27. I wanted the money.