I’m a billionaire entrepreneur at 34 — this is my easy secret to success
Putting people over profit can be surprisingly lucrative.
Tech entrepreneur Ankur Jain, 34, is worth an estimated $1.2 billion, according to Forbes. The former executive of dating app Tinder — of which he still owns 36% — went public in 2002 with his new company Bilt Rewards, a service that allows customers to earn rewards for paying their rent or buying a home.
Today, Bilt is valued at $3.25 billion.
The wildly successful son of former Microsoft executive Naveen Jain — who was also briefly a billionaire following the success of his company InfoSpace, a search engine, before Y2K’s dot-com crash — had this advice for young entrepreneurs in a recent Daily Mail interview.
“Start with a problem, not a perceived opportunity,” Jain told the UK newspaper. “Those are two very different things.”
“I think one of the most dangerous things that happened to entrepreneurship was that business school graduates started going into entrepreneurship,” he explained.
The academic emphasis on statistics, models, and creating new opportunities has inspired young business owners to create unnecessary goods and services—while exploiting the consumer—rather than addressing what people really want and need in their lives, according to the former Forbes 30 Under 30 lister.
“They forgot to ask the question of what problem they can actually solve for people,” he said.
Jain went on to boast that Bilt is a perfect example of “taking a real problem people have and … making it work.”
“It’s your biggest expense and now it’s your most rewarding.”
According to Bilt’s data, the average American renter spends around 30% of their income on housing each year.
Jain previously told The Post that he was inspired to create Bilt — and focus on building companies that solve “real problems” — after a shocking $100 million pitch her heard from a venture capitalist a few years ago. The idea: Putting virtual luxury goods on the blockchain.
“I’m thinking to myself: ‘You have the biggest housing crisis, a health care and mental health crisis here in the city… And here you are sitting, talking to me about like, digital Prada bags on the blockchain,'” he said.
“It was so out of touch with not just big problems, but big opportunities.”
