Two brothers owned an investing firm and brought me in. The first thing I did was sign an NDA— so I won’t give you their real names. We’ll call them the Baxter Brothers. While they didn’t speak in unison, they might as well have. Whatever one brother said, the other echoed.
I was excited to get my hands on some money to invest. I wanted to learn where to put the money and also how to make money. I was starting from zero here.
Instead of making money, the Baxter Brothers sat me down in a glass conference room and wrote the names of everyone I knew. I wrote down my second-grade teacher, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Carlos the geologist.
“You know The Rock?” the Baxter Brothers asked, looking at the list. Their eyes turned into money signs as they thought of the possibilities.
“You don’t?” I asked. “I thought everyone knew The Rock.”
“Well, we don’t have his phone number,” the Baxter Brothers said.
“I don’t either, but I saw him in The Tooth Fairy.”
The Baxter Brothers decided to move on and looked at the list. “Who do you want to call first?”
“I don’t want to call any of them,” I admitted. “Why would I call them?”
“You call them to set up a lunch,” the Baxter Brothers said. “Then, at lunch, we convince them to give us their money so we can invest it.”
I looked at the Baxter Brothers for a long time. “You’re asking me to leverage my personal relationships so you can invest their money?”
“How did you think this worked?” the Baxter Brothers asked.
“I thought people would come to us because we were good at investing. I don’t think any of the people on my list think I should manage their money. Half of these people have given me jobs that I quit almost immediately. Some of these people won’t even speak to me.”
“Let’s just try one,” the Baxter Brothers said. “Then we can go from there.”
I begrudgingly dialed the phone for my friend Philippe, who runs a French bakery.
“What, Oliver?” Philippe said, answering the phone. The Baxter Brothers listened on speaker.
“Hey, Philippe, want to get lunch?” I said, and I winked at the Baxter Brothers.
“No,” Philippe said. “I want you to go to France and get me a new starter to make my bread again. We’ve been over this. If you want to be friends, then fix your mistake.”
Philippe hung up.
“I’m going to go,” I said, as the Baxter Brothers stared at me. “Every call is going to go something like that.”
“What have you done to your friends?” the Baxter Brothers said.
“Look what you want to do to my friends!” I yelled, and stormed out of the room. I slammed the glass door to the conference room, and the glass shattered.