Moneywise

She sold for $88M, almost bought a lake house she didn't want, and spent $340K on Knicks playoff tickets — then gave two away because it felt better.
We're still surprised people did this but... 50+ founders worth $10M to $4B reveal their personal finances. Here it is: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
Why do we do this? Because if you're an aspirational person or someone who runs a business and is making money, it's incredibly challenging to figure out what to do. Information is impossible to find — and that's what we put together: the net worth reveal and why we do this podcast, Moneywise.

Also, this podcast is made by Hampton, which is a community for founders doing on average $20M a year in revenue. We saw a lot of these money conversations happening privately behind closed doors and we thought, "Why not, let's make it public." If you are a founder, apply here: https://joinhampton.com/mw
Anne Mahlum built Solid Core from $175,000 of her own savings into an $88M exit. Two years later, her net worth is $115–120M, with $65M in public equities and $15M in a single stock alone. But the numbers are the least interesting thing that's happened since.
After the sale, she secretly launched a second fitness company, had panic attacks she's never talked publicly about, shut the whole thing down, and spent two years in legal fallout. Then she had a baby, pulled an accepted lake house offer the morning after making it, and started forcing herself to spend $200K a month just to stop the money from piling up.
This episode covers the full portfolio breakdown two years post-exit, why she's done with private investments, the Ambition story she's never told, what a baby did to how she thinks about money and time, and what she actually wants to be remembered for — which has nothing to do with net worth.
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JOIN HAMPTON:
These episodes often come directly out of conversations happening inside Hampton, a private community for founders and CEOs with $3M+ in revenue or $10M+ exits. Members range from $5M net worth to billions. They wrestle with these same questions off the record. Apply at http://joinhampton.com/mw.
HOW FOUNDERS ARE BUILDING WEALTH:
How much do founders actually make, spend, invest, work, and keep in net worth? Hampton surveyed founders directly and put the answers into one report. Download it for free here: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
EPISODE DETAILS:
Most founders spend years learning how to make money. Almost none of them prepare for what their brain does once they have it.
Henrik Cronqvist is a behavioral finance professor who trained under Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and has spent 25 years studying exactly that. His research has been cited over 7,000 times. He has studied 38,000 people to answer one uncomfortable question: how much of the way you save, spend, and invest is actually hardwired into your DNA?
The answer will change how you think about every financial decision you make after an exit.
This episode covers the science behind why the traits that made you a great founder may work against you as an investor, what actually happens in your brain the day the wire hits, and the one thing Henrik says every founder should do before making a single investment.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 — The traits that made you a great founder will make you a bad investor 
01:45 — What is behavioral finance and why should founders care 
04:35 — How Henrik got into this research (the Stockholm subway story) 
06:39 — The 38,000 twin study: how much of your money behavior is genetic 
10:56 — The first thing to do when the wire hits your account 
12:49 — Loss aversion, performance chasing, and home bias explained 
20:35 — Your personal mortgage predicts how you'll run your company's finances 
30:08 — Why your brokerage app is designed to work against you 
37:07 — Why founders feel depressed after selling (the science behind post-exit emotions) 
47:14 — "I think I'm the exception" — and what the data actually says about that

Please answer our short Moneywise listener survey! (Very, very short): joinhampton.com/moneywisefeedback
JOIN HAMPTON:
These episodes often come directly out of conversations happening inside Hampton, a private community for founders and CEOs with $3M+ in revenue or $10M+ exits. Members range from $5M net worth to billions. They wrestle with these same questions off the record. Apply at http://joinhampton.com/mw.
HOW FOUNDERS ARE BUILDING WEALTH:
How much do founders actually make, spend, invest, work, and keep in net worth? Hampton surveyed founders directly and put the answers into one report. Download it for free here: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
EPISODE DETAILS:
Thibault — known online as Tibo — is a French indie hacker who spent six years failing at startups before building Tweet Hunter during Covid lockdown and selling it for $10 million. Except the real number was more complicated than that: $2 million up front, $8 million in earn-out, and 18 months of some of the most stressful building of his life to get there. He walked away with just under $3 million post taxes — and says he regrets the sale entirely.
Today, Tibo is doing over $1 million a month in revenue across a portfolio of five software products he's built since that exit. His personal spend is negligible. He has no financial advisor, keeps roughly 50% of his net worth in cash, and puts almost everything investable into index funds.
This episode gets into the full deal structure, the psychological cost of the earn-out period, what he calls the "frozen state" that hits founders after a big exit, and why he says he will never sell a company again.
Timestamps:
02:12 — Full guest intro: who Thibault is, the Tweet Hunter story, deal structure breakdown, and episode roadmap
08:08 — The $10M deal unpacked: earn-out structure, revenue milestones, and what he actually collected
10:17 — The co-founder split, the 25% influencer equity deal, and whether he'd do it again
14:09 — How the influencer partnership worked and why they replicated it on Tapio
26:17 — "Getting a ton of money up front feels unhealthy" — Thibault on why lump-sum exits are psychologically dangerous
28:14 — The "frozen state": why founders can't ship after a big exit
30:42 — The earn-out burnout period: stress, loss aversion, and the 18 hardest months of his life
34:37 — "It was a bad decision financially" — Thibault's verdict on the sale
38:15 — Nomadic life, the Vietnam hacker residency, and how wealth changes how he travels
42:42 — No financial advisor, no trust in wealth managers — why everything goes into S&P 500
45:29 — Personal spend breakdown: ~$8K/month — rent, food, tech gadgets, and that's basically it
48:27 — What happens to the ~$90K/month delta: cash, S&P 500, and acquiring more products
49:45 — The portfolio strategy: five products, two unannounced, and the 2026 scaling challenge
51:12 — Building a distribution bridge between all his products with an AI agent
53:06 — Raising kids with money: unconditional safety as the foundation for risk-taking

Please answer our short Moneywise listener survey! (Very, very short): https://forms.gle/EaS5NUt4Akb7wddt9
JOIN HAMPTON:
This episode came directly out of conversations happening inside Hampton, a private community for founders and CEOs with $3M+ in revenue or $10M+ exits. Members range from $5M net worth to billions. They wrestle with these same questions off the record. Apply at http://joinhampton.com/mw.
CHAPTER MARKERS
00:00 — Intro: Two trash bags and $3,000 in LA
02:15 — Austin's background: 10 years broke, restaurants, and the fitness world
07:52 — Gold's Gym, 1,000 employees, and the "building someone else's empire" moment
10:15 — The 203K loan, LA real estate at the bottom, and how it funded everything
12:41 — Buying one Bitcoin in 2013 at $700 and forgetting about it
15:37 — The Kickstarter: $445K raised, $150K in the hole, and 62 countries of shipping chaos
22:50 — Scaling to $35M and deciding to sell
25:23 — The $25M sale: deal structure, taxes, and what he actually walked away with
31:43 — Thrasio's collapse and buying the company back for $2M
37:48 — First thing he did with the money: retiring his parents and handing them a blank check
40:23 — Money, happiness, and why optionality is the real product
43:28 — Estate planning: why his son gets nothing until age 35
49:02 — Would you take $1 billion to walk away from everything?
He sold his company for $25M. The buyer went bankrupt. He bought it back for $2M.
Austin Wright moved to LA at 19 with $3K and two trash bags. He spent a decade broke, waiting tables, sleeping on an air mattress, sharing a car. Then he spent another decade grinding his way up to regional VP at Gold's Gym, overseeing nearly 1,000 employees and opening gyms across Southern California.
Then he quit to build something of his own.
What followed was a pop-up playpen that raised $445,000 on Kickstarter against a $20,000 goal — and nearly bankrupted him because he didn't account for international shipping. He dug out, scaled the brand to $35M in revenue, and sold it to a private equity firm called Thrasio for $25 million in 2021. 
In this episode, Austin breaks down the real numbers: what he walked away with after the sale, how he structured the deal, where his $13–14M net worth actually sits today, the one thing he'd do differently with his money after the exit.
Topics covered:
- Growing up broke in LA and 10 years in the fitness industry
- How a $199K North Hollywood fixer became the seed capital for a gym business
- Buying one Bitcoin in 2013 at $700 and forgetting about it
- The Kickstarter that raised $445K and lost money
- Scaling California Beach Company to $35M and selling for $25M
- The Thrasio collapse
- Net worth breakdown: real estate, crypto, liquid vs. illiquid
- Estate planning and why his son won't inherit a dollar until he's 35
- Why Austin would turn down $1 billion
HOW FOUNDERS ARE BUILDING WEALTH:
How much do founders actually make, spend, invest, work, and keep in net worth? Hampton surveyed founders directly and put the answers into one report. Download it for free here: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr

JOIN HAMPTON:
This episode came directly out of conversations happening inside Hampton, a private community for founders and CEOs with $3M+ in revenue or $10M+ exits. Members range from $5M net worth to billions. They wrestle with these same questions off the record. Apply at http://joinhampton.com/mw.
HOW FOUNDERS ARE BUILDING WEALTH:
How much do founders actually make, spend, invest, work, and keep in net worth? Hampton surveyed founders directly and put the answers into one report. Download it for free here: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
THIS EPISODE OF MONEYWISE:
70% of wealthy families lose all their money by the second generation. 90% lose it by the third.
The data is even worse for the kids themselves. Children from households making $200K+ have rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse 2 to 3 times the national average. 22% of affluent suburban girls show clinically significant depressive symptoms.
So how do you raise a kid in a wealthy household without breaking them?
In this episode of MoneyWise, I went back through every conversation we've had on the show about parenting and money. Doctor Becky. Taylor Adams (from a multi-generational billionaire family in LA). Alex Peikoff. Shane. Jane. Hank. Neil Patel. Scott Galloway. The pattern they all kept landing on was uncomfortable. Most parents with real money are accidentally setting their kids up to fail. Not because they're bad parents. Because they're doing exactly what their instincts tell them to do.
I'm a dad of two. I'm trying to figure this out in real time. Here's what the research, the experts, and the founders who already screwed it up are telling us.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
- Why "entitlement" is actually a fear of frustration, not a character flaw
- The Carol Dweck Columbia study that should change how you talk to your kids
- Why your kid is running on your behavior, not your rules
- The "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" trap (and why it's not about money)
- How allowance teaches financial trade-offs (and why unlimited Amazon access kills it)
- The single biggest regret of founders after a life-changing exit
- Why downsizing your house might be the best parenting decision you ever make
CHAPTERS:
00:00 The 16-year-old in the airport
02:57 Frustration tolerance is the most important life skill
05:30 Why wealthy kids have 2-3x higher anxiety and depression
08:00 Monkey see, monkey do: the emulation problem
11:00 70% lose it in 2 generations. 90% in 3.
14:00 Praise effort, not traits (the Dweck study)
18:00 Just because you love business doesn't mean your kid will
21:00 Why allowance only works if money is finite
25:00 The Scarsdale busboy who sees $300 sweatshirts as 30 hours of work
28:00 Scott Galloway's moving goalpost
30:17 The presence problem (the hardest one for me)
33:00 The 5 rules I'm taking with me
REFERENCED EPISODES:
- Taylor Adams: How a multi-generational billionaire family thinks about wealth
- Doctor Becky on parenting through money
- Hank: Inside a 24,000 sq ft home
- Neil Patel on going from 10,800 sq ft to 3,000 sq ft
- Alex Peikoff: The Macedonian milk family
- Jane: Finding out about a $20M inheritance in her late 30s
- Pete: $80M exit, rock bottom after
ABOUT MONEYWISE:
MoneyWise is the podcast where wealthy founders open up about the real numbers behind their lives. Net worth. Monthly burn. Portfolio allocation. The stuff nobody talks about in public. Hosted by Daniel Berk and produced by Hampton.
SPONSORS:
Oceans - Hire incredible talent for marketing, ops, sales, and more, and even have them build out all your AI workflows for you. Go to https://www.oceanstalent.com/moneywise now.