I built a $250M company in 3 months. Here's every idea I tried before it worked:

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 20+ years.

Most of my businesses failed, but a few of them changed my life.

If you want to win, keep trying even when it’s hard.

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1. Moved to New York at 21

I studied financial engineering at Columbia.

I wanted to be a founder but didn’t have the guts.

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2. Joined a startup hedge fund on Wall Street

I wanted to learn how things get built from scratch.

It died in a year.

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3. Joined Barclays Capital

They had just bought Lehman Brothers.

I worked on the trading floor for 2 years.

Had a lot of friends building software back then, and I started to feel inspired.

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4. Learned how to code

My best friend told me that once I learned, I could build anything.

So I did. Nights and weekends. For 6 months straight.

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5. Shipped my first app

Did it under the alias Ben Cera so my finance boss wouldn’t find out.

People loved it. I quit my job, bootstrapped the company for a year… it failed.

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6. Built a photo messaging app

Josh Kushner from Thrive Capital loved it and invested $1 million from his brand-new fund.

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7. Pivoted into a people discovery app

It had massive traction.

But then I realized I was building a dating app and decided to walk away.

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8. Moved to LA

I became the CTO of a tech-enabled interior design startup.

We raised $20M from Founders Fund and Zillow Group.

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9. Worked with Uber's founder

Travis Kalanick bought CloudKitchens and I got a meeting.

I decided to join as a product manager.

2 years later, I was leading a new division I had built from scratch.

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10. Decided to come back to the arena

I moved to Paris to start a new company called GiftShop with a good friend, and we raised $8M.

After 2 years of co-founder tension, I finally walked away to go solo.

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11. Started Polsia Inc

Decided that I wanted to start working with AI right away, but also take a break and see the world.

So I started traveling the world and touring most of Asia.

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12. Built Blanks

An iPhone app that builds iPhone apps using AI. Failed.

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13. Built Decision AI

An AI that makes decisions for you. Zero customers.

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14. Started Polsia

I went all in on the idea of building a company that builds and runs companies with AI.

I built the first version and moved to San Francisco.

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15. Polsia worked

5 months later, I had 10,000+ customers, $10M run rate, and raised $30M at a $250M valuation.

This is over 20 years of building, failing, and starting over.

Every lesson is tuition. Nothing is ever wasted.