From flipping burgers at McDonald's and working overtime at a gas station. To be one of the richest men in crypto & owning the world's largest crypto exchange. Here's the story of the World's most humble Crypto Cillionaire.
Changpeng Zhao aka Cz Binance was born in China's Jiangsu province. Both of his parents were teachers. In the early days, his father's academic career was disturbed during the Cultural Revolution. This forced him to work in the countryside instead of studying books.
Against all odds, his father persisted. Self-taught & determined, he pursued higher education & triumphed. He secured a spot at the University of British Columbia, for his master's degree.
In the late 1980s, when CZ was 12, they immigrated to Vancouver, Canada. His father was always a bookworm and an academic, not very good at business, but he lived a very simple life. It was his father who motivated him to work very hard from an early age. His family didn’t have deep pockets.
CZ, from a very young age, worked extremely hard to support his family. At 14, he got his first job at McDonald’s and also worked overtime at a gas station. Though he wasn't legally old enough to work, a loophole allowed him to do so.CZ said ‘Yes’ to every opportunity that came his way to cover his household expenses.
Soon, his hard work paid off. He got accepted into Montreal’s McGill University. He studied Computer Science there.
In college, he tried his hands at different jobs. His second internship job allowed him to go to travel Japan to work. CZ never settled.
As a young child, he moved from China to Canada. And then later on, he went to Japan to work. The international experiences really helped him, helping him understand all about business and monetary transactions.
One of his struggles early on was problems with transferring money across different countries. This would later become his inspiration for starting Binance. Upon graduating, he spent time in Tokyo & New York.
He was helping to build a system for matching trade orders on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and then at Bloomberg's Trademark, where he developed software for futures trading. At that time, CZ was 27, he was already promoted 3 times in less than two years.
He was working beyond his capacity. Soon, CZ realized that there were some bigger & better things waiting for him. In 2005, he quit his job & moved to Shanghai.
There, he started Fusion Systems, a company known for building some of the fastest high-frequency trading systems for brokers. Things were going fine.
But in 2013, he had a life-changing experience that was going to wholly transform his life. CZ and his friend, Bobby Lee was playing poker. Lee was the CEO of BTC China & VC. He introduced him to Bitcoin & told him about the future potential of Cryptocurrencies.
Lee asked CZ to at least put 10% of his net worth into Bitcoin.CZ was aware of the risk, they were very early & he knew that the invested money could become 0.But he was also aware that there was a greater chance of his money doing multiple x in profits. That was the time he decided to go all into crypto.
CZ was such a huge believer that he even sold his home which was worth almost $1M at that point. He put all that money into Bitcoin. He was very early & Bitcoin was very volatile at that time.
During his early days, he lost almost ⅔ of the value, he invested. But CZ HODL hard & was never interested in selling. During these ups & down, he got really interested in the Crypto space & he started exploring even more.
He worked very closely with well-known BTC evangelists. He also worked at OKCoin as the CTO. While working, he thought of creating his own exchange. But the journey wasn't easy at all.
He didn’t have connections with financial institutions and there were also many risks and regulatory complications. But CZ was the man. He wanted to do it anyway. His goal was clear. However, the timing was everything.
He waited patiently for the right time. In 2017, CZ saw the rise of crypto exchanges, Poloniex & Bittrex.
He realized that there was room for a lot of improvement:
• Better UI
• Mobile Friendly
• Faster customer response time
When Bitcoin’s price was rising, the exchanges were crashing. This was the time; CZ felt the market is hot. There were many new exchanges pouring into the market every day.
They were just copying each other & were making any improvements. In the midst, CZ decided to fill the gaps & make their own exchange. This is the time when Binance got launched.
Binary + Finance = @Binance
They offer an ICO for raising funds, where they offered 100M $BNB to investors. They raised $15M and used the funds to improve their platform, & marketing & saved an emergency fund too.
From there they never looked back. In less than 8 months, CZ turned an idea into reality. In 2018, CZ Binance was just a normal man like us and now, I don’t have to tell you more about him. He well deserved his success.
Today, Binance is the world’s biggest and most trusted Crypto platform. BNB is the fourth largest cryptocurrency.
Few principles you can learn from CZ:
- Be fair in life.
- Keep everything very simple, and remove distractions.
- Get so obsessed that people call you crazy.
- Always try to make an impact.
Do you know CZ is an avid reader too?
Some of his favorite books are:
- Infinite Games - Sinek
- Sapiens - Yuval Nova Harari
- Hug your haters - Jay Baer.