Moneywise

We did something nuts: we got 50+ founders to reveal their net worth, portfolios, income, expenses. Its free and right here: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
Why this podcast exists:
Hampton is a community for founders. Members do an ave of $20m/year in revenue.
Tons of the convos within the community are about money: how to invest, how to spend, how much to pay yourself...all this stuff you can't Google.
We thought "Let’s just make these convos public". And thus, this podcast Moneywise came to be.
We publish weekly. Click the subscribe button and the goodness will be delivered. 
Also...we've done 100+ episodes. If you want the aggregate info of all the numbers, meaning the net worth, spending, income of 50+ founders ranging from $10m to $1 billion: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr
Ok, so let's talk David Royce, today's guest:
He built the same pest control company four times — $13M, $30M, $135M, $1.5B — and says the first exit was the most life-changing.
David Royce sold four pest control companies — Moxie, Eco First, Altera, and Aptiv — each bigger than the last, culminating in a $1.5B sale of Aptiv when it was doing $508M in annual revenue. He kept 100% equity through the first three, gave 25% of the last one to his employees, and personally walked away with hundreds of millions across the run. He's now on an indefinite sabbatical, investing through Iconic (the firm that manages Zuckerberg's and Dorsey's money), with half his net worth in S&P 500 and the rest in private equity, direct deals, and alternatives — including multiple Anthropic investments.
This episode covers the exact mechanics of each asset-sale exit, why David kept restarting instead of holding, his full portfolio framework (including the 4-year cash buffer strategy), the "the answer is just a little more" moment that hit every entrepreneur in the room, and the story of flying his dying father on a private jet from a New Orleans hospital to Cedars-Sinai at 2am — made possible only by one call to a CEO WhatsApp chain.
Timestamps:
00:01:39 — David's full intro: four companies, four exits, what actually happened with the money
01:55 — First company (Moxie): nearly went bankrupt the first year, how a cash flow crisis taught him "cash was king"
03:14 — The asset-sale strategy: selling customers and technicians to Terminix while keeping the sales operation
04:57 — "Pretty close" — David confirms Forbes' reported $13M and $30M exit figures
05:37 — Why he gave 25% of Aptiv to employees and stepped back as chairman
06:23 — Aptiv was doing $508M in revenue; Daniel and David settle on $1.5B as the sale range
07:13 — What he actually took home: cap gains, California taxes, "hundreds of millions"
08:37 — Net worth today: "do the math backwards and figure it out"
09:09 — Portfolio breakdown: 4-year cash buffer in fixed income, S&P 500 with tax-loss harvesting, alternatives
11:31 — "I just invested in Anthropic — three different times in the last year and a half" via Iconic
14:35 — "The one that was life-changing was the first one" — $13M from nothing hits differently than $1.5B
17:46 — Why pest control? A starving college student, a friend who made $25K in a summer, and zero sales for five days straight
21:16 — His boss's question that changed everything: "What on earth would you go work for somebody else?"
27:31 — Fifth grade through eleventh grade: watching his family nearly lose the house, the fear that built everything
36:35 — Flying his dying father on a private jet from New Orleans to Cedars-Sinai at 2am
39:36 — What he wants to be remembered for: "The sign of a good leader is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create"
Sponsors: Daily Body Coach - achieve your dream body with https://moneywise.dailybodycoach.com
Subscribe to Moneywise: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneywisepodcast
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Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts: [search "Moneywise Hampton"]

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.
Sponsors: Daily Body Coach - achieve your dream body with https://moneywise.dailybodycoach.com

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