I officially had dropped out of college. It was September 2017. I moved to NYC and started my first full-time job as a Software Engineer. It was an exciting time.

Yet, I sought more meaning to what I was doing on a daily basis. While challenging and stimulating, my 9-5 grind didn’t feel entirely fulfilling. And so that’s how I came across the start of what’s now known as the cryptocurrency bubble.

I spent my evenings reading up on these white papers that explained the inner workings of complicated decentralized technologies. I browsed subreddits of crypto projects to see what the community had to say about them. I created accounts in over 10 exchanges so that I had as much accessibility as possible to trade the next hot ICO token. I downloaded multiple crypto portfolio tracking apps and configured all of them so that I could track coin prices on the go. I joined Discord servers with random strangers that speculated on price targets for altcoins.

After pouring hours into due diligence (or as the community called it, DD) I finally decided that I wanted in on the action. I shoved all in on a particular altcoin that seemed legit. It felt like I made a good decision, relative to the other projects out there. I talked to the founder of it on Discord (who had a great resume), read its open source code on GitHub, and played around with the technology locally on my machine. It felt like the next big thing.

A couple days after, the altcoin started to have heavy price action, like 30% intraday swings. Before this point, I had traded stocks for 2 years. But trading cryptocurrencies was nothing like that — right before I’d get onto the subway to get to work, I’d check my portfolio app, and then when I got off about 20 minutes later, I’d check it again, and I’d be up a couple grand.

It was insanity, and felt too good to be true. I couldn’t understand what was going on entirely by myself, so I asked around my friends to see if they were noticing what was going on in the crypto world. Most of them had no idea what was going on, and some of them mocked me for putting money into what they called worthless speculative assets.

But a few of them were in the know and had bought a variety of altcoins. By collectively sharing our observations in the crypto world, we started to converge on what was actually going on — it was a bubble, and it was gonna get ugly.

There was all sorts of nonsense on the internet — fake news, fake profiles, and fake projects:

  • There were Discord groups that were specifically designed to pump and dump altcoins — the owners would mention an altcoin ticker on Binance, and within seconds you’d see a gigantic 1m green candle followed by a devastating 1m red candle on its price chart.
  • There were organized ICOs that were entirely scams — they’d have invite-only Telegram group chats with a minimum investment of 100 Ethereum to get in.
  • There were tons of youtube videos and blog posts with manipulative intent — they’d take an altcoin’s price chart of whatever time granularity, draw random shapes and lines on it, call it “technical analysis”, and say that all indicators were reading a bullish signal.
  • There were influencers with large followings like John McAfee and Roger Ver tweeting about the viability of new cryptocurrency projects — and within seconds of a tweet there’d be enormous price swings of the underlying altcoins.

Meanwhile, my buddies and I saw this as an opportunity to make life changing money. We organized ourselves into a group chat and began throwing thousands of dollars into all sorts of nonsense — Golem, Tron, Cobinhood, Iota, and even a project called SpankChain. When we’d make 3x returns on one altcoin, we’d move all that money into another altcoin that wasn’t recently pumped. When we’d make something like 60% returns on an altcoin, we’d complain about how we could have instead bought a different altcoin that popped off 7x.

We realized how absurd our expectations were and that we could potentially lose all our money. But we loved the ridiculousness we were seeing across the internet and the ludicrous capital allocation in our crypto portfolios. And we loved the profits.

We named our group chat Yolo All In.

It wasn’t always up and to the right, however. I stomached watching my portfolio drop 10%, 25%, and even 60% in 24 hour periods. But in those moments, I held onto my coins (HODL, as we’d say) and sometimes even doubled down on red positions with my semimonthly paychecks.

In the moment, I knew this wouldn’t last forever and that it was just sheer madness. There’s a saying that goes something like “When your taxi driver is telling you to buy a stock, you know it’s time to sell.” Those friends who had mocked me for buying crypto changed their minds and started to call me asking for help on how they can buy crypto, how long it’s supposed to take for their Bitcoin to transfer to Binance, and whether or not they should put their life savings into Tron.

I took that as a signal to begin exiting the market. And we gradually did throughout the Holiday season. Throughout the next couple of weeks, I learned that my crypto portfolio could’ve been worth double, and then shortly after it would’ve been worth a tenth. The bubble had popped. The craze was slowing down, and people were on both sides of the spectrum — those who bought a Lambo with Bitcoin directly from the official Lambo Newport Beach website and those who lost what they could not afford to lose.

I learned a ton from this experience. It was the type of learning that couldn’t be taught but had to be felt. The core of my learnings stem from how history always repeats itself and how human nature doesn’t change. We’ve seen and studied tons of bubbles throughout history — tulip, dot-com, and housing to name a few.

There’s all sorts of common phrases and guidelines to follow when it comes to personal finance and risk management, and they’re written all over the internet:

  • Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.
  • Only play around with money you can afford to lose.
  • Invest for the long term.
  • If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

And the fascinating part is, all of these guidelines get thrown out the window during a craze like this. No matter what people have read or experienced, mistakes are bound to be repeated. The media companies begin to hastily pump out articles with the most ridiculous headlines in order to incite irrational reactions from average readers, all while the media companies benefit from the number of eyeballs on their site. You end up hearing about it everywhere you are. Your device’s push notifications are blowing up with shared links to these ridiculous sources and personal anecdotes of making 3x returns on unsustainable assets. It becomes difficult to find a quiet time to sit down and think clearly about what’s going on.

Fortunately, I’m very lucky to have walked away positively from this experience. It all came down to being at the right place at the right time, because I understand that I totally could have been on the other side of this by getting burned.

I feel that this experience gave me a look into how human psychology affects the markets, why people feel FOMO, and how insane communities can get without realizing it. It was a short time period — about 4 months — yet it was very transformative. I still use the lessons that I learned from this when I make decisions today, whether it’d be for capital allocation in the public and private markets, for moving on to new opportunities, or for strategizing on realistic goals in a product development cycle.

In commemoration of this crazy time, I created a company called YOLO ALL IN, INC. incorporated in Delaware. It houses the nonsensical and mischievous endeavors that I’ve pursued with my friends. It acts as a reminder of how there’s always haters and doubters when your all is given in pursuit of something great. And despite whatever is holding you back from going after what you want, it reminds me that you only live once.