I wasn’t always a personal finance nerd, but I gradually became one out of survival. This is my story — and my observation over the past 27 years — of why being an “American nerd” has become more important than ever if you want to rise in your career or achieve financial freedom sooner.
For context, I no longer view the word nerd pejoratively as I did in high school, when I was encouraged to play sports, workout, find a girlfriend, and do well in school. I liked dating too much to be cast as a nerd. As a parent now, I’d be thrilled if my kids turned into super nerds. It might be the only way they can thrive and remain independent in today’s ultra-competitive world.
No girlfriend or boyfriend in middle or high school? Awesome! More time to study and less risk of being a teenage parent with a tougher road ahead.
Not traveling every weekend for club soccer? Hooray! More money saved, fewer injuries, and more time for learning an instrument, a language, or the arts. After all, only about 2% of U.S. high school athletes receive any kind of athletic scholarship to play in college.
Only have a couple of friends who are also nerds? Wonderful. Challenge each other to keep learning and growing. With loving parents and maybe a sibling, one good friend is really all you need anyway… to have enough trainers to beat any legendary raid in Pokémon Go!
Today, nerds clearly rule the world. Let’s dig in!
Growing Up Average
Since 1999, I’ve lived in New York City and San Francisco — two of the most competitive, brain-powered cities in America. They’re magnets for top students from elite universities who come to make their fortunes. The competition is relentless. If you can’t keep up intellectually, it’s hard to stay afloat.
When I was in public high school in McLean, Virginia, I tried to do well. I’d heard from an older student back in Kuala Lumpur during middle school that high school grades mattered, so I took that to heart.
But no matter how hard I studied, I couldn’t crack the code. I finished with a 3.65 GPA — a B+/A– average. Spanish verb conjugations tripped me up, advanced math seemed pointless, and science teachers were brutal graders. After reading some SAT prep books at the library, I couldn’t break a 1,200 on the SAT either. Eventually, I gave up trying to be a nerd and focused on tennis and fun instead.
And boy, did I have fun, perhaps too much of it. I got into trouble for shoplifting, fighting, and pulling dumb pranks that I truly regret. I’m sorry and I paid the price. Thankfully, I still got into The College of William & Mary, a good school, but not elite. I knew my family couldn’t comfortably afford sending me to a private university, so I stayed in state at $2,800 a year in tuition.
With a second chance, I vowed not to mess things up in college too.
My Lucky Break
My big break came from a mix of luck, timing, and hustle. One Saturday, I got on a 6 a.m. charter bus for a Wall Street recruiting event.
None of my classmates showed up, so after 30 minutes of waiting, the driver drove me to a random shed and switched out the bus for a Lincoln Towncar to drive me 2 hours up from Williamsburg to Washington D.C. There I landed interviews with several bulge bracket firms. Thanks largely to a recruiter named Kim Purkiss, who believed in me, I joined Goldman Sachs in 1999.
Thirteen years on Wall Street taught me that intelligence is just table stakes. Being smart counts for maybe 35%. The rest is work ethic, teamwork, charm, and luck. Everyone is smart – so the real edge comes from being obsessive about learning and execution.
Enter the Super Nerds
Working on Wall Street exposed me to plenty of super nerds from top schools. But what surprised me was how many of them were also well-rounded, especially when it came to sports.
My immediate colleagues at Goldman had both brains and brawn: my boss played football at Dartmouth as a fullback, another at Penn State as a linebacker. Later, my direct boss at Credit Suisse had also played football at Cal and was president of his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE). The guy oozed charisma. We had an absolute blast entertaining clients.
However, when I went to Berkeley for my MBA part-time (2003–2006), I was suddenly surrounded by mostly super nerds. Most worked in tech. About 65% were engineers, and roughly half of those had come from India — most from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), where the acceptance rate is around 1%.
Think of IIT as MIT or Caltech on steroids. Graduating from there requires both extreme intelligence and hunger. They were scary smart. Those qualities now fuel many of the leaders running America’s biggest tech firms:
Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft.
Sundar Pichai – CEO of Alphabet Inc. (and of Google).
Arvind Krishna – CEO (and Chairman) of IBM.
Jayshree Ullal – CEO of Arista Networks.
Aravind Srinivas – CEO of Perplexity, and Cal alum (Go Bears!)
The Nerds Have Taken Over
Now that I’m a father, I see the “revenge of the nerds” everywhere. At my kids’ schools, most parents are engineers, executives, data scientists, doctors, money managers, or entrepreneurs — alumni of IIT, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Duke, and the Ivies.
You don’t see many of the “cool kids” from high school here in the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene who played varsity sports and dated around. Those who coasted on charm or athletic ability had their run. It’s the disciplined problem solvers who built the systems the rest of us depend on. They are the captains now.
As an investor, I also want to put as much money as possible into companies run by super nerds and filled with the smartest employees. Score poorly on Harvard’s subjective personality test to deny you admissions, despite stellar academics? You’re hired!
An American company only hiring a group of diverse Americans is nice in theory. But when it comes to building and investing in great businesses, ability always trumps nationality or identity. And the reality is, America does not have a monopoly on talent or ability.
Top U.S. Companies Hiring Employees On H-1B Visas
As capitalists, if CEOs can hire the smartest people from around the world for a fraction of what they’d pay an American, they will. For most leaders, profits come before patriotism. It’s business first, always.
Below are some of the top U.S. employers for H-1B visas. LCA stands for Labor Condition Application, the form companies must file with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) before hiring or sponsoring an H-1B worker. These employers offer some of the highest average salaries in the nation — and, not surprisingly, are among the toughest places to land a job.
And here’s the thing: while Amazon laid off at least 14,000 mostly American employees in 2025, it simultaneously increased its number of H-1B hires from the year before. If you’re the CEO and can pay a brilliant H-1B employee an average of $149,000 instead of $350,000 for an equally capable American worker, you’re going to make that trade every time until the government tries to stop you.
Now, as a rational investor, are you really going to vote against reducing costs and maximizing profits? Of course not. The vast majority of shareholders will always support profit-maximizing moves in hopes of boosting their returns. Hence, even if you’re an American nerd fully capable of competing with a skilled foreign worker, you still might not get the job — or that promotion — simply because you cost too much.
You’ve got three options: invest in the very companies that reject you, already be wealthy enough that rejection only bruises your ego, or be so well-liked and connected that someone in power decides to give you a shot.
Back in 2012, I decided to invest in all the tech companies that had rejected me after I left finance. Thirteen years later, all the nerds have been working for me ever since. Work harder, you beautiful geniuses!
The Poker Table Epiphany
That truth hit me again at a tech poker night last weekend. Nothing has changed since I went to business school from 2003-2006. And I don’t think anything will ever change given we’re capitalists.
After putting my kids to bed with my wife, I showed up around 9 p.m. expecting a relaxed game – maybe a few drinks and laughs. Instead, I walked into what felt like a graduate seminar on statistics and aggression at IIT. Roughly 70% were foreign professionals working in the U.S. in high paying roles on temporary visas.
To my left sat Akshay, a software engineer who spent nearly thirty minutes trying to order coffee on an app even though the room was stocked with Red Bull and snacks. Every couple of minutes, Arvind — the player on my right — would remind him, “Akshay, it’s on you.”
Twelve times. Maybe more.
Akshay would nod, glance at his cards, and then drift back to his phone — comparing prices, maybe debugging code, or maybe just deep in thought. The whole thing was absurdly funny and deeply symbolic. Total focus, but in five different directions, and completely socially unaware of his poor poker etiquette.
Meanwhile, the game itself was intense. Only $1/$1 blinds, but pots swelling into the thousands. A room full of analytical, aggressive minds — engineers who bet probabilities like they were running machine-learning simulations.
I realized I was at the wrong table. I’d come to unwind; they’d come to optimize and take my money with a vengeance.
The Hand That Saved Me
After two and a half hours, I was barely breaking even and thinking of calling it a night. Then came the hand.
I looked down at Ace-Queen of diamonds. After a few limpers, I raised to $8. Three players called. The flop: Ace of clubs, 3 of diamonds, 5 of diamonds. Sweet! Top pair, top kicker, and the nut-flush draw. What a dream.
The small blind — Sondar, another engineer — led out for $25 post flop. I smooth called. Another player called behind and another folded.
The turn came the 7 of hearts. Sondar checked. I made a value bet of $25 to see where my opponents were at. The third player folded. Then Sondar check-raised to $75 total.
That move got my attention. It smelled like two pair, maybe a straight. I thought for 25 seconds, stared at him like a samurai for five. He stared back calmly. I called.
The river: 7 of diamonds. Bingo. Nut flush.
Sondar checked again. I paused, asked him how much he had left behind, and he respond with $130. I slid out $115, leaving him a small cushion. My goal: make it too tempting not to call because even if he lost, he’d still have three $5 chips and a chair to fight again.
“Ugh, I hate that river,” he said, showing the table 4-6 of clubs for a straight.
He stared at the board, then at me. Two full minutes of wiggling in his seat, sometimes, with his arms raised up and hands behind his head. I didn’t move. But I loved every second of it as my own heart started beating quicker.
Finally, he pushed in his chips. Call.
I flipped over the flush. He groaned, nodded, and patted the felt — the universal poker expression for “well played, you lucky bastard.”
Obsession May Be Even More Powerful Than Smarts
A couple of hands later, I cashed out for $680 after buying in for $350 and tossing $35 to the host for food and drinks. I had survived the nerd gauntlet. Now it was time to squeeze in five hours of sleep before pickleball at 7 a.m., with frankly, more nerds!
On the drive home, I couldn’t stop thinking: this table was America in microcosm. A bunch of smart, competitive, math-driven people — all chasing an edge, with a hint of obsession. Meanwhile, here I was, trying to battle while never taking calculus.
I may come across as laid-back with Hawaiian vibes, but I’m obsessed too. I’ve logged thousands of poker hours and watch poker videos for fun on a daily basis. Further, I regularly bet 30X – 300X bigger in the stock market than my buy-in, so it’s hard to push me around at a $1/$1 or even a $5/$10 table. That night, luck, mixed with a hidden obsession of poker was my safety net.
If you get obsessed with something, you’ll eventually get smarted enough to effectively compete against your opponents. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That’s life. But at least you have a fighting chance to win.
Becoming an American Nerd
To succeed today, it’s not enough to be charming, athletic, or even naturally smart. You need to out-learn, out-analyze, and out-focus others.
In an interconnected world, you’re competing with brilliant, hungry people everywhere — many of whom treat mastery the way Akshay treated that coffee order: with total commitment, even when it’s inconvenient.
For decades, America has thrived by welcoming ambitious, talented immigrants from all over the world. That openness is part of what makes this country so dynamic.
But as global competition intensifies (see the AI race war with China), those of us already here can’t afford to coast. Countries with lower per-capita incomes, like India and China, naturally produce people who are driven to seize every opportunity they can find. When you’ve seen how hard life can be elsewhere, it’s easier to appreciate — and maximize — what’s available here.
Over time, privileged Americans risk taking prosperity for granted. We get comfortable. But the rest of the world is studying, grinding harder, and catching up fast. The only real way to stay ahead is to keep learning, adapting, and obsessing over improvement.
So if you want to thrive in modern America, you or your children need to become an American nerd — curious, relentless, and deeply invested in your craft. Because whether it’s at the poker table, in the office, or in life, the smartest and most disciplined players usually take the pot.
What do you think — is America losing its intellectual edge? What are you a nerd in? Have you noticed certain professions or industries where the “nerds” are clearly winning? And if you’re a parent, are you encouraging your kids to embrace their inner nerd, or hoping they find balance somewhere in between?
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