Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of digital currency exchange Amber: "I'm usually wrong a lot but when I'm right, I'm very right"

Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of digital currency exchange Amber: “I’m usually wrong a lot but when I’m right, I’m very right”

We all want to be millionaires, so what exactly are the three, simple steps to becoming a millionaire? Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of Amber says, there are none.
Aleks is Co Founder and CEO at AMBER; Australia’s first app, to combine a digital currency exchange, wallet, and round ups, allowing anyone to swap the spare change from their every-day transactions into Bitcoin – on auto-pilot.
Aleks told himself that he would be a millionaire by the age of 20. Was he a millionaire by this age? Not quite.
With HSC results in the top 1% of the State, Aleks was granted early entry and a Scholarship to the University of Wollongong. Once discovering university was not enough of a challenge, he taught himself to trade derivatives (stock market) & managed to turn his $3000 scholarship into over $50,000 – the drive to be an entrepreneur far outweighed the university dream for Aleks.
He said: “Everybody makes out like being an entrepreneur is a nice easy thing to do, they think there’s 3 steps to becoming a millionaire, it’s really hard and there’s a really difficult side to it.”
He said: “I invested my money right before the global financial crisis, my aim was to become a millionaire by the time I was 20 and, a week before I turned 20 I was massively levered up & lost everything. About 6 months later, I was almost $250,000 in debt.”
This initial setback led him down the Entrepreneurial path, desperate to pay off his debts, Aleks found himself door knocking.
He said: “I sold anything I could, and at one stage was the third best Pay TV salesperson in the country, although I didn’t have a TV at the time and I lived on someone’s lounge floor on a mattress – it’s amazing what necessity does.”
“I’d knock on doors all day and study markets, psychology and money by night.”
A number of years later, after having successfully rebuilt himself financially, Aleks took a sabbatical: “I travelled to some weird places, hung out in Venice Beach, became a bit of a hippy, studied yoga, Yuza meditation, stunt driving and was on a crusade to prove a healthy lifestyle was the way forward.”