Nicholas Hinrichsen – If You Aren’t Suited for Picking Stocks Build a Diversified Portfolio

Nicholas Hinrichsen was born and raised in Germany and played on the German National Golf Team and studied Computer Science and Finance in Germany, Chile, and Australia. At the start of his career, he looked into consulting and investment banking but instead joined a renewable energy startup that invested in projects in China and India. In 2011, he moved to the US to get his MBA at Stanford Business School, and by 2013 he started a company called Carlypso. He brought that startup through YCombinator in 2014, raised $10 million in venture funding by 2015, and sold the company to Carvana.com in 2017. Carvana went public at a market cap of $2.5B and is now the most valuable used car retailer in the US. Nicholas and his co-founder, Chris Coleman, recently left Carvana to start WithClutch.com, a fully digital platform that lets car owners refinance auto loans from the comfort of their own home. The team at WithClutch.com has seen that in the US, only 5% of auto loan applications were refinancing, yet 47% of all funded mortgage applications were refinancing. So, they are going to change that!   “To succeed as a startup, all you need to do at the very beginning is to leave the building and talk to customers.” Nicholas Hinrichsen   Worst investment ever Young investor When Nicholas was 16, the only thing he knew how to do well back then was playing golf. Then all of a sudden, his friends in school, even some golfers, started talking about investing in technology companies. Nicholas had about $2,000, which was a lot of money for him at the time. His friends told him to invest the money because he could easily 10x that money. Afraid to miss out As everyone around him continued to invest in the tech companies, Nicholas decided to look into it because he felt like he was missing out. He signed up for an account online, went to the physical branch to verify his identity, and then eventually got access to the stock market. Now with an account, Nicholas could shop around for a company to invest in. But with so many options, he was baffled. One of his friends advised him to buy some magazines and then just read about the stocks in these magazines because the magazines wouldn’t recommend buying those stocks if they weren’t the best. And that’s precisely what Nicholas did. Making his first investment and mistake Nicholas didn’t know any of the companies in the magazines, but one resonated with him because that happened to be Germany’s biggest telecom. He felt that this would be a good choice. Nicholas took the money he had and used it all to buy the stock at $120 per share. Sadly, that remains the highest price the stock has ever traded. The stock price went downhill a few months after...