In 2012, Harvard’s illustrious MBA program did something unusual. 

For the 25th reunion of the Class of 1986, they sent out a survey that asked intimate questions about these Harvard Business School grads’ lives and careers, and then they published the results.  As far as I can tell, they never published anything like this again.

The median annual earnings for these high-power executives was $350k.  More revealing, however, was what the survey indicated about the net worths of these ~50-year-old Harvard grads.  In 2011, the median net worth for the HBS Class of 1986 was $6m. 

Of course, adjusted for asset price inflation, that would mean something like $10m today.  It also is worth underlining that this would have been the midpoint in the set of reported net worths, and presumably the average would have been much higher as a result of some very high earners at the top end of the distribution. 

When I first came across this number, it shocked me.  It frankly feels low.  This is Harvard.

And this is the cohort of HBS grads who went out into the world at the tail end of the 80s, in the heyday of opportunity for corporate executives to deliver value through cost-cutting, offshoring, M&A, and financial engineering.  They would have been perfectly positioned to take leadership positions in new-fangled internet companies in the 90s, and would have been active participants in the 2000s housing boom.  Our culture glorifies the Harvard MBA today because of the massive success of this era of Reagan Republicans who were trained in the latest techniques of cutting-edge managerial science and whipped into the zealous religion of “shareholder profits above all else” before being unleashed upon the world.  These grads are why Harvard Business School is known as “the West Point of capitalism.”

It probably goes without saying, but these opportunities are not open to you.  They are not even open to recent HBS grads. 

The low-hanging fruit of driving shareholder value through the classic mechanisms of managerial science listed above have all been plucked.  But for every generation, there’s some new wave of opportunity whose low-hanging fruit awaits those who figure it out before everyone else. 

What could it be for this generation?

If you’re a millennial or zoomer, you’ve probably thought about how impossible retirement sounds.  It was different for the boomers. 

Interest rates were driven down from 15% in 1981 to 0% over three decades, causing equities markets and home prices to soar.  If you got in on the ground floor – like the boomers who entered the workforce in the 70s, bought houses in the 80s, and maxed out their 401k contributions for decades along the way – you did great.  But there’s no more runway to drive down interest rates.  What’s more, the younger generations have already been priced out of homes.  Most of my MBA classmates can’t afford to buy a home, and we’re in our mid-30s. 

It’s all terribly disheartening.  We’ve been told to put faith in the tried-and-true wisdom of responsibly growing personal wealth (get a mortgage, invest in stocks), which became the accepted wisdom because of the tremendous success of the prior generation at stripping that tree of its fruit.  There’s not much left there for us, except to take on crushingly large mortgages.  And yet, if you just turn around, perhaps there’s a new tree full of opportunity. 

For example, purely hypothetically… what if there was a digitally native store-of-value asset?  

Something whose properties have set it on a deterministic path to become gold for the Internet age.  And once it becomes gold 2.0, it doesn’t stop on its pre-programmed path to get more scarce, more valuable, such that it starts to rival and even surpass the previously unmatched capabilities of real estate as a scarce store-of-value.  And along this whole journey, it enables the disruption and disintermediation of entire industries involved in the traditional functions of value storage (banking), transmission (payments), and associated services (financial services).  Why, such a wide-sweeping overhaul of the world of value would be tantamount to a second Internet revolution – an Internet of value to complement the existing Internet of information. 

If there was such an asset, it could very feasibly eat ~$200T of the world’s ~$900T in assets. 

That’s a bold claim, and will likely sound preposterous on the surface to many readers, but that’s my conclusion after thousands of hours of trying to disprove the mechanics underway.

As far as I can tell, all that has to happen for this to play out is for Bitcoin to keep doubling in scarcity, which is programmed into the protocol to happen every 210,000 blocks. 

Which is to say, all that separates Bitcoin from becoming the most important asset of the 21st century is the passage of time.  Since that is a given, Bitcoin’s rise appears inevitable – pre-programmed and deterministic.

While I am tempted to launch further into all that, it’s time to bring our focus back to the HBS Class of 1986 who have been waiting in the wings patiently for the author to get to the point. 

If Bitcoin becomes a ~$200T asset, each of the 21M Bitcoin that will ever exist will grow to be worth $10M apiece. 

For millennials and zoomers, the path to achieving financial success on the scale of the legendary Harvard MBA’s of our parents’ generation is as simple as accumulating one whole Bitcoin. 

The best of the boomers achieved $10M in wealth through leveraging an unprecedented era of equities and real estate price appreciation; the best of the millennials and zoomers will achieve the same wealth by plucking the low-hanging fruit of accumulating Bitcoin before the rest of the world has caught on.