Antanas Guoga is a 51-year-old poker player, businessman, crypto investor, founder of Pokernews.com and former Member of the European Parliament of Lithuania, who served from 2014 to 2019. In the poker world, however, he is known as Tony G.
Tony G has up to $11.3 million worth of live tournament winnings to his credit, but as we learned from a recent interview, these ammounts are just peanuts to him. In fact, Tony appeared in a new short interview on the School of Hard Knocks YouTube channel, where the host caught up with him in Dubai while he was getting out of his Rolls-Royce.
The presenter didn't hesitate and immediately bombarded Tony with questions. The first was whether the Rolls-Royce he was getting out of was his, to which Tony replied that of course it was. During the interview, Tony G boasted that he is the owner of a blockchain company (Sol Stategies) which he had owned for 5 years, and that he made $100 million last year. He then added that this is the amount he made himself, the company made more money. When the question came about Tony's net worth, he replied that it was about $300 million.
The host asked Tony what was the best advice he had ever got in his life, to which Tony replied: "Look, first you have to make it. You go all in on your idea because you don't have money. But when you have money, you have to diversify. That's very important to be balanced. You can't be too aggressive about one thing, but when you make your first hundred million, go for it. You have to be crazy, insane, never give up. If they all leave the office, go there and work overnight. Just don't give up. Just keep going. Even if you don't have the money, fake it till you make it. Keep going."
"You cannot give up. The first time I went bankrupt, I also worked in tech. I didn't give up. I learned a lot from it. I was part of the dot com bubble in the year 2000. It was tough, right? We lost everything. But then I thought, I have all the knowledge. I know how Google works. I know how Google ranks. And I built PokerNews.com, which was the number one site in the world for poker."
"Remember, you only do things that you learn from. So if you lose money on certain things, you don't give up. You take the knowledge that you got from that experience, and you go and create other stuff. So money will always come to you if you have what it takes."
Tony G told us that he grew up in Australia but was born in Lithuania when it was still part of the Soviet Union. He didn't have rich parents and his family lost absolutely everything so he could later go from zero to $300 million.
At the end of the interview Tony also gave life advice and a lesson for all entrepreneurs: "You can't be satisfied, you have to constantly develop and you have to get the best people to work with you. Henry Ford said, only with a team you can make it. So you need a good team around you. One person is nothing. It's not about me. Having a lot of shareholders, having a great team, tech team - that is precondition for success. People will take you places that money can't. Exactly it's all about people it's all about talent and if you can get them to work with you and build a bigger thing that's success."
"Believe in yourself, go for it, do business yourself, you're going to be very happy. And the key is to invest, invest and invest. Don't save, but invest. Invest in yourself, in your health, in your head, and in the businesses you can invest in, in the stock market, in the blockchain, in the crypto. Just invest all your life, and you're going to have the most interesting, successful life ever. Whatever you're doing, and not everybody has to be a businessman, you can be a great investor. Thanks to investing, you can afford different things and have the most interesting life."
Source - youtube, school of hard knocks, pokernews