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Managing Tech Millions

Christopher Nelson

Welcome to Managing Tech Millions!

http://www.managingtechmillions.com/

This is the podcast where your tech-driven success meets innovative wealth strategies.

Hosted by Christopher Nelson—3x IPO tech executive and private equity expert—this show dives deep into how to protect, grow, and transform your hard-earned millions into a legacy.

From private equity and real estate to maximizing equity compensation, we break down the strategies used by the ultra-wealthy to help you take control of your financial future.

Whether managing your first exit, equity tranche or scaling toward lasting financial independence, this is your blueprint for building wealth like a pro.

Tune in, take action, and make your millions work harder than you do.

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20 episodes
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English

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September 15 · 18 min
$500K into INCOME investments, here's how I allocated it...
What I'd Do Differently With My First $500,000 Between 2013 and 2018 I deployed $530,000 across nine investments while I was still working full time in tech. It worked. That capital paid me real income from the first year, and it became the foundation of the portfolio that now generates around $200,000 a year. It also took far more work than it needed to. I've put millions to work since then, and I've watched which decisions hold up across cycles and which ones only worked once. Standing at that same crossroads today, with the same $500,000 and the same goal, I'd build it a completely different way: fewer investments, fewer operators, and a lot less of my own time. In this video I walk through the original deployment in detail, what each piece returned, and the five principles I'd follow instead if I were starting tomorrow. The shift that drives all five runs against everything my tech career taught me about what makes something valuable. If you're sitting on capital you want to turn into income, this is the framework I wish I'd had in 2013.
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September 8 · 11 min
How to Start a Micro Family Office FROM SCRATCH (3 Steps)
If you're sitting on $1 to $30 million, the wealth management industry has left you stranded. You've outgrown basic personal finance advice. You're not rich enough for the family offices built for the ultra-wealthy. So you end up managing millions the way most people manage thousands. I lived in that gap. Former tech CIO, concentrated equity, no playbook. Today I run a $7 million portfolio on a system I call the Micro Family Office, and in this video I walk you through how to build one. The strategic advantages billionaire families have used for decades don't require a $100 million minimum or millions a year in overhead. They require three phases, and most people skip straight past the first one to go pick investments. That's why their portfolios never compound the way they should. I break down the whole WealthOps framework: what you architect before you make another investment, what you build, and the quarterly rhythm that runs it once it's live. I also take on the objection I hear most, that this would take over your life. I answer it with a number.
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September 1 · 12 min
$20K monthly cash flow from a $3M portfolio, here’s how…
Most advisors hand you the same plan. Accumulate for 30 years, then withdraw 4% a year and hope the math holds. I ran that plan through real numbers in this video: the taxes, the sequence risk, the principal you liquidate every year to pay yourself. It's a water tank you drain while praying it rains again. Ultra-wealthy families operate differently. I've sat on both sides of the table, as a GP allocating capital and an LP writing checks, and today my portfolio covers my family's essential expenses without touching the principal. The difference comes down to the job your assets do. They stop accumulating and start operating. I walk you through the framework I use in my own portfolio and in the funds I run: how the assets get selected, how the tax bill shrinks, and what families north of $20M actually hold instead of index funds. Then I put both models side by side. One funds a retirement. The other funds independence.
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August 25 · 14 min
Have $1M-$30M? DON'T use the 4% rule
In 2012 I had millions in the bank and no income strategy. Every advisor told me the same thing: 60/40 portfolio, 4% rule, you're set for life. Then I went and read the research behind that rule. It comes from a 1994 study, and what it leaves out is the thing that can end a retirement in the first three years. So I spent the next decade studying how ultra-wealthy families actually pay for their lives. I interviewed Chief Investment Officers at Single Family Offices and took their portfolio structures apart. What I found made me angry. The strategy isn't complicated. It's been kept quiet by firms charging you 1% a year to sit in the same cookie-cutter portfolio they sell someone with $500K. Families with generational wealth follow one rule about their assets, and everything else is built around it. Follow it and a 30% market drop stops being a threat to your retirement. In this video I walk through the structure I built, what my own numbers looked like the year I walked away at 51, and the four steps I'd take if I were starting from scratch today.
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August 18 · 10 min
Already Have $1M? Here's How to Get to $10M
In 2012 my company IPO'd and I watched my net worth go up $3 million in a matter of minutes. A few days later I sat down with a Morgan Stanley advisor expecting a playbook. I got 30 minutes of the same recommendation he gives someone with $100K in a 401(k): 90% stocks and bonds, 10% cash. He wasn't a bad advisor. He was giving me the only thing the industry is built to give someone at my level. That's how I found the financial dead zone. Retail finance serves people under $1 million. Family offices serve people over $100 million. If you're somewhere in between, you're paying about 1% a year for advice you could get out of ChatGPT. So I studied how ultra-wealthy families actually run their money, then rebuilt it at my scale. In this video I walk through the blueprint I used to grow past $8 million and cover my family's essential expenses entirely with portfolio income. Most people try to jump straight to the last phase. I explain why the order matters more than any single strategy.
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August 11 · 8 min
Family Office CEO Explains How To Start Your Own (Without Needing $100M+)
You Don't Need $100M to Run a Family Office If your net worth sits between one and thirty million, you already have investments. What you're missing is the system that grows them, protects them, and passes them down. That gap separates owning a portfolio from running a family office. The wealthiest families in the world run their money like a business. Every family office operates on the same components, whether it's running five million or five hundred million. Miss one and the whole thing gets shaky. In this video I walk through each one, what it does, and where the gaps usually show up for people at one to thirty million. I also break down why the hundred-million-dollar entry price on family offices is a myth, and which component flips your relationship with your advisors completely. By the end, you'll be able to count how many you already have in place. Whatever number you land on is your starting point. The gaps are the work ahead. Let's keep building.
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August 4 · 8 min
Have $1M–$30M? Your Family Will Probably Lose It — Here's How to Fix That
Most first-generation wealth doesn't survive the handoff. The investments were usually fine. The problem is that everything holding it together lives in your head. The strategy, the reasoning, the relationships, the plan for what happens next. In tech we call that a single point of failure. Right now, that's you. The Rockefellers solved this in 1882, and their family office still runs 140 years later. Their heirs got more than assets. They got the thing that keeps wealth alive after the person who built it is gone. In this video I walk through the three shifts that turn a portfolio into something your family can actually run without you. One of them is the shift almost everyone gets backwards. I'll also share a moment from my own family, on a service trip to a small town in the Dominican Republic, where it landed for me. If your kids are still young, or you're too busy building to think about succession, this is the one to watch.
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July 28 · 10 min
Protecting Your Wealth Is Hard Until You Focus on These 4 Tasks
The moment your wealth becomes worth protecting is the exact moment the financial industry stops serving you. Too complex for retail advice. Too small for the family office built for hundred-million-dollar fortunes. Welcome to the service desert—where defending everything you've built falls to one person. You. And here's what nobody warns you about: your wealth isn't facing one threat. It's facing four, all at once. The market that built it. The world that can sue you for it. The IRS that quietly drains it every single year. And time itself, which decides whether any of it outlasts you. Most people at your level defend against one, maybe two—and leave the other doors wide open. You don't need to be a financial genius to close all four. You need to execute on four specific tasks. The exact four I focused on first when protecting my own $8M portfolio. I'll walk you through each one—and show you why they're not independent. Done right, each defense reinforces the others, until your wealth stops being a pile you anxiously guard and becomes a business that defends itself. Let's keep building.
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July 21 · 11 min
The Kind of Portfolio That Makes You Immune to Market Swings
Most retirement advice tells you to survive market swings with more diversification, more bonds, more cash on the sidelines. I'm going to show you why that entire premise is backwards. Here's the uncomfortable truth: a 20% drop doesn't hurt you. Being forced to sell into that drop does. And the traditional retirement model all but guarantees that moment arrives. There's even a name for it in the research, and two retirees with the identical average return can have wildly different outcomes based on nothing but timing. In this video, I put two models side by side using a real $3 million portfolio. One is the drawdown plan your advisor recommends. The other is the evergreen structure the ultra-wealthy actually build. Same income. Completely different outcome. And when I show you what the wealthiest families keep in the public markets, it's going to surprise you. If you have $1M–$30M and you're serious about income that ignores the market's mood, watch to the end. Let's keep building.
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July 14 · 8 min
99% of Wealthy Families Don't Know How to Protect, Grow, and Pass Down their wealth
If you have between one and thirty million dollars, you've probably done what almost everyone does: handed it to an advisor, paid the fee, and hoped the money outlasts you. That's the 99%. And it's not your fault—no one ever handed you the playbook. The ultra-wealthy don't hope. For over a century they've used a specific structure to run their wealth like a business built to outlast them. Not a better stock pick. Not a better advisor. A better structure. I'm Christopher Nelson. I left a tech career, built my own Micro Family Office, and learned the hard way that the entire financial industry is built to take your assets under management—not to teach you this. So I reverse-engineered what the big family offices do and scaled it down. In this video I'll walk you through the four phases and the seven components that turn a pile of investments into a wealth business you actually control. Watch this before you hand another dollar to anyone.
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July 7 · 38 min
1B+ Family Office CIO: "Before You Invest a Dollar, DO THIS!"
Most first-generation wealth builders make the same move: they cross the million-dollar threshold and immediately ask "where should I invest?" That question is the trap. And it's costing you more than you realize. In this conversation, I sit down with Marco Quevedo—my friend from our UCSD days, a Wharton MBA, and now the Chief Investment Officer of a nine-figure family office. Marco has helped start multiple family offices from scratch, and he walks through exactly how billion-dollar operations architect their wealth—goals before thesis, thesis before allocation. Here's what surprised me most: the best investors aren't the ones who are great at saying yes. They're the ones who say no—fast, and without guilt. Marco explains why "it doesn't fit our thesis" is a complete sentence, and how that single discipline separates the operators from the hopeful. We cover goal-setting, the investment thesis, allocation buckets, governance, and the cadence that keeps it all alive. Then Marco leaves you with one piece of advice about the empty seat in your financial life. Watch to the end for that one.
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June 30 · 16 min
Family Office CEO Ranks Every Income Investment BEST to WORST (For Experienced Investors)
I Ranked Every Income Investment, Best to Worst — One Popular Pick Got an F Most income advice gets one thing backwards: it ranks investments as if there's a single right answer for everyone. There isn't. So I did something different. I took every income vehicle worth knowing — annuities, covered call ETFs, private credit, REITs, syndications, BDCs, muni bonds, the ones your advisor pitches and the ones they've never mentioned — and I graded all of them, S through F. But here's the catch that changes everything: I graded them for one specific investor. $5 million, five years from drawing income, comfortable in private markets. Change that investor, and some of these grades flip completely. One of the most popular income products on the market earns a flat F. And a vehicle most people have never had pitched to them lands at the very top. I'll show you exactly why — and the five dimensions of diversification almost everyone gets wrong, even with a dozen positions. Watch the full ranking, then build your own. Let's keep building.
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June 23 · 11 min
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Buying Your Next Covered Call ETF
The Truth About Covered Call ETFs Nobody Tells You Covered call ETFs might be the most blindly bought income product on the market right now. And almost everyone picks the same way: they chase the biggest yield number on the website. Here's what that number won't tell you. The yield is what you receive. It says nothing about what you actually keep. I learned this the hard way when I started moving capital into these funds—capital that's part of a portfolio generating over $200,000 a year in income. I nearly made several expensive mistakes myself. I caught them because I went deep: I broke down the strategies, the fund structures, and the tax treatment most investors never look at. In this video, I walk through the five biggest mistakes people make with covered call ETFs—and exactly what to do instead. One of them has nothing to do with which fund you pick, and it quietly costs people thousands every single year. Get these right, and you'll be operating at a level most investors never reach. Let's keep building.
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June 16 · 9 min
Have $1M–$30M? Here's How to Grow, Protect, and Pass It Down (7 Steps)
You're Too Big for the App—and Too Small for the Family Office If your net worth sits somewhere between one and thirty million dollars, you're stuck in a place nobody built for you. Too big for the retail app on your phone. Too small for the single family office running things for the ultra-wealthy. So you default to the only option anyone ever handed you: give it all to an advisor, pay the fee year after year, and watch the accounts draw down—until the money runs out, or you do. There's a second path. Five years ago I built my own Micro Family Office on the same seven components that run hundred-million-dollar family offices—scaled to my situation. In this video I walk through every one, and how they lock together into a system you actually run. Here's what most people get wrong: you don't build all seven on day one, and the sophisticated version of a few is not what wins. Stick around to the end—I'll show you how to score yourself across all seven, so you know exactly where you stand and what to fix first. Let's keep building.
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June 9 · 15 min
You NEED a Micro Family Office (if you have $1M-$30M NW)
You Don't Need a Better Advisor. You Need a Better Structure. As your wealth grows — one million to two, two to five — you outgrow your financial advisor. So you go hunting for a unicorn: the one advisor who'll finally get it. I did the same thing after my first IPO watched my net worth jump to $3.3 million. Every firm came back with the same cookie-cutter pitch and the same 1% fee. Here's what took me years to understand: if you're between $1 and $30 million, the problem was never your advisor. You're stuck in a place the industry simply isn't built to serve — and chasing a better advisor keeps you there. The ultra-wealthy solved this over a century ago. They don't have a portfolio. They run their wealth like a business. In this video, I'll show you how to build a scaled-down version for yourself — the same structure, made cost-effective and actually implementable for high earners. This is the shift from money maker to money manager. Let's keep building.
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June 2 · 50 sec
Give me 50 sec... you'll never look at your financial advisor the same
Most people think they're in charge of their money. They're not. If you have a financial advisor telling you what to buy, when to worry, and what your goals should be — and you're nodding along — you're not running your wealth. You're an employee in a business you own. I'm not saying fire your advisor. I'm saying something different. There's a specific seat you should be sitting in, and right now, someone else is sitting in it for you. Most people never see this until it's too late. In 50 seconds, I break down the role your advisor should actually play on your team — and the role you need to step into if you want any real say in how your wealth gets built. Most people get this exact dynamic backwards and never realize it. Because if you don't take that seat, someone else will build their version of your dream. And you'll be the one living with it.
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May 26 · 9 min
SpaceX IPO Is Minting Overnight MILLIONAIRES — Here's 7 Decisions you MUST Make
SpaceX is about to mint 160 new millionaires — and most of them will get this wrong You think the big decisions come after the money hits. You're wrong — and that misunderstanding is what costs first-generation wealth builders the most. A tweet stopped me cold this week. Roughly 160 people in Austin are about to clear $100 million from the upcoming SpaceX IPO. Twelve will clear a billion. I cleared $3 million on my first IPO. I made almost every mistake a first-gen wealth builder can make — and most of these SpaceX employees are about to make them too. Here's what nobody tells you: the highest-leverage moves happen before the stock even prices. The first call most people make is the wrong one. The lockout window most people sleep through is the most important planning period of their financial life. I walk through 7 decisions you need to make if you're staring down an IPO, a business sale, an inheritance, or any sudden wealth event. There's also one question underneath all seven. If you can't answer it, none of the rest works. Let's keep building.
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May 19 · 14 min
5 Counter-Intuitive Investing Principles That Helped Me Retire at 51
I Retired at 51 Without Following the 4% Rule Most people are handed the same retirement playbook: hire an advisor, diversify your stocks, withdraw 4% a year, and hope the market cooperates. I followed none of it. And I walked away at 51. Here's the part nobody tells you — that playbook wasn't built for early retirement, tax efficiency, durable income, or leaving a legacy. It was built to help you accumulate wealth. Not to live from it. The real shift came when I stopped studying retirement advice and started studying how ultra-high-net-worth families — the ones managing $100M+ — actually operate their money. They weren't asking how to beat the market. They were asking completely different questions. In this video, I'm walking you through the 5 counter-intuitive principles that changed everything for me — including the $10K decision that's quietly worth over $650K, and why the org chart most people use to manage their wealth is upside down. If you've built real wealth and the conventional model feels like it wasn't built for you — you're right. Here's what to do instead.
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May 12 · 16 min
Family Office CEO Ranks Every Income Investment BEST to WORST (For $1M–$10M Portfolios)
Most first-gen millionaires I meet have a portfolio that looks the way mine did 14 years ago — over-concentrated in growth stocks. That works when markets are ripping. It breaks the moment you actually need the portfolio to pay you. I've spent the last decade building an income portfolio that now generates around $200K per year in tax-efficient income across multiple asset types. Along the way I've evaluated every income vehicle on the menu — and the ones getting pushed hardest on YouTube aren't the ones I'd actually recommend. In this video I rank all 15 income investments S through F for a specific situation: $5M, five years from retirement, growth-stock background, semi-liquid preference. A few of the "obvious" picks land much lower than you'd expect. One vehicle most investors overlook turns out to be the cleanest on-ramp on the entire list. If you're trying to make the shift from money maker to money manager, this is the map. Let's keep building.
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May 5 · 10 min
Build a Micro Family Office From Scratch (7 steps)
If your wealth feels disorganized, it's not because you've made bad investments. It's because nobody ever taught you the part that actually matters once you've made the money. Every book, every podcast, every advisor obsesses over the same question — where should I put my money? But that's the wrong question at this stage. The wealthiest families in the world figured this out generations ago. They don't run their wealth like a portfolio. They run it like a business. It's called a family office, and the most famous one has been operating for over 140 years. Here's the catch — traditional family offices need $100M+ to run. So I scaled the model down. Same architecture. Same operating components. Built for $1M to $30M. I call it the Micro Family Office. In this video, I walk through the components every family office is built on — the same ones that will run yours. Watch this before you make another investment decision.
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