I’m Max Altschuler. I was a born to build things.
At a young age, you could find me in my room with towers of wooden bricks and lego castles taller than me sprawled across the place.
My father likes to reminisce about how one of my first words was Demolition, a word we would say together after knocking down all of those brick towers at the end of the day, before putting them back in their boxes.
I wasn’t a very good student. I liked to go by the saying, “C’s get degrees”. My parents, guidance counselors, and teachers were always trying to fix me by making me enroll in special classes away from my friends, prescribing me to adhd medicine that I felt took away a lot of my creativity, or dragging me to a range of therapists in the hopes of trying to understand me. I always knew it came from a place of love, but it didn’t make me feel the best.
I wasn’t until college that I got my first chance to pave my own path
That path lead me to an interesting place. A place where I truly became a hacker.
I hacked college by figuring out you only needed to take 50% of college credits in class at Arizona State, to graduate with a degree there. So I took the last two years of credits at local community colleges online. I would download the syllabus the first day of class and spend the next 2-3 days cranking out all of the work for the semester. Then I’d set reminders on my calendar when to post the assignments that were do.
This gave me free time to travel the world, another thing I hacked by emailing a handful of hostels before I got to a city about doing some chores in exchange for free room and board. This allowed me to visit more places without spending any more, and also allowed me to meet more locals who could give me rides to the next backpacking location. This along with buying 500 Facebook likes and selling them for a 25x profit, would fuel my travels to over 80 countries.
Hacking college also gave me the time to I needed to start my own business. Because I didn’t have to be in class, I had free time to devote to my bike share startup, Rack N Ride. I started a social media marketing company strictly to make american money while living on the beach in Central America.
Then I leveraged that to get into one of the hottest tech startups
I work with Udemy to build out the instructor side of the marketplace as one of the first 10 employees. Now they’re a multibillion dollar company. Then I helped build both sides of the AttorneyFee marketplace that was acquired by LegalZoom.
I started Sales Hacker, a media company, to help others figure out similar sales processes to what we set up at Udemy. Sales Hacker has done over $10,000,000 in revenue in our first 4 years. I wrote a bestselling book on the subject called Hacking Sales, that sold over 25,000 copies and was later bought and published by Wiley.
I founded two other multimillion dollar media companies, CMX and SaaStr. I’m an active advisor and investor to over 55 private venture backed companies. I’ve been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc, the Huffington Post, Time, and many other highly credible publications.
I stand before you to tell you that you can do it too.
That’s why I created Career Hacking, the podcast, and the book. Because I wasn’t an ivy league student, or a D1 athlete, or a rich kid, or well connected.
I worked hard and took a lot of risks. I moved out to San Francisco to work for Udemy and didn’t know a single person in the city. My father was a local financial advisor and mother was a yoga teacher. We lived in the suburbs and my house was attached to another house, until they split up when I was in the 8th grade.
I’m a normal guy with a normal upbringing. I have minor OCD and I’m sure some ADHD, along with small intestines disease called Colitis.
I learned a lot on this journey so far. I also failed A LOT. In doing that, I’ve stepped on quite a few landmines in my career, and I truly believe my advice and stories can help you save a few limbs by not making the same mistakes I did.
So I say all of this because there’s no reason you can’t do what I did. I’m here to help because I genuinely love it. I always said if I put a roof over my head near a beach while helping as many people as possible, I’d be a happy man.
Career Hacking is here to do this. It allows me to help as many people as I possibly can at one time. So where can I help you today?
Hop on and say hi or tell me how I’m doing at this on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Appreciate the support and thanks for reading more about me today.
With love,
Max