Chris Sacca is a billionaire due to his early investments in tech companies like Uber, Instagram and Kickstarter. 

He got his start backing something a bit less cutting edge. "I started trading commodities when I was 13 or 14 ... And I was trading live hogs," Sacca, a 49-year-old venture investor and entrepreneur, said on a recent episode of the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show."

Sacca, whose net worth was most recently estimated at $1.2 billion by Forbes in 2021, was introduced to investing while working for a family friend who ran a construction equipment rental business, he explained. The owner, Bob Haas, who Sacca said was his "dad's best friend," had a commodities trading account that he showed the teen Sacca on a computer in the business' upstairs office.

After Sacca showed an interest, Haas offered his teen employee a deal: He'd allow Sacca to make one trade with his account, offering to either cover the cost of any losses or split any profit evenly. "That's called venture capital," said Sacca.

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Because Sacca was new to investing — and his parents didn't own stocks, he noted — Haas gave him a week to study what sort of trade he wanted to make.

"I went to the library, I started learning about Stochastics, about charts, and technical analysis," Sacca said, adding: "I went all in. I read everything, I studied everything." Soon, he was researching commodities like coffee, oil, cocoa, even "frozen orange juice concentrate, like [the movie] 'Trading Places.'"

He identified what he thought was a "pattern anomaly" in live hog futures, placed his trade, and cashed out two weeks later for $171, he said. He was struck by how he could earn so much "by pushing a button and using my brain," compared to $4.25 per hour doing manual labor downstairs at Haas' business, he added. 

"I was like, 'I want to be the guy who works upstairs,'" said Sacca. "I can't tell you how seminal that experience was for me, the rest of my life. There's only so far you can lever a man-hour."

Sacca followed stock quotes regularly from that point forward, even carrying a pager to school, he said. His interest in earning money from a young age wasn't surprising: "From the time I was 6 years old, I was going around the neighborhood selling walnuts that I'd poke holes in and call air fresheners, or rocks that I had found in a parking lot," he said. "I was literally going door to door."

Other childhood ventures for Sacca included mowing lawns, washing and detailing cars, a newspaper route, selling candy, and running a gambling card game at his high school. "I paid off a teacher," he said. "We were always hustling."

Sacca got a law degree from Georgetown University in 2000, and eventually landed a job as an in-house lawyer at Google. He helped fund some early-stage startups as an angel investor, becoming one of the earliest backers of Twitter, now known as X. In 2010, he launched VC firm Lowercase Capital, which invested in companies like Uber, Kickstarter, Stripe and Blue Bottle Coffee.

Sacca announced his retirement from traditional venture investing in 2017, instead shifting his focus to a climate investment fund, Lowercarbon Capital, aimed at backing carbon removal startups.

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