Chris Dunn

My dad was a U.S. Air Force pilot. That meant we moved every two years, which sounds disruptive until you’re a kid who loves it. South Korea. Iceland. New bases, new cities, new everything. That constant movement wired something into me early: comfort with the unknown, a genuine appetite for adventure, and zero attachment to “how things are supposed to be.”

School was a different story.

Around 4th grade, I fell behind and never really caught up. I couldn’t sit still, failed math consistently, fell asleep in class, and eventually picked up in-school suspension in high school. The system decided I wasn’t a good student, and I mostly agreed with it, until I got bored enough during that suspension to start reading.

The books I found changed everything. Rich Dad Poor Dad. Think and Grow Rich. I read them and realized something that nobody in school had bothered to tell me: bad grades don’t mean you’re doomed. They just mean school wasn’t your game.

So I started playing a different game.

At 16, I launched a mobile car detailing company built around a product called The Waterless Car Wash. My pitch was simple: I’d come to your office building, detail your car in the parking lot, no water hookup needed. I went door to door cold, terrified of rejection, and got rejected constantly. Then I didn’t. I hired my friends. By the time I was pulling in around $2,000 a week, I wasn’t thinking about school at all.

One of my detailing clients owned a mortgage company. He offered me an apprenticeship, and I took it. That’s where I learned how finance actually worked: mortgages, credit, real estate, and sitting next to someone who was trading stocks on his screen during lunch.

That image stuck with me.

I barely graduated high school, sold the detailing business, and went to work full-time in the mortgage industry. During the housing boom of the early 2000s, I had a front-row seat to something most people weren’t paying attention to. The math didn’t work. The loan products didn’t make sense. I could see the subprime crisis building before it had a name.

So I got out. Left corporate America for good and went back to what I’d been thinking about since that mortgage office: trading.

In 2007, I started trading stocks and e-mini futures full-time. I lost money first, spent thousands of hours studying, and eventually figured it out. By 2010, though, the game was changing again. Algorithmic trading was squeezing human day traders out of the markets they’d lived in for decades. I could see it happening in real time.

I started looking for somewhere else to go.

I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011. My honest reaction: penny stock scam. I ignored it completely.

It wasn’t until 2013, when the price was around $100, that I took a real look and realized I’d been wrong. Not just wrong about whether it was legitimate. Wrong about the scale of what it was going to become. This wasn’t a curiosity or a tech experiment. It was a decentralized, programmable asset with no central authority, operating completely outside the traditional financial system. For a trader who’d watched that system nearly collapse in 2008 and then watched algorithms take over what was left of it, that was genuinely interesting.

I went deep. I created a YouTube video series walking people through how Bitcoin worked and how to think about it as an investment. I became one of the first investing educators in the world to treat it as a serious asset class worth studying. Eventually, millions of people found those videos.

In 2015, I self-published “How to Trade Bitcoin for Serious Profit,” one of the first books ever written on the subject. I sold every copy I had. Tens of thousands of people used that book to get their footing in Bitcoin when most of the world still thought it was a joke.

I’ve traded through every single Bitcoin cycle since. The rallies, the collapses, the 80% drawdowns that shook out everyone who wasn’t paying attention, and the recoveries that rewarded everyone who was.