We trust banks with our money without thinking twice about it. That’s what banks are for.

This article is about what happens when trust is handed to exactly the wrong person, and nobody checks.

Barings bank was founded in London in 1762, and it grew into Britain’s oldest merchant bank, an institution that had survived wars and financial crises for more than 200 years. It’s said to have helped finance the Louisiana Purchase, and its client list included the British monarchy itself, even the Queen banked there.

A young man named Nick Leeson joined Barings in 1989. He didn’t come from money, he was the son of a plasterer, but he rose fast. He was quickly promoted to the trading floor and made manager of the bank’s Singapore office, trading on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange.

He looked like a star. In 1993 alone, his profits made up almost 10% of everything Barings earned that year. He was still in his twenties, and he was already treated like one of the most important traders the bank had.

What nobody stopped to question was how much control he’d actually been handed. Leeson was in charge of both trading and settlement, which meant he could hide losses with no one checking his work. In a normal bank, those are two separate jobs done by two separate people, precisely so one can catch the other’s mistakes. In Barings’ Singapore office, they were the same person.

That single decision, letting one man mark his own homework, is the reason everything that followed was possible.

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In July 1992, not long after he arrived, Leeson opened a secret account. Its number was 88888. He told his bosses it existed to cover a small error made by an inexperienced colleague. In reality, it became the place where he buried every trade that went wrong.

At first the losses were small, a little over $8 million by that September. Nobody noticed, or nobody looked. By December 1994, the hidden losses had grown to roughly $374 million, more than a third of everything Barings owned. And still, almost nobody outside that Singapore office knew the account existed.

When a senior auditor finally noticed something didn’t add up that January, Leeson didn’t come clean. He invented a story about a trade with another firm and produced a forged document to back it up. The lie held. For now.

Around the same time, Singapore’s exchange flagged the sheer size of what Leeson was trading and asked Barings’ senior management about it directly. London’s answer was that the bank had more than enough capital to cover the risk. Nobody had actually checked.

On January 16, 1995, hoping to finally claw his way out, Leeson placed one more bet, that the Japanese stock market wouldn’t move much overnight. It only worked if nothing dramatic happened.

But something dramatic happened. Early the next morning, the Great Hanshin earthquake struck Kobe, Japan, killing more than 6,400 people. The Nikkei went into freefall.

Any ordinary trader would have cut their losses right there. Leeson didn’t. He doubled down, buying thousands more futures contracts, betting his own buying could drag the market back up. By February he controlled roughly half of all the open contracts in the Nikkei futures market, one man quietly betting the whole market wouldn’t notice. Other traders noticed. And they started trading against him.

The market kept falling. By late February, the losses hidden inside account 88888 had reached a number that’s hard to picture, more than $1.3 billion, over twice the capital the entire bank had to its name.

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On February 23, 1995, Leeson left a note on his desk. It read, simply, “I’m sorry.” Then he and his wife fled the country.

Three days later, Barings, the bank that had survived 233 years, wars, and financed a piece of American history, collapsed. It was sold to a Dutch bank for the price of one British pound.

Leeson didn’t get far. He was caught in Germany and extradited to Singapore.

He pleaded guilty in December 1995, and the trial that decided his fate was over in two days. The judge said he had “spun a web of deceit,” and sentenced him to six and a half years. He served for four years and released early after being diagnosed with colon cancer.

He later wrote a book about what happened, and it became a film.

"I'd never experienced failure. I think that is one of the problems." -Nick Leeson

So,

Hiding one mistake costed a collapse of the bank. It’s the same mistake we make anywhere we let one person mark their own test, a business, a team, a habit we’ve stopped questioning in ourselves. The moment nobody’s allowed to double-check you is the moment it gets easy to believe your own story a little too long.

Thank you for reading this,
Riya Prajapati

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We’re all familiar with iOS and Android. some of us even start arguing over which one is better. But that’s not what this article is about.

Have you ever wondered why android phone comes with Google’s app pre-installed? or why almost every other phone company uses Android operating system, even though they didn’t develop it?

To understand that, we have to go back in time.

Android was founded by Andy Rubin and Chris White in October 2003, later joined by Rich Miner and Nick Sears. But the operating system we know today almost didn’t happen.

In April 2004, the team decided to make an operating system for smartphones to compete with big names like Symbian and Windows Mobile. Money was tight, and they barely survived the early days, but they kept going.

Meanwhile, over at Google, things looked totally different. Fresh off going IPO in August 2004, Google was the undisputed king of computer search. But behind closed doors, co-founder Larry Page was worried.

He saw the future coming. He knew people would soon browse the web on phones instead of big desktop computers. Google’s fear was being locked out entirely by giant companies like Microsoft or cellular carriers who controlled phone software.

In 2005, Andy Rubin tried making deals with Samsung and HTC. Shortly after, Google stepped in and bought Android for about $50 million.

Then Google decided to give Android away for free. This strategic move altered the mobile industry.

At the time, expert business analysts were totally confused. Software was supposed to be expensive! Microsoft, for example, made phone companies pay up to $20 for every single phone license.

By removing software licensing fees, caused seismic shift in the mobile industry.

Hardware manufacturers like Samsung, LG, HTC and Motorola shifted to android immediately . They no longer needed to spend millions of dollars and years of research developing their own phone software.

Android went from holding roughly 4% of global market share in 2009 to becoming the world’s most popular operating system by 2012. Today, Android powers over 70% of smartphones globally running on nearly 3.9 billion active devices across the planet.

Through the Google Play Store, Google collected a percentage cut on billions of app downloads and digital subscriptions, while its ad business thrived by keeping Search, Maps, and YouTube at user’s fingertips.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt later called the Android acquisition “the best deal ever.”

So let’s go back to where we started.

Why does your Android phone come with Google’s apps already installed? Why do phone makers who never built Android still use it?

Because that was the whole trick. Google gave the operating system away for free so that almost every phone on Earth would become a direct doorway right back to Google its search, its ads, and its store.

The software was just the gift. The doorway was the real business.

Sometimes, you don’t need to charge people for the thing everyone else is selling. The smarter move is to give it away, and own whatever it opens up next.

Thank you! I hope you enjoyed reading this,

Riya Prajapati

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These days he's semi-retired, stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway's CEO at the start of this year, though he's still chairman. He's worth somewhere north of $140 billion, which puts him in the top ten richest people alive, depending on which day you check.

Here are key lessons we can learn from Warren Buffett’s early years:

1. He didn’t wait to be qualified

   When he was 11 years old, he bought 3 stocks from his and his sister’s saving. When he was fourteen, he was already filing his own tax return and writing off his bike as a business expense.

   

   By his teens he had saved close to ten thousand dollars, all of it his own. Nobody sat him down and taught him how to do any of this. He just did it, badly at first, long before anyone would’ve called him qualified.
   

   Feeling ready is a trap. The feel readiness for the next project, startup or side hustle is never comes on schedule. It shows up after you have already started, usually annoyed that it took so long to arrive.

2. The stock that dropped, taught him more than winning would have

   The stock Buffett bought at eleven dropped right after he bought it. His older sister reminded him about it every day on the walk to the school. He sold that stock the moment it recovered.

   Then the stock kept climbing. A lot. He had gotten out too early because the losing felt bad, not because the investment was actually bad.
   
   He turned that into a rule he kept his whole life: don’t quit just because something’s uncomfortable right now.
   
   Everyone messes up at some point. It feels like proof you should quit. Where it is the first step of your journey.

3. Small and boring turn into something else, eventually

   Buffet used to buy pinball machines in his teenage. He used to put machines in barbershop and splitting takes with the barber. Within a year he had three machines in three shops.

   
   It was a small side hustle with vending machine. Nothing about it was impressive. The impressive part was what it turned into, once you have started.
   

   

   whatever you are building right now might feel small but that is just what the beginning looks like from the inside.

4. The thing you are most afraid of is worth fixing first

   You might wonder because this same kid fearless enough to buy stocks and running small pinball business was terrified of public speaking.

   
   He would throw up before having talk. to solve that, he signed up for a public speaking course when he was in Columbia but quit before the first class.

   After he graduated in 1951, he moved home to Omaha and took a job selling stocks. The thing he feared was now his job. So he signed up again for a hundred dollars. This time he finished this course. The certificate dated January 13, 1952 hangs on his office wall.

   
   The course ended, he walked into University of Omaha and offered to teach a night class on investing. A twenty-one years old, standing in front of students older than he was because he’d figured out that if he didn’t force himself in front of people immediately, the fear would just close back over him.
   
   He once said, “if they just learned to communicate better and both in writing and person they increase their value at least 50%”

   

   He didn’t get the confidence first and then act. He acted first on purpose, on the thing that scared him and the confidence came after. If there's something you keep avoiding because it makes your stomach drop, that's probably the most important thing on your list right now.

5. The real takeaway

   People constantly aske him, what is the best investment anyone can make. His answer never changes: “invest in yourself. There is nothing that compares to it.”

   Whatever’s sitting between you and what you actually want, a skill, a fear, some weak spot you keep working around, that’s the one thing nobody can take from you once you’ve built it.

   

He was eleven when this all started. You don’t need it figured out yet either. You just need to start before you feel ready for it.

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