CNBC Make It

Bhavik Vashi, 32, is living the dream of many Silicon Valley tech workers. He joined a promising startup, did his time and eventually the company was acquired, minting him as a millionaire. Shortly after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, he joined software startup Anaplan. Over the course of about 10 years at the company, Vashi worked his way up from an entry-level consultant role to vice president. It all paid off in June 2022, when Anaplan was acquired by private equity company Thoma Bravo at a roughly $10.4 billion valuation. Under the deal, all Anaplan shareholders received $63.75 per share. Vashi made over $2 million after selling all of his equity in the software startup, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It. Today, he has moved onto a new role as the managing director for Asia Pacific and the Middle East at software company Carta. While he acknowledged the role luck played in his payout, he also credited a couple strategic moves he made for his success. Here are five tips on how to negotiate for more equity at work, according to Vashi.

Two weeks before her side hustle’s launch party, Olivia Cleary did the math: At five minutes per inch of fabric, she was running out of time to sew 20 polyester scarves. She started working on the scarves from 7 p.m. until midnight, and 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. — when she had to leave for her full-time architectural design job. She finished the edges of her “crappy little scarves” on a $100 sewing machine that sat atop a folding TV table in the New York apartment she shared with two roommates, she says. That was in June 2022. Today, her business — called The Clearly Collective — sells silk scarves featuring iconic architectural landmarks. It hit six figures in annual revenue for the first time in October 2023, and its sales have been relatively steady since then, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Cleary left her full-time job in April to spend more time running the business. Here's how Cleary built her business while maintaining a full-time job. ⬇️

New research from LeanIn and McKinsey & Co. suggests that younger women are more susceptible to ageism in the workplace than their older colleagues.  Ageism impacts older employees at fairly similar rates for women and men. Yet women in their 20s and 30s report much higher instances of ageism than older women and their young, male colleagues.  Nearly half (49%) of women in their 20s and 37% of women in their 30s say their age has negatively impacted their career, compared with 24% of women in their 40s and 29% in their 50s.  Read more here:

To live “comfortably” as a single person in 99 of the largest U.S. metro areas, you’ll need a median income of $93,933, according to a SmartAsset analysis. “Comfortable” is defined as the income needed to cover a 50/30/20 budget, which assumes 50% of your monthly income can pay for necessities like housing and utility costs, 30% can cover discretionary spending and 20% can be set aside for savings or investments. Here’s the income a single person needs to live comfortably in the 25 U.S. cities with the highest cost of living.

Melinda French Gates believes it’s “so dumb” to try and maximize productivity by getting only a few hours of sleep. The billionaire philanthropist, who who recently announced that she’s sponsoring a $12.5 billion grant toward women’s rights, told Vanity Fair last week that she aims to get seven to eight hours of sleep each night. Medical experts agree with French Gates: Adults ages 18 to 60 need at least seven hours of sleep per night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Work is the most common activity that prevents people from getting enough sleep, says research from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Is work preventing you from getting enough sleep? Read more:

A family of four needs to make more than $275,000 to live comfortably in some of the most expensive U.S. cities, a SmartAsset analysis reveals. “Comfortable” is defined as the income needed to cover a 50/30/20 budget for a family of two adults and two kids. This budget assumes that 50% of the monthly income can pay for necessities like housing and utility costs, 30% can cover discretionary spending and 20% can be set aside for savings or investments. SmartAsset extrapolated the income needed for a 50/30/20 budget based on the cost of necessities, using data from the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Here’s a look how much income a family of four needs to live comfortably in the 20 most expensive U.S. cities.

Daniel Lubetzky isn’t a fan of hiring people who remind him of himself. In his experience, his best employees have different qualities and skills than he does, says the billionaire founder of Kind Snacks. “You want to be careful not to hire the same person you are,” Lubetzky, 56, tells CNBC Make It. “We tend to make the mistake [of looking] for clones by nature — we like ourselves. But that’s not actually how it works.” Instead, Lubetzky preaches the value of surrounding yourself with people whose strengths are your weaknesses.

He may not have known it at the time, but in 2005 Sam Altman took a risk that changed the trajectory of his career. That’s when Altman dropped out of Stanford to build Loopt, a location-based social networking app — the first of his projects before co-founding OpenAI, the game-changing artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT. It “seemed like a really fun thing to try,” Altman, 39, told students during an interview at his alma mater, the St. Louis-area John Burroughs School. More importantly, he added, leaving college was a decision he could go back on if entrepreneurship didn’t work out. “That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door,” he said. “You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else.” Here’s why Altman says it’s crucial to choose the right risks — but not avoid them altogether.

If you want your degree to help you land a fulfilling job, consider studying music therapy. The medical and therapeutic fields are among the college majors helping graduates get jobs that make the world a better place, according to graduates surveyed in a recent Payscale report. Alumni with bachelor’s degrees in music therapy are most likely to do this kind of fulfilling work, with 95% of degree-holders saying their work makes the world a better place, Payscale finds. Music therapy programs cover coursework in music, music therapy, science and psychology, according to the American Music Therapy Association. However, those positions often don’t pay top dollar. The median income for music therapy degree-holders is just $49,400 in the first five years of working, and $64,900 with 10 or more years of experience. Other degrees can pay better, though. See the nine majors and degrees that alumni are most likely to say led to meaningful careers, according to Payscale — including 2 that pay more than $100,000: cnb.cx/4d8ANvX

More than half of young people want to be influencers — 57%, to be exact. That’s according to a 2023 Morning Consult survey of 1,000 Gen Zers. And they’re not alone. Nearly half, 41% of adults overall would choose the career as well, according to a similar Morning Consult survey of 2,204 U.S. adults. Their reasons vary. Some “are very excited about the idea of celebrity, fame and money,” says Victoria Bachan, president of talent at influencer agency Whalar. Some “are just genuinely looking for a place to connect and find community,” and there are those who simply love to create using the tools of social media, she says. Whatever their reasons, the job may be harder than it seems. Here’s what it looks like day-to-day and the many challenges creators face along the way.