At the age of twenty-six, John Roa founded a tech-consulting and design firm that he sold for a fortune to the largest tech company in San Francisco, Salesforce. Roa’s twenty-year-long journey from being dead-broke to wealth he never imagined is an absurd and often comical story of talent, luck, risk, rapidly changing technology, larger-than-life personalities, sex, gambling, and excessive alcohol and drug consumption. Roa’s story is a cautionary tale of the toll that entrepreneurship can take on ambitious young people unprepared for the physical and mental costs that “making it” can take. A Practical Way to Get Rich…and Die Trying is a compelling memoir and the foundation for a campaign of honesty and vulnerability in an industry that currently allows neither.