> He got a computer-engineering degree in 1997, and skipped the graduation ceremony to begin working at a company near Ottawa called Newbridge Networks. This was the early upslope of the dot-com boom. He started at forty-one thousand dollars a year, with no savings or possessions except “a bike, a backpack, and a diploma.” He made the rookie mistake (“what a clueless young man!!!”) of buying a sports car with a loan from his sister. He got his first raise soon afterward, to fifty-seven thousand and six hundred dollars. By the end of year one, he’d saved five thousand dollars. A year later, he had twenty-three thousand. By year five, a quarter of a million.
It's quite apparent that yes, Adeney has done a ton of work to be rigorous enough to have built and to maintain the endowment.
However... it feels like he built this retirement nest egg on a rare period in the markets' history. I'd question how repeatable it is.