The usual generic financial advice I give is:
- Maximize every retirement vehicle offered to you (max 401k, HSA, etc).
- Pretend that any money you sock away for retirement doesn't exist. This is best done with automated withdrawals so you never even consider it money in your checking account.
- Learn to cook. This doesn't actually save much money at the individual level but is huge for families.
- Set up separate accounts for expenses and savings. Most payroll setups allow you to automatically divert funds to multiple accounts. This lets you automatically put $X in your expense account and $TOTAL - $X in the savings account. Again, the idea is to never consider that money spendable. It goes into a lock box.
- Shoot for a 50+% after tax savings rate. It sounds nuts but it's actually easier than you think. The key is to not bump up your expenses as your income increases. You might not be there when you first start out but if you're increasing earnings 5-10% per year you'll get there quite quickly (particularly in tech).
- Never buy a new car. They're for chumps.
- Never lease a new car. That's for the biggest chumps.
- Once you've built up an 8 to 12 month nest egg of reserve cash, start allocating the rest in a diversified portfolio. Pick securities from the trading company that don't have transaction costs (large discount brokers usually have in house mirrors of popular ETFs for this).
Stick on this path and you'll eventually be sitting on a decent nest egg. Plus if you've reined in your expenses, if you decide to go the founder route you'll have plenty of runway to pursue your ideas.