CEO of Bulletproof Coffee shares why he left Silicon Valley and moved to Canada | Hacker News Reader

CEO of Bulletproof Coffee shares why he left Silicon Valley and moved to Canada

businessinsider.com

37 pointsbilkoo74 comments

The article, and by extension Asprey, come across as a bit tone deaf to me.

He was making $250,000 salary + stock/benefits + double income with his physician wife. He owned a home, admitted he lived in "nice neighborhoods", sent both his children to private school, spent weekends at Tahoe, and who knows what else.

With all of this he says he felt "less than middle class".

You have excluded the sentence which immediately follows his stated income: "The median-priced home in San Francisco costs $1.5 million, and a person needs an annual household income of $303,000 in order to afford the 20% down payment on a home that expensive."

I agree that it is a bit tone deaf.

I do not understand that logic at all. Having a household income $303K says nothing about how much down payment you are able to afford.

Perhaps it meant to say that one needs a $303k/yr salary to support a $1.2M mortgage (i.e. the loan on a $1.5M house after a 20% downpayment). At an interest rate of 3.5%, that's about $5400/month. A $303k salary is maybe about right for that, considering taxes (income and property), insurance, private schools/daycare and things like "food". Wow, this can't go on.

Vancouver and Toronto are super overheated by the influx of foreign capital.

Here's a stellar 2 bedroom house relatively near me: https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/01/everyones-shocked-toront...

Surely, being married to a working physician, their household income well cleared that mark.

He had his wife's income so likely the family made more that 300k. As a successful physician, they may have pulled in more than 500k total.

I got the feeling that this guy really had/has no idea what being middle class entails.

yes, it's very hard to feel sorry for a guy who is in the top 1% of household income. rather than looking at how good he has it, he focuses on what he doesn't have. what a lack of perspective.

by the way, bulletproof coffee tastes awful--synthetic and mealy-mouthed.

Plus he was paying for private school tuition at $44k a year. So sure maybe the budget was tight but he had an investment (the house) in that budget and yes your standard of living will be lower than somewhere cheaper (even though it is above most bay area folks)... so yes tone deaf.

When you live in an area where basic homes start in the $1M+ range and it seems that everyone else is richer (not necessarily wealthier!) than you, it's easy to feel like you're "barely" getting by. It fucks with you...badly. That's the disadvantage of living in "luxury" neighborhoods: you need to have massive self-control to prevent keeping up with the Joneses.

I felt this way often when I worked in Finance. My and my wife's combined total income was great at >$200k, but it felt like tons of people were way ahead of me despite us being well ahead of the national average, especially for our ages. This felt even worse with the burden of student loans over our heads.

I bet that leaving the Valley was a great decision for them. A lot of these feelings went away when I left NYC as well.

That said, deciding to send their children to private school was 100% on them. My wife has several friends and acquaintances who teach at private schools and charters. They aren't necessarily better, curriculum wise.

Is Sunnyvale a 'ritzy' city? I've visited the Valley more times than I can count and that's not my impression of Sunnyvale. Am I mistaken?

I knew from the headline his company sounded familiar. He sells coffee mixed with snake oil - I'm sorry, I mean butter. Wait, no - medium chain triglyceride oil. Now that sounds more like it does something.

I didn't even know that was a brand name until now, I've been making it myself for months.

He even sells MCT oil at twice the market rate. https://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Brain-Octane-Reliable-Sou...

And Tibetans have been making it for centuries [1], which is where Asprey says he got the idea from.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_tea

It's not snake oil, doing it yourself. It's that he sells the products to do it when they are easy to make. He's marketed the concept, and then tries to sell it at a massive premium.

The concept, or at least some of them that he sells, are not snake oil. It's the profiting on the concept that is a bit gross.

I mean, they kinda market the brand as some big health cure-all, like crossfit. But it's just putting butter in your coffee. Like, maybe having some fats in your diet first thing in the morning is alright, but the science is pretty mixed.

Yeah, it's not snake oil, but like, it sure feels like it.

His tactics are snake oil. No question. His other devices, and things certainly fit the bill.

But the actual concept of taking in more fats, versus carbohydrates in a keto way, is not. The science is not particularly mixed.

He had 1 good idea, and then marketed it to spread it. Then tried to monetize it, and through that had no more good ideas, so became more and more snake oil in an attempt to duplicate the success of the first good idea.

Sorry, but that story was pure clickbait. So instead of moving to affordable, yet economically strong places like the metro areas in Texas he went for Canada to pay double the taxes... I do not get that story. There is nothing wrong with moving to Canada, great country, great people. But no one can tell me that the only Alternative to SV was Canada.

Taxes in California are very comparable to taxes in Canada, and like the US it does depend on the province one lives in.

Comparable taxes to California, except that Canadian health care is (mostly) free. Some British Columbia residents pay an extra supplement for additional insurance (prescription drugs, vision, dental, etc.), but it's a nominal amount for the coverage you get in return.

Seems like he feels better about himself having money living around middle class people rather than feeling middle class living around people with more money than he does.

Arguably he gets more for his taxes in Canada than he does in the US.

Higher taxes + social safety net make more sense for lower income people. Higher income people can buy themselves a safety net.

> Higher taxes + social safety net make more sense for lower income people. Higher income people can buy themselves a safety net.

It also makes sense for richer people if the living conditions are better because people poorer than you have a safety net so you aren't impacted by their social problems, or if, e.g., universal government benefits like healthcare end up being better value than what is privately available elsewhere, perhaps because of economies of scale, or because you are effectively a co-owner of a monopsony purchaser, or because the safety net for the poorer people supplying the service means total labor costs can be less without them living in unacceptable security.

> because people poorer than you have a safety net so you aren't impacted by their social problems

Well, you are impacted in that your taxes are higher.

I'm not saying that is a bad thing, btw, just wanted to point out that the social safety net isn't really a major consideration for wealthy people. Heck, my wife is Canadian and we considered moving to Canada a while ago—and we aren't even wealthy, just middle to upper middle class—but the math just didn't make sense. Much lower salaries, much higher taxes, plus insane real estate market. It was a much better deal to say in the U.S. and buy our own safety net.

Canadian taxes include health insurance, possibly also obviates the need to buy a $500k house in order to be in a good school district (not sure if Canada is like this, other first world countries are) So could be a net savings.

Canada has good schools and bad schools, although not to the same degree that the US does. You pay for better schools primarily through housing. Houses in good school district cost 10-30% more.

Canadian real estate is insane. As bad as California.

Vancouver Island is much more affordable; seems like the person is willing to live away from dense urban centres. The insanity of Canadian real estate seems to be isolated to Toronto and Vancouver, although prices are predictably rising in "nearby" suburbs such as Kitchener/Waterloo (Ontario) or Langley/Surrey (near Vancouver).

Yeah, what I mean is that, if you compare like to like, it's at insane California levels. So, in the city in Vancouver is comparable to SF. In the suburbs of Vancouver is comparable to suburbs of LA/SF. Rural land anywhere in BC is comparable to rural land in CA.

So, rural land on Vancouver island is more affordable in the sense that there are less economic opportunities that come with that land, so the land costs less to buy. Which might be a good tradeoff for somebody who doesn't need to be near a job, but is not super useful to the majority of people who do.

I don't know why every talks about the "savings" if health care.

No highly paid tech employee is paying 10s of thousands of dollars for Healthcare.

The employer is the one who pays that, and the Employee is probably paying close to nothing.

Well that's a myth. If you are on an HSA you can be screwed over in one big event. Likewise with deductibles and premiums for a family on other plans you can see health care costs at $10k easily. So you can't say that no highly paid tech employee is pay 10s of thousands b/c I know a few that are.

When there was holes in coverage, I easily paid 10k in a year without major events. I switched to just paying a flat rate for the most coverage, so I pay up front. I think I pay what, 400 a month for 85% coverage. I'm paying quite a bit of that 10k up front, and if anything happens it's mostly covered.

Healthcare is a disaster in the US.

There are plenty of good school districts in the US where a house won't cost anywhere near $500k.

Not in every province. Here in BC we pay $75 month for a couple (was $150 a month until last Dec).

And that does not cover dental or "other" items like physio.

Texas is arguably one of the worst states in the US to live in (unless you're a high net worth individual), which doesn't bode well for a comparison against Canada.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150401050939/https://www.texas...

Well, I took it for an example (and I am a little Fanboy concerning Texas, forgive me having chosen it). There exist regions for about any taste in the US, it's such a diverse country.

Article is from 2011 and you're ignoring the fact that TX is a very large state. There are a wide variety of places to live.

I'm not ignoring the size of the state. That doesn't change its fundamental deficiencies. If anything, its size gives it the advantage of scales of efficiencies it doesn't take advantage because of politics.

Not covered in the story, and my speculation, but his wife is a physician and that likely factored into their decision. Very different physician culture in Canada compared to the US.

Your overall point is totally correct, and as a Canadian I dislike the way Americans often perceive Canada as this place that's basically America but better - that they're entitled to move to in order to escape their issues with their own country.

But I wish people would stop spreading the myth that Canadian taxes are necessarily significantly higher than American ones. The highest federal income tax bracket in Canada is taxed at 33% [1], which is very comparable to US rates.

Certainly, provincial taxes do tend to push things a little higher, and by comparison there are US states with very low or non-existent tax rates. But if you live in SF or New York, with their high state and city taxes, your income tax burden would be barely any higher in Vancouver or Toronto.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

$88000/year for kids' schooling?!?! Couldn't enroll them in public school?

In places where housing was affordable, especially ten years ago, no... you wouldn't necessarily have wanted to enroll your kids in the public school where you lived.

I was in SF when my child was young, but as soon as we started digging into the school enrollment processes, I moved to Lafayette and enrolled him there.

Lafayette was more expensive than Union City, but a better place to live and school, but perhaps not a place where a house could be as affordable.

That said, none of it would compare with a 32 acre farm near Vancouver, IMHO...

You don't know what school your kid is going to end up in, because of the lottery system. You might have your kindergartner going to school across the city.

This is foreign to me, can you explain it a bit more? Where I live, we have school districts, and inside those districts are boundaries for various schools. You know well before you even buy/rent your home what school boundary that home belongs to.

Different school districts weight the location of a child's home differently when choosing which school the child should go to. In most districts location is the highest factor. In other places it's a moderate or low factor.

Sf has a lottery system to avoid all the rich kids at one school, and all the poor kids at another. It’s well motivated but totally impractical from get-kids-to-school-before-work perspective.

When I grew up, I was bussed an hour a way when I had a far nicer school in walking distance. And then a far worse school a 5 minute drive.

Logic and school districts don't usually have anything to do with one another.

Calling himself "lower middle class" is a joke. How many middle class send their kids to a private school?

A decent number. But most middle class folks (or those outside upper middle class at least) don't send multiple kids to $44,000/student/year schools, let alone one kid.

In some cities sending children to private school is a very middle class thing to do. It depends on the local public school system.

Some people consider their children their first priority. Why the US education system is failing above average children is a different argument. I send both my kids to private school and consider it a necessity.

This guy is just a charlatan. Period.

I recently watched a debate with Dave Ausprey [1] where he said something like "we're animals so we need to eat animals". I wonder what he thinks cows eat.

Edit: So I'm curious why I'd be downvoted for this. This guy is truly hand-wavy crazy.

[1] https://youtu.be/o5N-qPEnThs

Personal attacks are often downvoted.

Yeah, I get that. But I think there's a subtle line between calling out his incredibly unsound and strange beliefs and meaning it as a personal attack.

In my opinion he opened himself up to that sort of attack when he decided to turn his persona into a brand.

Cows eat whatever they can find that looks like food to them, including chicks[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhElaGCZVU - warning: could be considered animal cruelty.

So you have one instance of a cow eating a chick. That's hardly enough evidence to claim that cows eat "whatever they can find", especially without considering the cow's environmental circumstances. How many cows living in their natural environment would eat another animal? I'm open to being shown otherwise, but this is just silly at this point.

Paying California income taxes and property taxes and everything else would maybe make sense if you lived in Palo Alto/Cupertino/Hillsborough with multiple kids in school, but if you're paying another $44k/yr for school on top of the taxes and high cost of living, it's pretty crazy. It also makes sense if you want to work at the HQ of one of the bay area tech companies, or if you're involved in a startup or other business selling to other startups, but probably doesn't make sense in any other case (including enterprise-focused startups, or potentially, even consumer focused startups now.)

While Vancouver real estate is expensive (largely due to foreign buyers, many of whom do not live in the properties), rental isn't as bad, and Vancouver Island or other areas outside metro Vancouver aren't particularly bad. If you're already willing to accept a Cessna ride to civilization, you can definitely find something cheap.

Las Vegas or Texas would have been cheaper, though.

Take a look at his supplement company and you'll quickly find he's a quack.

They sell collagen for $40/lb. Collagen is the cheapest, crappiest animal protein source and is incomplete. I bet their markup is over 1000%.

$23.50 for a 16oz bottle of coconut oil with unsubstantiated claims.

> Brain Octane oil is rapidly absorbed by your body and converted into brain-fueling, fat-burning ketone energy.

Fat isn't converted to ketones unless your body is low on carbs. If you are on a low carb diet the fat source doesn't matter. A ketone is a ketone.

Also he hasn't built a "$100 million empire" as the article claims. On LI he states that Bulletproof has a valuation of $100 million.

That leads me to another point. Why do investors keep putting money into these garbage supplement companies? Stop funding quackery.

>Why do investors keep putting money into these garbage supplement companies?

Occam's razor says the investment pays off, not all investors have issues with the placebo business.

Is drinking butter with coffee still a thing ? I had thought that was a passing fad. This guy can make $250k for himself selling this gross concoction blend make me rethink everything I know about humanity.

It is still a thing, butter and or mct oil. It's a passing fad insomuch as keto is a passing fad, which depending on who you talk to, or care about as a group can be a fad.

I tried to find something similar -- here's 5 acres for CA$350k (US$270k). Home not included.

https://www.point2homes.com/CA/Home-For-Sale/BC/Qualicum-Bea...

The Reddit AMA is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fa2xs/i_spent_20yrs_...

It's a bit of a disaster, really.

Just call it a gut feeling, but I don't think he will be criticized as a foreigner buying property in Canada and employing a loophole to gain entry (ie creating a company to sponsor his work visa).

Investor visas (aka Golden Visa) aren't really a loophole, they're quite intentionally designed to bring money into a country and provide employment for existing citizens.

Though in this case, all his employees are in Seattle, not in Canada....

Nope, as part of the golden visa, he would've paid an immigration attorney to set up a Canadian company, shove some money into it and hire the minimum amount of employees. This is unrelated to the coffee business and doesn't have to be profitable, it's merely a requirement to gain residency.

After 6 years of residency, he can then apply for citizenship.

Oh god, he's on Vancouver Island now? Just what we need, another snake-oil-selling pseudo-hippie to run up real estate prices.

Who would have guessed being a drug dealer makes good money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com