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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I love your story Sahil, it is so true that people equate 'wealth' with 'success' but that is short sighted. If you step back and look at the big picture, you're on this planet for anywhere from 70 to 100 years, and at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'?

Working on things you enjoy, making a positive impact on people's lives, and raising a new generation to carry on where you left off, that is success.

Stay focused there and you might accidentally accumulate so much wealth you have to work at putting it to use helping people like Bill does!

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> at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'?

Let's not forget personal satisfaction. I'm a little leery of putting the entire assessment of my life onto other people (even though if I was going to, I could do a lot worse than number of people helped).

Hopefully helping other people leads to some amount of personal satisfaction for most people, and they'll have a fairly good life and good impact on others by the end. :)

Personal satisfaction doesn't matter once you're dead. Those other things do. And your entire assessment of your life at that point will be put onto other people.

With that said, optimizing for after you're dead might be selfish and reasonably desirable, but there's a lot to be said for optimizing for tomorrow instead. Life would be pretty pointless if none of us were supposed to optimize for some enjoyment while we're here.

Intentionally being provocative here, but by that logic, why does your effect on other people matter? You are unlikely to leave a lasting legacy, and the generation you do affect, will die as well.

Well, my point was really more that the orignal claim was explicitly talking about "at the end" of the timeframe, so we're talking about near death -- where putting weight on immediate gratification is harder to justify.

But to address your question: people 'take the limit' and argue that life is just meaningless in every way all the time. If it were true, you shouldn't be bothered to make that effort in the first place. Obviously your actions matter to other people by the sheer virtue of the fact that you're optimizing for it. if you weren't, you wouldn't have bothered to ask the question.

Sometimes life is what you actually do, not merely what you think.

> You are unlikely to leave a lasting legacy, and the generation you do affect, will die as well.

By this logic, culture and society would die every generation, and have to be rebuilt from scratch each time.

We all leave behind a "small" but far-reaching legacy that ripples out from our short lifetime. Each of the thousands of interactions we have with with other people and our general environment have a tiny but real impact that doesn't necessarily diminish to zero after we die. The change that occurs then has a small domino effect on any other person or system that it touches. And so on and so forth :)

My life today is deeply affected by the concerted actions of billions of unknown individuals from centuries and millennia past in ways that I can't even begin to fathom. I'm grateful for some of those impacts. For other impacts less so, but I hope to contribute small changes for the benefit those who live in the untold distant future.

I completely agree that wanting to make a positive impact on the world is important, although, and I don't want to sound too nihilistic here, the actual magnitude of that will probably be small for most people, therefore I think that personal satisfaction in life should be important and isn't meaningless, which was what OP claimed and the reason why I asked that question.

Yeah small and quickly diminishing over time, outside of very close friends and direct descendants. For example how many fought in WW2? How many were in high level roles and instrumental to the conflict? How many would be thinking they were making a lasting impact on the world? And of those what small portion have pretty much a permanent place in the history books?

Even to pick a small part of it, 130,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project but a history of it that the average person would consume might name 10 key figures.

The long-term impact of any human activity is so much more than what is written in a history book somewhere. A history book is an enormously compressed, somewhat distorted depiction of human experience. Only a very small sliver of the actual fiber of human culture, achievement, and experience across time is recorded in this way. Yet all of these things are still happening, and they form the substrate upon which the events that are actually written down can take place.

To use your example of the Manhattan project: only 10 people may be remembered in books, but they certainly would have never completed the project by themselves. The contributions of those other thousands of individuals was vital to the project's success. If they didn't exist, it's not a guarantee that you could have replaced all of them -- the project may have simply failed.

> We all leave behind a "small" but far-reaching legacy that ripples out from our short lifetime. Each of the thousands of interactions we have with with other people and our general environment have a tiny but real impact that doesn't necessarily diminish to zero after we die.

What you do in life, echoes in eternity.

>Personal satisfaction doesn't matter once you're dead.

Nothing matters to you once your dead. Other peoples' assessment of your life is irrelevant to you.

I would rather live my life happy with my decisions (part of which is helping people because of my own morals) rather than helping a bunch of people in ways that make me miserable.

One wonders why you have those morals if they mean so little to you. And if you don't need to justify your behaviors to others, why are you trying to justify them to me?

It's called having a discussion. You felt like participating, why isn't the person you are replying to given the same courtesy?

Um... Because I don't believe "other peoples' assessment of your life is irrelevant to you."

That is your reason for not being courteous?

“Nothing matters once you’re dead” seems inescapable until you realize that it’s based on the rather flimsy presupposition that presentism is true and eternalism is false.

> personal satisfaction

You can be one of the people you help.

at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do wonder why those should be the only two metrics to consider. IMO, the range of metrics is nearly infinite and highly subjective.

Agreed, these two metrics are just as arbitrary as any other life-defining metric, "the number of healthy grand children you had", "the number of phish concerts you went to", "the number of Free AOL hours CDs you collected"

"the number of phish concerts you went to"

Yep. For me it's "number of Mötley Crüe concerts attended" and "number of Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts attended".

(currently "4" and "4 or 5" respectively)

My wife and I have missed the Trans-Siberian Orchestra every year for 10 years, but we REALLY want to go. It's almost a running joke at this point. This year I set about a dozen alerts that'll start going off at the end of summer to make sure I don't forget to get the tickets.

Oh man... I cannot recommend seeing TSO live highly enough. The music is amazing enough by itself, but the live shows - with the lights, the pyro, the video screens, and all the other "stuff" they do - are an absolutely amazing spectacle.

I'm also very happy that they've slowly been incorporating more old Savatage songs into their sets. :-)

> "4 or 5"

I'm curious now: is there a story behind this ambiguity?

Not really. I just don't remember exactly which years I went. I think I went to my first TSO show in like 2004 or 2005, and for a while I was keeping to a cadence of going every other year... but I haven't been for the past couple of years, and I've lost track of exactly how many times I've seen them.

>at the end of that time there are two metrics, the number of people you helped and the amount of wealth you amassed and held on to, which number is a better representative of 'success'?

But of course those are highly correlated - it's easier to help a lot of people if you have plenty of surplus wealth and time to share out. I'd imagine that Warren Buffet will end up helping more people that almost anyone else in the past 100 years despite never really having a goal other than "make lots of money."

I couldn't possibly disagree more. For starters, I think the majority of those who accumulate massive wealth do so at the expense of countless others. Buffet is an excellent example, actually. As probably the premier monopolist of the late 20th and 21st centuries, he has played a huge role in consolidating industries and destroying US wage growth. That's probably the single most detrimental macro trend in terms of quality of life over the last 50 years. His charitable donations have been fantastic, but the man has truly been a parasite on economic growth for his entire career. I would have a hard time believing the good offsets the bad in his case.

But in addition to that, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the extremely wealthy are generally a positive force in society. Many give nothing or close to nothing back, and often work against the interests of others in so many ways (trying to decrease their own tax burden, hoarding wealth in assets, disproportionately damaging the environment, etc.)

Americans in particular worship the wealthy, but I really believe that it is utterly misguided.

That you can help more people if you have more money is simply a fact, it's not an argument based on the statistically average behavior of wealthy Americans. And as to the sources of wealth, the economy is not a zero sum game. Lebron getting paid $30mm doesn't take money away from anybody.

As far as Warren Buffet goes, I don't worship him - he got pretty lucky, was a little bit disciplined, and rode a wave of increasing value of American stocks for 40 years - but to say he has been a "premier monopolist" (hint: having high profit margins on the back of brand recognition like Coca-Cola and Apple have done is not what a monopoly is) or is a "parasite on economic growth," is only your own preconceived bias.

And as far as the behavior of the very wealthy in general, the things you describe are things that the middle class or the poor do as well. The vast majority of human beings are assholes, unfortunately. If you do happen to be a good person, though, I think the world is better off if you're wealthy than if you're poor. And if you set out to do the most good possible in the world, then choosing a career where you can make a lot of money, and then donating a large portion of it, is not a bad way to go. Doubly so if you can help people along the way, as many doctors or lawyers with pro bono hours do.

Based on the revenue and growth rates of Gumroad my guess is Sahil will make more money from it than he would have at Pinterest. It will take longer but it will be on his terms.

How is that even remotely possible, unless he got no equity in pinterest? They are ~10b IPO'ing this year. Even 1 basis point of pinterest is worth more than what Gumroad brought in.

He owns the majority of Gumroad. Let’s say he had 100 basis points of Pinterest, call it 50% dilution, he’d walk away with $50m. That’s probably very generous, probably actually closer to $20m.

Gumroad will be worth that in a few years at this rate, and he could cash million dollar paychecks along the way if he wanted.

So he'll be worth $50M in a few years with Gumroad. Meanwhile his original investors lost all the millions they invested. His employees lost all the time and vesting. Ouch.

That's why it's way to dangerous to just follow any guy and do a startup and waste a few years of your life.

> So he'll be worth $50M in a few years with Gumroad.

That's my best guess, yes.

> Meanwhile his investors lost all the millions they invested.

Well, some sold his equity back to him for $1, so yes.

> His employees lost all the time and vesting.

Well the employees could have exercised their grants when they were laid off, but I doubt they were inclined to double down on what was then a failing company.

> That's why it's way to dangerous to just follow any guy and do a startup and waste a few years of your life.

I mean, the employees got paid all along the way, and probably not that much less (if any) than they would have working for another company, and they got to work on something they loved.

Sad that it didn't work out. These things are risky, but having worked at startups and not gained anything from the equity I would do it again in a heartbeat.

The employees got paid less because of vesting. It is a gamble and this story shows different outcomes for employees. Pinterest paided off and gumtree didn't.

In both cases the founder made between 20-50 million.

Both employees and founders vest.

Founders own more of the company than employees, of course. The good news is anyone can start a company!

Agreed but if you choose to be an employee opt for higher salary over vested future value for better game theory results.

Unless the company is successful, in which case you should do the opposite

Actually, his employees got a ton of experience building systems and processes the “hard way,” from ground zero at a startup. This inevitably made them more attractive to whomever they decided to work with afterward — startup, large company, whatever — especially as they were let go into a frenzy of hiring by other firms.

And if, God forbid, they wanted to start their own company and waste a few more years of their life (your words, not mine!), well... Everything is easier when you’ve seen someone else do it.

1 basis point of $10b is $1m. It's pretty easy to see someone paying him well over that to buy GumRoad at some point.

I will guess that as employee #2, he had more than 1 basis point.

Yeah, I think employee #2 would be in the range of 50 - 300 basis points. (0.5% - 3%)

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