Yes, I saved a lot. About $1M in liquid assets. But I meant that I'll start with no income, no product, no business. I'll write another post about how I set up my safety net.
But domain knowledge and contacts will probably be the biggest assets OP turns out to possess. Don’t undersell those.
And 80k is still well over the average household income
Getting a sustainable business is not easy. Lots of groups don’t get there with $10’s of millions in venture capital. So from a business prospective he is starting with nothing but does have a personal safety cushion.
What I think you mean is you don't have steady W2 income from an employer.
A different post would inspire me to try too. A post like this one makes me sad to be less privileged.
And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad or anything. People have different circumstances and make different choices for themselves, some biased by the circumstances and some not. I'm just saying it as a consumer of a text. Just throwing my opinion with no expectations of anyone catching it.
Depending on where you live, who you support (or are supported by), and how capital intensive your independent business is, that could be plenty. Plus, you've already got a book deal worked into the business plan it seems.
Even though I sold myself cheap, I still made more money that the salary I would get if I had worked for the big consulting companies. The biggest challenge is selling yourself, and I am not very good at it. Still it worked out great for 2 years until I joined a startup as the first employee which has gone from 3 to 100 employees in just 2 years.
If I was employed at a regular company, I would never have gotten the chance to join that startup.
- almost broke startup founder
Since OP has a million saved I’m going to assume they had a similar plan in place. But. $150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.
I hope these kind of things are taught to people early. Somewhere in school, or may be at a level of a social value system. The default every day mode for most people is to work very hard and fail. In fact you are lucky to achieve mediocre success even after working insanely hard.
>>The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money.
Yes the best thing to do in case of a windfall period is to take all the money and put it into some kind of an investment. So that when the gravy train stops, you have something to fall back on.
>>Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it.
It isn't just rock stars and athletes, its your every day cousins and uncles, who have some career run, spend like no tomorrow, when the gravy train stops, they realize they have their best years behind them, all their money is gone, and nothing that they can do will help them even get by, let alone take them back to their past glory.
>>$150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.
A lot of people will be willing to show sympathy to you if you met with an accident and bad things happened to you beyond you control. But if you threw away a perfectly fine opportunity and asked them to settle for less, they would be asking why should they even be doing it at all.
Usually big stock grants go out to those who have shown themselves to be force multipliers. If you can make everyone around you more productive than you’re contributing in ways that make companies like to put golden handcuffs on you.
“Now that I have some runway I’m going to build something from scratch”? Probably wouldn’t satisfy those that could only dream to make $500k and are frustrated you don’t appreciate it I guess.
I’m not making that much but your post makes sense and resonated with me.