Looks like this guy is trying to run a lifestyle business, and his investments pay enough interest that he can coast for a long, long time.
To be quite honest: He's spending all day playing.
That's a position I envy quite a bit.
To be quite honest: He's spending all day playing.
That's a position I envy quite a bit.
You can easily amass 500k-1M and just coast on 40k/year in expenses for a long time. If it's something you want... a lot of people want kids, or to live in high cost areas, or to accumulate wealth to pass on, or have dependents such as elderly parents, or enjoy money a lot.
Harder if you're in a higher cost location but you can definitely live off $60K even in SF if you're single.
With the usual caveat, "if you are working for a big tech company in the bay area".
In London, starting on 30k and rising to 80k after ten years, not so easily.
I’m fortunate enough to be in this situation, where if I go somewhere cheap and keep my expenses down I can sustain myself financially for a long time, maybe indefinitely. And I’ve though about leaving my salaried job to do my own thing many times. I do worry though that the lack of financial pressure will just leave me lazy and “playing around” instead of focusing on building a financially viable business.
Anyone else have experience with this?
The one thing I'd say, is that it's critical to know whether you have a strong internal drive / self-motivation. If you don't, it can be a dangerous context to put yourself into (dangerous in the financial or time waste sense). If you don't have that internal always-on motivation, it's super important to have a firm plan and object/thing/business idea that you're going to be pursuing before you quit. Start at least drawing up some sort of minimum framework before you quit, laying out what you're going to do, how you'll spend your time, what type of lifestyle businesses you're interested in, plot everything out financially as much as possible and so on. Good advanced planning will save the day and help prevent catastrophy as the road gets challenging. It's a new type of 9 to 5 job, although it's more likely to be a 50-80 hour job getting started. Without financial pressures, you have to either naturally self-motivate strongly so you don't constantly veer off (get lazy, get distracted, get bored, and such), or follow a fairly strict plan that you've laid out for yourself ahead of time to keep yourself sane, productive and making progress.
In a sense, it's cool, cuz like, you're helping people in the world out for less than the cost to provide that service. But in terms of recommended reading material for people hoping to replicate the situation without an infinite runway, selection bias is a definite concern.
The argument would probably be that he's lucky to be in the position he's in. But presumably he earned the money he has from working at Google. So either dismiss his entire situation by saying that anything he tries to achieve from now on is just "playing around" because he already has enough money, or respect him for trying to continue to improve his life (even if it's from a good place to start).
I don't think it does, but looked at purely through the lense of 'how to be a solo entrepreneur' maybe discount advise from folks who can afford to be wrong for years.
I want to distance myself from the 'you should just work for google' folks. I totally respect the idea that using your savings to build the services you want from society. My position is that by default, postings on HN are viewed as recommendations to others. And yes there are other reasons to write, even if nobody else is reading it. But with zero qualifiers (Show HN, Ask HN, etc), my expectation from HN front page material is that people should read and learn from the material.
Anyone hoping to learn from the post for their own ambitions needs to be able to separate the typical from atypical in the author's post. The author is forthright that he's funding this via savings and I think it's reasonable to think he can afford to do so in perpetuity -- again, great for him; I hope to be in a similar boat some day. But like, last year's post describes a cost cutting strategy of buying a house, and most self employed persons find it challenging to get a mortgage without multiple years proof of income.
You make it sound easy! How do I do that outside of not just SF, but the US?
Work for one of the big tech cos outside of US is probably your best bet.
Bag-holding 101, folks.