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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>How does one break out when everyone's taking glamorous selfies in Thailand but I'm working in a dingy apartment trying to build the next big app?

Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting?

Only except for the "nomad lifestyle" or "selling courses", etc, it's supposed to happen by coding in a dingy apartment. But it's equally unlikely, and too starry-eyed, the tech nerd version of the kind of dream the stereotypical bus-arriving Midwestern teenagers had of "becoming famous in Los Angeles".

How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon.

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I write software because I have always liked computers and always spent all my free time figuring out coding, linux, networking, and hacking in general. I don't expect to become the next Zuckerberg and I think that's the equivalent of telling kids they can make it in professional sports. I'm just content making a comfortable living building systems for someone else.

I think I could have made roughly as good of a living being a plumber, an electrician, or a welder! A good electrician around here makes 150k a year. I think the best career advice I heard was pick something you can stand doing and work as hard as you can at it, try and be as good as you can, not measured against someone else but for your self. If you pick a career where expertise matters and it has demand and you work harder and smarter than other people you will do fine.

The thing is, some people don't want to do well and merely be part of the upper middle class. Some people want to get rich. And the strategies you must employ to be comfortable are much different than those required to make serious money.

Different strokes, different folks.

That's naive and unexperienced view on life values and true achievements.

These days, money isn't impressive. What you actually do in your life is. For some of it, some amount of money is important, and if you have plenty its easier to achieve. But that's about it. I live in place swarming with rich folks, both old rich and new rich, while being neither. Most of them live such boring lives it would be sad if I cared for them. Never once met one of them that I would want to swap my adventurous life with. Had to go through a bit of hardship to get where I am obviously but not that much.

What I want to say - striving to get rich from the start is a stupid strategy of a clueless person. Be good at something you do, and more importantly be good at living a great life, being a good kind person. Being rich becomes just a gimmick, whether it happens or not.

> I live in place swarming with rich folks, both old rich and new rich, while being neither. Most of them live such boring lives it would be sad if I cared for them.

I was half-expecting the next sentence to be "Sign up for my webinar and I'll teach you how to make your life as fun as mine!"

Seriously though, what do you mean by "adventurous life"?

Low-cost backpacking in 3rd world (obviously not during covid), hiking, alpinism, climbing, via ferratas, ski touring/alipinism, skiing, paragliding, diving... plus some more usual sports/activities like biking, running, swimming.

It doesn't have to be that many (which is hard to manage with 100% employment), even 1 would suffice if done properly. I have a kid now, second possibly on the way, so even without covid some of this is/will be massively scaled down. But I still want to pick up new ones - right now its precision target shooting and archery.

Its more about mindset - if you feel you have a great life, money is just a tool to keep it. For that you don't need terribly much, heck some full time climbers live in camper vans for the whole time. On the other hand if you don't enjoy your life, money won't make it magically better, sometimes the opposite.

And no I don't sell some stupid coaching :) Those are just my own experiences

Why can't you be rich and be exciting things? I know many definitely rich, and definitely exciting (maybe too exciting) people.

> Seriously though, what do you mean by "adventurous life"?

If the post you were replying to wasn’t composed while skydiving above shark-infested waters with a supermodel by their side, I’m going to be terribly disappointed.

I probably should’ve become a fisherman then.

> How about merely building a business?

More people need to be told this.

The combination of work ethic, of risk tolerance, and of perseverance against ridiculous odds that is required to build a Tesla, or an Apple, or a Whatever, is extraordinarily rare

Tesla was built by a billionaire. There was little to no risk involved.

Musk had about $140 million when he ~started~ bought (sorry) Tesla. That's a pretty far cry from a billion. On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.

>On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.

Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that.

Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...

Yes, I remember when NASA was launching reusable rockets as regular supply missions and weren't using 5% GDP, and did such a great job they didn't end up giving $400MM/year to Russia to hitch rides on the Soyuz for the last decade.

That would be the "slightly improved" part, "50 years later".

And NASA hasn't used "5% GDP" for 40 years. It has been less than 1% since 1973. Actually scratch that, it has been less than 1% the federal budget, which is much much less than the GDP.

Of course all that 50-years of IP got handed to the "private visionaries" of SpaceX for free, or rather, along with money paid to them...

If it was that low risk and easy for Musk, why didn't NASA just do it themselves? Or why not some other person? There seems to be quite a lot of space x competitors not doing as well as space x.

Where is the will in the federal government? If we handed 20% of the War On Terror budget to NASA would it make Americans more safe? Or feel more safe? (an important distinction since the TSA is mostly dog and pony shows).

Standard Fed'Gov contract hustle -- provide a service for less than what they're currently playing and leach off that gob'mnt teat.

Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too!

Can't turn around without bumping into an electric car / reusable rocket company these days.

SpaceX is not profitable.

Well, for electric car, that's true...

>Yeah, just look at all the other profitable companies in the space which did it too!

Did those other companies in the space (of space) got NASA contracts and subsidies?

140 million is a lot closer to a billion (7x) than most people are to 140 million (>140x.)

Once you get past a few million dollars, the extra money is just bargaining power and losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life

Lol you clearly are mistaken about how human emotions and happiness works

However it works, it's still true to "losing it doesn’t affect your day to day quality of life".

Butthurt emotions is not the same as lower quality of life (e.g. less access to food, entertainment, travel, housing, health, studies, taking care of kids/relatives, etc).

Additionally, during the 2008 financial collapse Elon Musk took the last of his personal fortune and put it back into Tesla. The company very likely would have folded if he hadn’t put up his own money, and Elon Musk would have no longer been worth very much at all.

Tesla was built by someone else and was purchased by a young man who grew up rich and insisted that as part of the transaction that his title be founder.

This whole comment thread is hilarious. “Oh tesla, no big deal, anyone could have made it including me if I just had the same capital.” You guys are living in outer space!

Well, it's an intersection of having the right venture, the right person, with the right leverage, at the right time. Elon Musk is perhaps close to unique in that intersection.

Are there other people who could do it but were not in the right place in the right time or didn't have the right leverage (money, connections, etc.)? Lots. If you took away those parameters, if Elon was just an engineer working for Boeing with just enough money to go on vacation every year, then he probably wouldn't have founded Tesla. He'd be some middle manager somewhere like lots of other smart/capable people.

Grew up rich? I don't think that's accurate. I know a lot of Musk-hating articles have been played up, particularly on socialist Twitter circles, alleging that Musk inherited family wealth from an emerald mine. But this is simply not true. The emerald mine story is dubious and vague, and it's only real mention is from Ashlee Vance's book on Musk, and her source is Elon's father. Elon and his mother fled an allegedly abusive relationship with the father, and had nothing in terms of wealth. It's why Elon had to work odd jobs after moving (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/odd-jobs-elon-musk-had-when-...).

Elon later got thousands of dollars from his dad to start Zip2 so it's not like he ran away without a safety net. He did what so many other trust fund babies have done: He slummed. Stop contributing to the Horatio Algers narrative that Musk spins, among hundreds of other yarns,

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

> In Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, it is claimed that the Musks' father, Errol Musk, provided them with US$28,000 during this time,[4]:Ch.4 but Elon Musk later denied this.[6] He later clarified that his dad provided around 10% of US$200,000 as part of a later funding round.[7]

I feel like someone who is able to get 90% of their funding round could either convince an existing investor in the round or convince someone else to join the round. This doesn't sound like money to "start Zip2" as you claim.

Also, note that Elon had to shower at a YMCA while starting up Zip2 (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/19/how-elon-musk-founded-zip2-w...). Does that really sound like a "trust fund baby" to you? I feel like a lot of the myths trying to tear down Elon Musk's successes are all sourced from Ashlee Vance's book, which in turn are based on, as I understand it, interviews of Errol Musk himself (the father).

It is well know that Elon's father is a successful owner of an engineering company in South Africa. If something was missing in his youth it was not money. Of course, his father being rich didn't immediately translate into personal wealth for him, that's why these people like to claim that they are "self made".

I'd say the combo of "work ethic, risk tolerance, and perseverance against ridiculous odds" involved in Tesla/Apple/etc, is orders of magnitude more commonly found than actual Tesla/Apple/etc level success...

Agreed. For every tech millionaire there are a thousand guys who are just as smart and worked just as hard and it didn’t work out for whatever reason. Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example. There’s a lot of survivorship bias in what is in large part a lottery.

> Maybe their timing was off by a mere 6 months for example.

First job I had (1995) was "Classified Ads on the Internet" - back then it was expensive to host a website and hugely expensive to add CGI (I think Demon wanted maybe £300 a month for that?) and the money ran out after a year. If they'd been able to keep it funded for, say, another 2-3 years, until home internet was more accessible, I think they'd have been in a pretty good position to own UK classifieds on the web (at least for a while.)

Webvan vs. Instacart. So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.

> So many dead startups that are brought back because they were just too soon.

I recently had a recruiter from color.com reach out to me...

Dang that's fascinating

You forgot two factors: capital (which excludes the vast majority of people om earth), and an enormous amount of luck.

It's pretty easy for a technology business to get capital these days.

I'm all ears.

Check the footer of the website you’re on right now? The whole thing is content marketing for an offering of capital.

Ah, the "pretty easy" part is "convince some VCs"?

Yes indeed, convince VC's is a lot easier than being born a millionaire

There's a distinction with "easier than being born a millionaire" and "pretty easy"...

But how much capital do you need to get in front of YC in the first place?

It's a genuine question. Who's the poorest YC founder? Least family wealth, least angel/seed investment. Who genuinely managed to get YC funding without putting in any money of their own?

I don't want that capital though. All it's doing is ossifying the power structures that are the cause of the major problems we are facing. It's a trap.

Indeed. Who are these people, why do they get to decide what gets built and what do people labour on? I want democratisation of capital.

Sure, democratize capital. Then it will be decided by a few thousand voters in swing states, with “who are you and why should you get to decide” problems that put VC to shame.

A lot of VC capital is democratized: an elected official appointed a pension fund manager who decided to allocate some funds to a particular VC firm.

Who said anything about swing states, and how is an opaque political appointment a democratic way to decide anything?

It’s not that easy, even in SV and within my batch at 500 startups (arguably one of the better credentials a startup can have at an early stage) the struggle to raise was real. And then back in the Midwest a lot of startups I’ve advised have had a hell of a time raising.

If you aren’t well connected or hyper credentialed (or if you’re a minority founder), raising capital is very hard. It’s easier than it’s ever been, but it’s not « easy »

Working as a software engineer remote is easy mode compared to everyone else. You don't have to spend your time coding in a dingy apartment. There are plenty of people that will pay you a descent wage to work and you can do that from a nice cafe in Thailand. Living costs are low enough that you can pay your bills working part time while spending the rest working on your get rich long term side hustle. I'm writing this as we speak from an airbnb in Turkey with much lower living expenses than when I was in san francisco.

> How about merely building a business?

But that's the thing right? You aim to make the next big app, and fail into the comfortable existence of "merely" building a business, or aquihired. Certainly better than aiming for moviestar and ending up a waitress.

>Isn't the idea of building the "next big app" itself based on the same kind of get-rich-quick mindset those schemes are exploiting?

Perhaps, depending on the app, a ponzi scheme is based on wanting to get rich by taking advantage of people's gullibility and non-understanding of how ponzi schemes work.

I suppose some apps could have that kind of disregard for how users of the app are harmed, but I think in most cases people building apps also think they are helping their users in some way. Ponzi schemers know they're only helping themselves.

> How about merely building a business? Think small indie developer or Basecamp at best, vs Facebook and Amazon.

I think you're getting hung up on my qualifier of "big" -- really, I'd be very happy to make 250k yearly off of a project (a far cry from Basecamp's $25MM yearly revenue), but even ramen profitability is hard, let alone getting to quarter-of-a-million.

Reminds me a lot of this talk from the Pinboard guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c

Or this talk from the Bandcamp guy about financial sustainability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM

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