While a lot of those top 100 people made it to that list by starting companies, I'm curious how many of them did so by leveraging family or inherited wealth.
Having parents who are able to lend / invest / gift modest sums of money is yet another step up the ladder.
All the way up to having parents with business / political contacts in the industry you are trying to move into.
I was lucky to live in a state where my college tuition was mostly paid for, and with a parent who, despite making very little (worked in the school system), was still able to help support me with a stable home and to help cover some of the gaps (like living on campus). I was very lucky.
I realized later on the advantages other people had though when talking with people; a work colleague whose parents, though not rich, were far better off than mine, and had equipped her with life skills I and my family simply did not have. It was from her I learned about the company 401k, and investing in general, and caused me to realize that I should be investing money, not saving it.
>All the way up to having parents with business / political contacts in the industry you are trying to move into.
Well that and understanding how to leverage those contacts. I have people in my social circle that could serve as contacts, but the idea of asking for that makes me extremely uncomfortable. And if I somehow forced myself to do it, it would still end up in a "what now" situation because it's not really clear what next steps are. I think the kind of people who know how to operate in those circles have a skillset that's not taught in a CS/EE curriculum.
You nailed it. I don't think there's any formal way of learning it either.
I have fought without connections or degree to hit 1% in earnings for my age bracket in my late 20s, but the lack of wealth, the lack of security means developing ideas requiring runway and capital is nearly impossible.
Struggling and succeeding through the financial equivalent of having you head held underwater by life is very very different than even a lower middle class upbringing.
Thank goodness software development exists, it has the closest thing to effectively 0 signaling/gatekeeping to a very good income.
I'd still kill for a couple years of runway and the money to hire two or three devs.
You might want to consider what it is, exactly, that you want out of your career.
You already are in a position to give your children a 10x better life, if that’s something that drives you (this is a common denominator for a lot of people).
The stress of chasing the 100x and the fear of the 0x, without connections and an infinite runway, might make you a 10x worse partner, parent, friend, etc. and you end up losing the things you were trying to secure.
Again I don’t know you or what drives you, but just wanted to share this idea in case you hadn’t considered it before.
Escaping poverty into 1% of income is a huge accomplishment that can never be diminished, from my humble armchair you don’t need to prove anything more to people. You’ve made it.
I have some concepts that I want to try to bring into the world.
One is a first principles notes/app platform I've been using for personal use that upends how apps and data relate. The goal is to reduce context switching costs to nearly 0 and reduce cognitive overhead for 80% of "life things".
One is a social software approach to ending involuntary homelessness that is invasive enough that it needs tons of homelessness education for the general public and buy in from existing homelessness resources. I want to upend charitable giving by combatting the learned helplessness society inculcates from childhood.. because we perceive it as an intractable problem.
Another is a platform for developers to "never" interview again and for high signal employed developers to capture 50/60% of profits going towards recruiters (piggy backing off my work with speaking talent and how speaker bureaus work.)
I'd like to take an honest, well funded stab at those three things before I die, the notes app is the first on the docket because it's the easiest and I'm working my way there via bootstrapping atm because I'm weak at fundraising. Succeed or fail I want to birth these things into the world you know? Do my damndest before I die, that's really it.
A follow-up question, is there a reason you want the stab to be well-funded? As opposed to a FOSS, nominal-fee-for-hosting-bootstrap?
From my limited perspective, the worlds' most successful technologies, in terms of (value created) - (costs incurred for each impacted party) tends to follow the FOSS/open model.
Again, limited perspective, but having observed some "well-funded" things from the inside: being well-funded comes with the cost of an incessant demand for outsized and near-term returns.
This demand is, quite frequently, at-odds with net value creation. In fact, it urges your project to become re-distributive: sucking money from bottom-to-top, either directly from the global poor, or indirectly, through government subsidies funded by taxes that are paid by those who need an income to survive (86% of federal revenue comes from individual income tax + payroll taxes, in the US in 2019. 7% from corporations. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...).
The redistribution passes through you, the founder, near the top, which is nice for you because you get to keep some of it, but it doesn't change the net value equation.
All this to say, if your goal is to create real, enduring value, you might be on the right path already, today!
I almost had it with my talent booking agency (which was bootstrapped over nearly 4 years), and then the money we were making went to a co-founders head and he blew up the company after developing a coke/sex addiction that unhinged his mental health, he couldn't handle the money and the access it gave him and that was at ~50k mrr.... it was like a whole world opened briefly opened up for me before getting crushed.
For me personally I experienced that having an income source not dependent on personal labor has a very strong benefit for being able to focus on execution and setting the company up strategically, it also let me hire devs who I trusted and had a compounding effect on speed of development. I like to think I am a good dev, but I'm not as good as 3-4 good devs, I can't afford that hiring in my current state.
For the homelessness thing in particular, well funded also means well connected, it means you have buy in and backers and vested people going to bat for you. It means I don't have to do all the dev on my own.
That's my current thinking at least.
That's interesting. You mean to get rid of "Coding Interviews?"
Lead gen for filling a companies open roles either 1. Doesn't get engagement from the employed or 2. Extracts value from the already employed with little career return. It distracts from core competency.
Software engineers path to self monetization is basically be a dev and get paid for labor or start an agency (which sucks and changes what your work actually is), but there is a third path that is pretty well trod that most people haven't experienced (and no devs really), that lets dev write code like they love and still reap most of the profit from placement without an active time sink.
It's basically bringing what Zig Zigler originally modeled with his company and current speaker bureaus do for "hot" talent to the developer world.
They don't see borrowing money or using connections as a favor. I've also heard them say 'If I was born today to a broke family I'd still be rich by 30! I'm a hustler!'
These were my own family members and work colleagues, as well as an ex-girlfriend or two.
It's a mighty big leap to go from a single intro to "set for life."
An introduction might lead to a job, apprenticeship, or internship. It might lead to a partnership somewhere or the opportunity to invest in some way you would not normally have access to. Or it could open the door to further introductions and connections. Network effects are powerful things, and being introduced to the right node in the social graph can make all the difference.
That takes a lot of luck and advantages, such as family advantages. I'm not saying that detracts from what they accomplished, but they can't take all the credit either and it's not reproducible.
Exception to the statement being wealth taken from your countries people through corruption (like Putin, Jinping etc).
If you are born into a single-income, lower-middle class family, your floor is poverty and even literally starving to death. If you're born into a family of two high-income individuals, the odds of you living your adult life in poverty are vanishingly small and your floor is probably something closer to a ho-hum middle/upper-middle life. If you're born into a family where one of your parents is the CEO of a publicly traded company and makes tens of millions a year, your floor is probably a $150k/yr lower management job in some sector-adjacent company that your parents had to call in a bunch of favors to get you.
It's not so much that coming from an exceptional family increases the "genetic" odds of exceptionality, but it provides safety and security that allows you to take risks someone waiting tables at night to pay for college wouldn't be able to, which coupled with the natural contacts and associations you'll have, gives you a huge advantage.
I'm not discounting that at all (and I recognize all the advantages that that class receives), rather pointing that generational wealth is normally created once, not multiple times in a family. Probably as a function of environment and not having the same drive - but thats merely speculation.
Third-party sites post rankings showing the best player performance on various metrics worldwide across thousands of boss fights
There's often some choice you can make for your character where it works out like "10% chance of doing 5x as well, 90% chance of doing half as well", and the entire leaderboard is filled with people who lucked out
Where would Amazon be without pre-existing innovation and infrastructure that the public paid for? Systems like roads, education, technologies, safe working environments, etc.
We tend to regard these uber rich as though their success happened in a vacuum and all of those billions are justified.
(I’m not accusing the rich themselves of necessarily promoting or having this view point. That would vary by case. Just that it’s society’s view in general.)
The changes to the list over the decades could be more a function of wealth disclosure, which are mandated by the regulatory requirements of equity markets (e.g., we can all look up Zuckerberg's percentage ownership of Facebook).
Here's a chart that tries to show the decline of upward mobility in the U.S. with an article that explains it. While, from the reading I did while trying to find this - which was not a huge amount - it does appear down, somewhat, worldwide, it is in a much sharper decline in the U.S. on average. This, of course, is in comparison to European nations. Not a true "worldwide" comparison.
Also I like the stagnant wage growth numbers because it demonstrates that the corporations are no longer the gatekeepers to economic opportunity. If you're more likely to make money starting a business than getting a job somewhere and working there 30 years, this is good for everyone because their economic prospects aren't dictated by McDonalds and General Motors. It means a more diversified economy, more opportunity beyond the beaten path, and more creativity driving economic growth.
I'd also like to see the criteria for "upper", " middle" and "lower" used in the chart about income distribution. Judging by the first graph of "is it all bad news?" I'd say it's a hard dollar amount delimitation, a very bad metric, because while that would appear to show a bad trend, all it shows is that more people have higher amounts of money. The only way to get a clear picture is to weight income/wealth with purchasing power as the delimiter between classes.
Another note on this first graph, it clearly shows that less people are in the lower class and lower middle class, and more people are in the middle, upper middle and wealthy class with each graph since 1967, which means people have gotten richer and as a whole life is getting better for people economically. Ideally what you'd want to see is the bars to the right of each sample get bigger and the bars to the left get smaller with each sample, and you almost see exactly that. I'd like to see the same graphs in 20 years and that will tell if upward mobility has actually decreased. I'd also like to see this graph weighted with purchasing power.
From those graphs, upward mobility looks perfectly fine, I'm getting the sense it peaked about 20-30 years ago, but has not had a sharp decline and is definitely still higher than it was 50 years ago.
The world just went through massive war that destroyed nearly all of Europes infrastructure and the demand to fix it mostly manifested as opportunity for Americans. Since then Europe has rebuilt and both India and China have arrived on the scene as powerhouses of their own. We will never have the same opportunities that we had then again, or at least we should all pray we don't.
So you have a good question is all I'm trying to say.
#1 was born to a teenage mom (and an alcoholic/deadbeat dad). Since she was still in high school, I assume she was probably in the bottom quintile of income.
#7 was given up by his mother and adopted.
#9 was born in the Soviet Union. It's likely his family's income (in rubles) was in the bottom quintile of the United States at the time. (Sources I've found suggest that the top 1% income cutoff in the SU was around 250 rubles per month, which is less than the $5,000--$7,500 cutoff for the bottom quintile in the US at the time.)
#13 was born in Yemen before his family moved backed to India. One could probably assume that he was in the bottom quintile by US standards, because even today, the top 10% cutoff in India is below the bottom 10% in the United States.
#18 was born in China and I have little doubt that he was far below the bottom quintile cutoff for the United States growing up.
You might think it's a stretch to call Bezos's family "bottom quintile", but saying that billionaires Zhong Shanshan, Xu Jiayin, or Qin Yinglin weren't is hard.
Also, people born in foreign countries had completely different experiences, and more importantly, what is relevant is if they were in the bottom quintile in their own country.
If you're super rich in your own country then you have a lot of opportunity. For example Sergey Brin may have been born in Russia, but his family managed to come to the US when he was a kid and he was clearly middle class as a teen.
I think the comment does refer to Jeff Bezos. Here is the relevant section from Wikipedia:
"At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was 19.[17] After completing high school despite challenging conditions, Jacklyn attended night school while bringing baby Jeff along.[18]"
IMO a 17 year old attending night school is pretty low in terms of economic status.
Also I am sure there are other cases but I know about #17 (Mukesh Ambani) and his father was a petrol bunk attendant - pretty low down even by Indian standards.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Shanshan "He dropped out of elementary school during the Cultural Revolution and found work in construction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Jiayin "Xu Jiayin was born to a rural family in Jutaigang Village, ... His father is a retired soldier who participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 1940s. After the establishment of the Communist State, he became a warehouseman in his home-village. Xu's mother died of sepsis when he was 8 months old. He was raised by his paternal grandmother. After high school, he worked in a cement product factory for a few days and then worked for two years at home."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Yinglin "Qin was born in 1965 in Hexi Village... He grew up in poverty.
In 1982, when Qin was in high school, his father saved up money and bought 20 pigs, but all but one died. This motivated Qin to study pig farming at university, so that he could help people in his village earn money raising pigs."
I'm not sure billionaires like Eric Yuan ("collected construction scraps to recycle copper for cash"), Jay Chaudhry ("Chaudhry was born in Panoh, a Himalayan village without running water"), Jan Koum ("When he was living on welfare, Jan Koum's family collected food stamps a couple of blocks"), Isaac Perlmutter ("He emigrated to America, arriving in New York City with only $250"), and Romesh Wadhwani ("He contracted polio at age of 2") count as "super rich in your own country" that would thus "have a lot of opportunity".
At the time of Mukesh Ambani's birth, his father was in Aden colony (present-day Yemen). A year later, he supposedly left:
> The rise of Ambani began in 1958 when he gave up his clerical job in Aden and moved back to Mumbai with fifty thousand rupees in his pocket. https://knappily.com/onthisday/dhirubhai-ambani-death-legacy...
If the claim is to be believed, then 50000 rupees of wealth is probably the lowest quintile in the United States (at the time).
Of course, Dhirubhai Ambani is probably a better example himself, but he is dead.
Elon's "teenage mother" was a famous model.
Its interesting to note that many of our own prized meritocratic examples owe their parents in terms of intellectual inheritance or first-round funding.
I believe Trump's father (a billionaire in 2018 dollars) was given start up capital by his father who owned a diner in gold territory during the rush. Elon Musk I believe also was the beneficiary of a small amount of investment from his parents.
The question is whether or not that "counts". It certainly counts when discussing disparate outcomes between demographic groups when discussing success/failure with broad brush strokes but probably doesn't when comparing aristocratic-like inheritances to startup wealth.
There's so much mythology around this. I've heard the argument, "he had no support from his father", and I've read in more detail that one of the examples of said lack of support was "Elon and his friends wanted to buy and operate a video game arcade when they were teenagers, but his father refused to provide financial assistance".
There's a whole world between "deadbeat" and "wouldn't buy his son and his friends their own video arcade".
I'd agree top 100 is too small a data set.