> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-of-...
This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.
The Chef as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.
So half a billion USD for this.
(same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)
That has always been the case. If anything, software development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get rich other than stuffy “elite” colleges that feed into NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.
Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera
Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point they were thirty days from going out of business.
Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.
I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and then pretend it never happened...
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-Shaping/...
I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else, there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".
I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.
Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.
The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.
Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not the same.
well yeah the dream is not the salaryman lifestile, but the financial independence, thanks for agreeing with me
If you’re making millions of dollars, you’re not a salaryman. You’re making a choice to sell your labor, but you can always quit and the impact to your livelihood will be minimal.
Obviously you won't be set for life at any income level if you spend money as quickly as you earn it - hedonic treadmill and all - but there is an income level sufficient to meet all of ones needs, and the rest can be saved and invested.
Rule of thumb is: if you can barely afford the lifestyle you have with an income, you probably can't maintain the same lifestyle without an income.
Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.
Out of curiosity, what are the tax rates and housing prices where you are?
In my area, the maths would work something like this. Let's say $400k income (extremely high for my city). After tax, more like $200k. Rent might be $30k, plus other costs, let's be generous and say $40k total. That comes out around $160k savings per year. Lets say you work there for 5 years (which IMO is a long time at the start of your career), that's $800k. Median house is $1.5M. You could probably buy a substandard apartment and be back to 0 savings. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it better than what everyone else is getting? Absolutely. But I don't think it's exactly "set for life" given you've achieved pretty bare minimum...
What I've also found is there's a correlation between people in tech who don't seem to care about money, and having already started from wealth. Oh, how are you saving so much money? Right, you live in your parents' second house... How did you afford that apartment? Oh, your parents paid for half of it... (For added effect, add in a rich partner too.) Etc etc. Strip away generational/systematic wealth and even at the top of the layperson ladder, you're barely getting anywhere.
I think this might be the root of the difference in perspective. Very few people can be set for life maintaining a lifestyle only just afforded by their income. You may have to move to a cheaper neighborhood or less costly metroplex, and perhaps not buy a new car as frequently. But you won't have to work a day again
Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.
The wealth inequality in the US is the underlying fracture in the social compact that is driving the populist politics that are at play.
Even at $200k, only NYC/SF are so expensive that cost of living changes are meaningful.
I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.
When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.
When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.
not great
>and then whether you listen to your manager.
I mean that's part of the job, no?
I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.
G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.
There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.
Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.
10% of Americans don’t get big corp RSUs. As I said HN lives in a weird tech echo chamber.
As I said, spend some time reading. I pointed out some good places to dig into this.
If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's a few for you to chew on:
1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you compare them against people with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who control capital.
2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay Area still likely cannot afford what historically was considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.
3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy and be largely dependent on their ability to continue receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth who can take loans against like billionaires.
The reality is, someone earning that much is likely financially comfortable where a major disaster likely won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more than most of America for sure right now and that sucks, but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda machine that you and so many others think that.
That used to simply be "the American dream."
- Earning 500k TC for 15 years equals financial independence and retiring at age 45 if you're careful (even if you lived in a HCOL)
- Earning 50k means working until you're 65 with a meanger 401k and spend the rest of your life depending on social security
Just because high earners aren't billionaires doesn't mean they can relate in any way to someone earning 50k or even 80k, that is absurd.
People are living on half that, if not less. $3,000/month? $2,000? Saying that $500k doesn't go very far just because they have to have the $3,000,000+ house isn't likely to garner much sympathy.
Oh no, it's going to take a couple of years to save up for the down payment on a $3 million house. How about not making enough to be able to save for a down payment on any house in the prime parts of the Bay Area!
$500k/yr is enough to buy a lot of luxuries that are denied to those making $50k/yr, and it's stupid to try and deny it.
But that's simple jealousy. Some software person at Google writing ad software isn't the one that moved manufacturing jobs out of America, nor do they have the power to bring them back. They can't vote on a tarrifs or fund a stimulus in Congress to help American workers. They don't set public policy at all. The best they can do at stealing from the government is to cheat a bit on their taxes, or be a NIMBY after they've bought that house.
> which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in
Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.
There are more exotic situations where they aren't, and also there are ESPPs (employee stock purchase program) which are also different though that's not a grant, but I don't want to rathole on stock option grant stuff here.
Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)
My mental health is 5x better since leaving.
The irony is killing me.
It’s incredibly hard to build that beginning into a profitable money machine.
Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source