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al3x.net

92 pointstrevorhartman26 comments

Whenever I read things like this, my immediate reaction is "How do these people have so much money to travel around the world doing nothing-in-particular for two years?"

Are there just a lot of really rich people out there? Or am I over-cautious and they're operating without a safety net?

API lead and one of the first employees at Twitter. CTO for Bank Simple. Both of these jobs should've left a bit of a financial cushion. (In fact, he mentions that Twitter paid off so he doesn't ever need to work again)

From the article:

To make things a little more surreal: a few weeks after I turned 30 this past October, Twitter went public, confirming that I never need to work again. (I’m still getting my head around that.)

I won't call you over-cautious, but I submit that it's much much cheaper to travel around the world for an extended period of time that you might imagine depending on where you go (i.e. Thailand = cheap, Iceland = not cheap) and how comfortable you are working odd jobs and/or staying at strangers' houses. I traveled literally around the world a couple of years ago (albeit for months, not years) and spent far less than I do living as I do now in the Bay Area, plane tickets included.

He probably is wealthy from the Twitter IPO, but regardless of that travel is not that expensive if you stay away from beachfront suites and luxury events like the Olympics. My roommate spent two months this summer in Europe, and I think he spent something like $6k in total. He just stayed in hostels and traveled by train whenever possible. That's maybe not dirt cheap, but consider that a lot of people in America blow $10k on a one week trip.

The problem for most people on this forum is probably not money--it's time. I'm sure many readers here have $6k to spend on a vacation. How many have two full months off work a year, on top of all the other normal days off and sick time? I'd wager only a very, very small minority, especially among those in the US.

Cost of travel is directly proportional to how fast you want to go. You can get by very cheaply if you have no deadlines. Hitch hiking and teaching English classes leisurely can pay your way.

Having deadlines and taking flights, being picky about lodging - this is what costs money while traveling.

I'm travelling India right now. For now I'm in reasonably nice hotels (if you go too downmarket you get no wifi). My living costs are less than half what I'd pay for an apt in NY, London or SF.

All I did was work as a developer and live below my means.

Depending on where you travel, your expenses can end up being less than when you lived at the last place you called home.

Being rich isn't necessary. Living below your means is a great way to build a cushion for emergencies... or for when you burn out and need an extended vacation. The only people who really have an excuse to be unable to do that are people making less than the poverty line. Anything more than that, and you can save.

Of course in this case the author is rich, having been able to cash out his early Twitter stock after their IPO, but being rich isn't the only path.

Are there just a lot of really rich people out there? Or am I over-cautious and they're operating without a safety net?

The Internet also has a lot of 25-year-olds dying of stomach cancer.

The likelihood that an individual person will have that happen is very low, but those 1-in-10,000 events are magnified by reporting bias (in favor of the unusual) when you're on the Internet.

Couple this with the positive reporting bias of social media, and it looks like there are even more very rich people than there are.

However, the answer is that there are still a fair number of rich people out there. Self-made tech rich people are extremely rare-- you're about as likely to win the startup lottery, if you weren't born into VC connections that take you directly to founderdom, as you are to win the lottery-- but there are plenty of people making money the old-fashioned way: inheriting it.

This looks great.

You know what's really wacky about government inefficiency?

It's damn near impossible to help, much less fix from the inside.

I've long been convinced that the best/only way to help right along the lines of what these guys are doing - build boxed solutions from the outside.

This is effectively an air-drop of tools which sails in over top of all the petty backbiting, ass covering and general self-serving bullshit that stifles in-house projects.

Kudos to him, I would have gone back to school and lived the life of the spoiled rich brat I always wished for.

I just connected the dots and realised that I went to high school with al3x in the DC area. I never realised the programmer I knew in high school went on to work with twitter, et all. What a brilliant surprise!

Anyway, really glad to see he's doing so well, especially after reading his blog entry a few months ago about his personal troubles. It's refreshing to see a fellow human being making great use of their time and fortune to the betterment of others. Good luck in the new role, al3x.

Really interesting — I think the question of "How can I help make government better?" is not asked enough. My guess is that there is a large number of very smart people who would love to write code to improve the government; I know that when I'm looking for a new gig I'll be reaching out.

Minority set-asides wouldn't be my answer. It seems the government needs the best contractors it can get.

You'll notice that private companies never do that stuff because they suffer if they don't get results.

Minority set-asides aren't our exclusive purpose. We want to reform the procurement process to make it more competitive and honest. Part of that is making it so that a woman doesn't have to write an essay explaining that she's a woman before she gets granted woman owned business status by the SBA.

But another part of it is advocating for the RFP-IT Act, which would make it a lot easier for small businesses to sell to the federal government: http://blog.dobt.co/2014/01/27/Reform-Federal-Procurement-fo...

And another is piloting our software, Screendoor.io, which is based on the project we ran successfully in the White House, RFP-EZ: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-sa...

I've been hacking around with DOBT's formbuilder.js, and they seem like a great team. Hope the new position suits you well!

For those who, like me, were clueless, DOBT = "Department of Better Technology"[1].

Not, oddly enough, "Depth-Oriented Brief Therapy" which is the only Wikipedia hit[2].

[1] http://www.dobt.co/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_therapy#History

This is similar to what I would do in the same situation. If I didn't need the income of my day job, I'd spend the time on public service or charity of some sort. I can't see myself spending money like a trust fund dilettante nor funding yet another startup.

I don't believe in the government. Unfortunately it believes in me. Well done on being almost as free as a person can be in this unfree society. But please don't help the biggest source of unfreedom there is. Instead, use your time to help make others free if you want a suggestion as to what to do.

Easy to use crypto for one.

For all their hand-wringing over the healthcare.gov debacle you'd think at least one of these DoBT guys would have gone in to help fix it. That probably would have gotten in the way of fund-raising, though.

We did the best we could, and tried to help on it as much as the law would allow. And still do. But one cannot simply volunteer to help the government do things, as the federal advisory committee act prohibits government from accepting free advice or work (you can infer why).

Not sure what you mean about fundraising though, as we don't raise money (we have received a grant for our operations from the Knight Foundation, but aren't looking to raise any VC money).

You must not have tried very hard. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/oracle-red-hat-and-google-e... People are still flying out there to help with healthcare.gov, all the time.

Cool. Well, if you'd like to help out, let us know.

Yes, I'm sure the TechCrunch article you read makes you better qualified to judge than someone who was involved in the actual situation.

Those big companies used their government contacts to land some big government contracts. The government reached out to industry as a PR move, throwing money at whoever promised they could fix the problem as soon as possible. There's no altruism here.

sorry, no, you're all wrong. those employees are all taking unpaid leave to come work on healthcare.gov.

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