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Comment by solutionyogi | Hacker News Reader

I would love to know the actual deal which happened however I highly doubt if he would publish it.

It is very clear to me that redis is a labor of love for antirez and money is not a driving factor anymore in his life. I am sure If it was about money, he would have started something like redis labs long time ago himself.

Personally, if I was as smart as him and created a great open source product like Redis, I would have definitely started something like Redis Labs to benefit from it financially. I am jealous of folks for whom money is not a driving factor.

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It's a complex matter with different factors: for me money is important as well since I've family with two children, even if, indeed, I'm not crazy about getting as much money as possible in general. However, how good is money if you have no free time? Coding is something I can do from Sicily, but bootstrapping a company, I'm sure would require me traveling a lot more, compared to someone who is based on SF or London. So given that, as David Welton said in this thread, in Sicily is not super expansive, I tried to balance things, getting SF-style compensations while living here. This does not made me rich at all... I purchased a 350k euros house a few years ago and I'll have to pay half of it for the next years... But still, I can travel with family, go buy food without checking the price labels too much, have a small garden, and so forth. For me this was a good quality-of-life/money balance. With Redis Labs my compensation improved since Redis Labs is focused on Redis, is not just a part, so they are able to compensate me better, and this is good since I'll be able to work from home in a similar fashion.

Kudos for finding work/life balance while providing the community with, dare I say it, an essential tool a lot of us could not live without (or our lives would be much more difficult with a substandard tool in its place).

Thank you, and congratulations.

I, too, am an OSS developer who makes a living off my projects. Money is very important to me but so is my time. Like antirez, I want to focus on building the best features and products I can and not spend time looking for investment, hiring, running a company, etc. As of today, I have a one person self-funded profitable company which requires very little effort to maintain aside from periodic bookkeeping.

It's not for everyone but neither is VC-funding.

There's a button for that.

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