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Thank you very much :) I'd love to write more, I just need to figure out a good next topic.

Author here. Honestly, I don't have a good answer. I spread my capital across enough exchanges so that if one runs away with it gets hacked it doesn't ruin me. It's just a risk I'm taking.

I'm also not trading much capital. Because the system is more on the HFT side, the actively traded capital isn't that high, and I don't care about losing it. Any profit I try to get out of the exchanges regularly. I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving large sums on those exchanges.

Author here. Perhaps if you already have existing HFT infrastructure and connections to efficiently trade on such exchanges. But such infra costs millions. If you don't have this, you're probably at too large of a disadvantage to find any alpha.

At least that's my understanding based on conversations I've had, I've never traded equities.

Author here. Let's assume you cannot got short (which you can't in most crypto markets) and can only make money when the market goes up. The best you can do is avoid losing money when the market goes down.

But there are no pure market downturns. On a daily scale the market may be down, but that does not mean that on a millisecond or second-scale you will only see downward movement. There is just an overall downtrend, but there is still almost the same upward movement to make money. For HFT systems, it really doesn't matter if the market, on a daily scale, goes up or down. There is no difference.

In fact, on many markets the system does better in downward trends. Probably because there is more liquidity on that side of the book, a bias that may come from certain market participants.

I made a similar move a while ago, though I was not at the same level that you are and worked at startups before joining FAANG.

> Second, what are some of the surprises post-FANG that I would be in for if I wanted to start a company?

The biggest changes for me were psychological. I'm a competitive person by nature, and where I worked, most people were the same. It mattered a lot to me that I was keeping up with my coworkers, both in terms of salary and peer recognition. This was unconscious, and I never truly realized this until quitting.

As a result, it had become difficult for me to enjoy my free time. I would hate myself for doing nothing and wasting time. Let me give you an example. When I was younger, I loved playing videogames. After quitting I thought it's finally time to catch up with all those games I had missed. But after having worked in tech for so long I found myself unable to enjoy them on the same level I had before. Instead of taking my time appreciating the game and its art and discoveries, I felt pressure to complete it with 100% as quickly as possible, in the most efficient way possible. I believe that's what tech culture did to me. It made me into a robot trying to compete. That also spilled over into my relationships, where I would regularly cancel dates or leave early in order to optimize my time.

Getting away from this mindset took a long time and I'm still working on it. I am now slowly learning to enjoy the small things again, relax without worrying about wasting time, or keeping up with everyone else around me.

Easy account sandboxing and profiles would be the biggest for me. Both Chrome and Firefox have this in some way, but it's still rather primitive.

I think the bigger issue for most people are the switching costs. I don't even know if Firefox is better than Chrome, and honestly, I don't care, because I don't want to put the effort into switching. The only way to get me to switch was if Firefox had some absolutely huge advantage over Chrome that would make switching worth it. But I can't even think of what that would be.

Like many others posters, also using Hugo + Netlify here. I've never had issues, highly recommended.