What can you do with money?
Question to the successful guys amongst you: Did you find out what to do with the Money?
I run a successful startup. I dont make a fortune, but all of a sudden I have a lot more money then ever before. And guess what - I have not clue what to do with it.
Today, I read this:
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/27/DIME.TMP
And there is a sentence: "The person who sold the dime is Oakland businessman Daniel Rosenthal, who was unavailable for comment, perhaps because a person newly in possession of $1.9 million has got better things to do than answer a lot of questions."
I really would like to know: What are these "better things"?
What are those better things I could do then chillin on my sofa and reading ycombinator and stuff?
86 comments
[ 0.63 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadAn example of comparative advantage: it doesn't make sense for a $500/hr lawyer to do pro-bono work for the poor. It would make more sense to work for that hour and use the income to fund 10 $50/hr lawyers. The benefit would be much higher for those in need.
So my point is that charity isn't necessarily the best way to give back to society.
And besides that... school??? Sitting on my ass, listening to someone sounds not like a lot of fun to me.
Most evenings and weekends.
Now for example :-)
That does not exclude the other 2 points. In fact, currently most of my fun comes from my business.
I translate that to "We dont know what Javascript is, probably something that has to do with HTML which probably is some weird programming language or something."
I dont think I will let these guys take my ass to the moon :-)
Say your failure rate is 1%. Then the chance that you get away without failure in 100 tries is 37%. (0.99^100).
Oddly enough, YC itself is an example. We may make money eventually, but our main motive for doing it was that it was a cool idea.
The only issue I see is that YC seems to be entirely focused on success in the Web 2.0 and software arenas. PARC had a much broader remit.
It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap.
You don't hang around the Haskell crowd very much. ;-)
Seriously, blue-sky research is alive and well in the computing field. You just don't hear about it much because blue-sky research, by definition, is useless. And usually highly technical as well. Techcrunch gets far more readers by covering the latest Reddit clone than Lambda: The Ultimate gets by covering the latest advances in dependent typing.
But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.
As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.
With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.
The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :- Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage. Proof that the brain works on a quantum level. Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules. Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.
Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.
Is it hard to be motivated when you know that low risk investments could keep you comfortable? Though I'm sure the pleasure of a fancy car wears off, what about a beautiful home or travel etc? Is there life long satisfaction from the achievement (ie not the money but the job well done)?
Getting rich can be a danger to people who aren't very driven. But you don't have to worry about that problem if you're starting a startup. If you're not driven, it's unlikely your startup will make you rich.
Didn't you write two Lisp books and start Viaweb before you got rich? Would you say you and your co-founders were just as motivated afterward?
As I understand it, the Zenter people darn near killed themselves leading up to the Google acquisition. Realistically, I wouldn't see them continuing at that breakneck pace afterward.
After the Apple II disk drive, Woz took it easy -- really easy. He doesn't even walk anymore, he Segways!
Taking it easy seems to be the norm. The exceptions to this get mega-rich, like Jobs and Gates. I used to wonder why Gates didn't just take his billions and retire somewhere; reading a biography makes it clear that his life IS Microsoft, including his social circle. It's his whole identity; it's not a job. He didn't do it so he could get rich and do something else; he did it because it's the thing he wanted to do the most anyway! And of course Jobs has always been on a transcendental mission to change humanity via consumer technology.
The Zenters worked super hard more because they had a deadline than because they had no money. I'm just as frazzled before deadlines. I worked 16 hour days for about a month straight to get Hackers & Painters in by the deadline.
That is interesting, because when I lived in Cambridge I worked in a circle of serious lisp/hacker nerds who busted ass to get rich, and then promply retired from doing anything once they cashed out. They are now exactly like what the guy mentions in the first post; they chill on the sofa and read stuff on the internet. Maybe the Harvard grad school hacker scene had a different personality type than the one at MIT.
I want plenty of Girls.
People (men and women) would love to see awkward rich guys falling on their face while trying to pick up women.
Then you'd really never need to work again, and you can focus on making interesting things.
There is plenty of life automation that you can do. Laundry, grocery delivery, maid services, restaurants, financial planner.
You can easily spend $1M on travel for months, building a dream house, etc.
I don't have $4M to put in the bank. But I do have a comfortable income. My goal would be to work on interesting problems without needing a paycheck.
Things like financial planners, grocery delivery, and cleaning services are all excellent value for the amount of time they save.
I'd go for a foreign stock index fund.
Don't forget the Ferrari though. ;)
If yes, build/help to make open source (and free) software better and more "commercial" looking so open source+free software can be used widely.
Basically be a disruptor.
Make the next Perforce (either support git or make a new one).
Make the next IDE (a complete one like Visual Studio) for Python so that Python can become the main language for enterprise.
One example of disruptor in this area that is starting to rise is Ubuntu.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&re...
Start another.
or
Spend a year in Argentina reading and building a boat. This is my plan upon retiring (2.5 years to go!)
This TED talk says that the key to fulfillment is to grow, so you have more to contribute to others: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5625548517080716077
After that, it really is not what can you do with freedom, but what do you want to do with your freedom? For me, at least at the moment, I like to work on Internet startup ideas and help people (as best I can) who are doing the same. For you, maybe it is something different, perhaps along the lines of some of the other comments.
Finally, I think your situation just lets you slow down a bit. That is not to say you have to have less motivation, but just that you don't have to run at a million miles an hour all the time and hit potential burn out periods. You now have the opportunity to take things at a comfortable pace. And that can be a good thing for innovation because you can read more disparate things, try different projects, and even work on may projects at the same time.
Be is harder IMO. Do you want to be a husband? father? grand father (you need help on this one obvious)? Do you want to a champion whatever? These are the questions I would ask myself. With the answers, you can start taking concrete steps.
Purchase time with your money in hiring other people to do the chores in your work & life.
(This may not apply for you) Purchasing real estate close to your work, reducing commute times to 10 minutes from maybe the hour or two you have already.