Ask HN: Anyone else give up on trying to get rich?
Let me preference this by saying I'm comfortable where I'm at. I have a solid upper middle class job and I can afford to take vacations and travel.
I'm doing much better than I could of ever hopped to when I was growing up.
However, in my mid 30s, something is different. I went from trying to come up with multi-million dollar ideas and cold calling( tweeting/emailing) VCs asking for funding and feedback. Now I'm just content working on small games.
I have another project which is basically a music/lyric video generator in Unity.
I really like the technical aspects of creating a startup, picking a stack and hacking something together. I hate the business side. Idea guys with half-baked ideas who expect free prototypes. I like building stuff with my friends, but actually figuring out how to make money... That's the hard part.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] thread> trying to come up with multi-million dollar ideas
In my experience, starting with that mindset is unlikely to work - and worse, its focusing on the wrong thing. If you can see the multi-million dollar idea - so can other people, including competitors with more money and momentum than a new startup. I approached it differently.
The general pattern which had the best success rate for me was applying a new technology (or old tech in a new way) which I found intriguing or cool to solve a real-world problem in a new or different way that was both better and cheaper than existing solutions. One important element was validating very early on that this problem actually existed and was important (ie high-value) to real potential customers. This meant actually meeting these people and sharing a non-functioning demo or conceptual prototype able to get them interested enough to want to test prototypes as the product evolved. If your non-functioning solution demo doesn't get real potential customers almost pleading to get in the beta - then you don't yet have the right problem, solution or customer.
Developing solutions to solve real problems for real people whose names, needs and preferences we already knew made development both easier AND a lot more fun. It kept us focused and grounded in ways that were transformative. Note: I didn't say there had to be a million customers with a validated TAM of zillions of dollars. Just a handful of real customers in enough need to want to spend their limited time guiding some startup's non-existent product into existence. They're not doing it because they're nice, they're doing it because they're not happy with what they've got and want to ensure your solution arrives in a form able to solve their problem. I never spent a lot of time validating there was a huge market beyond the first pool of customers. I felt okay as long as there was plausible evidence of some reasonably sizable number of customers beyond our handful of "new best friend" customers. Doing it this way ensured we'd make some number of early adopters delighted as well as there being a high probability of at least enough early customers for a two-pizza-sized company to survive for a while.
While this was no guarantee of eventual riches, it did help ensure we were making something of real immediate value for at least some real customers who'd pay for our solution - and that alone put us past about >80% of the early issues that kill startups. The "riches" possibility is innate because once you're successfully applying an interesting new technology in new ways to solve a real problem that at least some real customers will pay real money for - there's probably at least a 10% - 20% chance you're one pivot (or less) away from an emerging new market you can be on (or close) to the ground floor of. So - once you're nearing first delivery to your "new best friend" customers, start keeping your eyes peeled for that emerging opportunity that's somewhere nearby in the same or an adjacent market. If it's not there, you've still got a lifestyle-sized business that's either breaking even or close to it, and that alone provides options. You can decide there's potential and work toward turning that break even into profit and growth or you can pivot to something adjacent with the benefit of ...
Correct. I'm still open to working for startups, but as far as coming up with my own ideas, I've accepted it's probably not going to happen.
I still plan on making some side projects, working on an open source game now, and I've written a script ( probably going to switch it to a short graphical novel I can self fund).
I definitely will revisit your comment in the future, I think you've just provided a full semester of Business School in a few paragraphs. What I take from this is I need to find the tools that people want, and actually build those instead of building tools and then telling people how amazing and great they are.
I think the next big B2B opportunity would be something like Pivotal Tracker / Jira , but with intelligent LLM generated summaries of what each team member is working on. As well as the option to assign small scale tickets to code agents which would either write the code or at a minimum create a branch with the methods stubbed out.
I don't really think I have the capital to do this personally. But hypothetically if I did, I'd build a POC and then offer it to members of my game dev group.
Or maybe I should just go down to this one bar where I know a lot of old school business folks hang out. These are men and women with relatively high net worths, and just ask straight up what problems they'd liked solved.
Do you have any suggestions for books on your business philosophy ? I might have free time in a few months.
Yep.
> Do you have any suggestions for books
Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder
Many of us will hit a point where what we have is enough. If we are lucky enough to hit that point then we will retire or keep doing what needs to be done to maintain that point. Looks like you hit that point. Good for you...
Since making this decision I've become an expert in a number of hobbies, gotten married, had kids, and am now living a quite pleasant life. The financial freedom people aim for in retirement, the time, I have that already. I'm already living a care-free life, largely doing what I want.
I have a family member who is a multi-millionaire and who owns multiple businesses. He has more money now than I'll have in my lifetime. But I have something that he doesn't have - time. In my estimation time is a much more valuable commodity to obtain than money. If you can work your career so you have enough money, but also time, that's a more valuable goal than simply 'being rich'.
Money with no free time and boat load of stress is a shit life.
If he retired.. then what? I'm also going to retire, but in the interim I experience no stress, have plenty of free time, and enjoy what I do.
If his businesses fail he has no other options, if I lose my job I go find another one doing the same thing, making the same amount of money.
Is this really that hard to believe?
You started by making the point that he might have more money, but you have more time, which you conclude is ultimately more valuable.
As many have pointed out, he can sell his business and retire, which you don’t have the option to do. Your rejoinder that he can’t do that because then he’d have too much time makes little sense, both because you’ve already setup the axiom that “more time = more freedom”, but also because he could at that point decide to do all kinds of things: start another business, buy one, get a job, work for charity, whatever. He’s quite obviously more free than you, although perhaps not psychologically, who can say.
You don’t need to defend your life choices to anyone, but from the outside it looks like you’re making an illogical case because you can’t accept that he actually does have more freedom than you. Which is OK! There’s always someone out there doing better than us.
As I'm trying to re-iterate, work-life balance. Others in this thread are making the assumption that work is always bad. People like working, without work we have no purpose. But finding work that offers work life balance offers both - purpose and leisure time. Not an excess of one or the other,
When we have an excess of work and money we have no leisure time, when we have an excess of leisure time we have no purpose. This isn't that controversial of a point, read up on any number of uber-wealthy people that attempted to retire early.
Sure they were financially free, but in practice they were beholden to the work they chose.
And lots of people have retired early. Many struggle with it and return to work to find purpose or meaning. But they can choose to do that, and on their own terms. I’ve never heard anyone who has become financially independent wish they were back where they had to work a job in order to survive.
And guess what, if they DID want that, they could choose that too! They could donate their money and go back to work.
They’re more free than you are, no matter how you slice it. It’s OK to acknowledge that.
Can they choose anywhere on the work / life continuum? Maybe sometimes. Can they just go do something else? It's not always that simple.
For the record, I am currently self-employed again after a five-year stint in big tech. Prior to that I worked for myself for more than a decade. I’ve seen this issue from both sides, and I definitely wouldn’t say most entrepreneurs can pick anywhere on the work/life balance continuum. But again, we’re not talking about most entrepreneurs, or even really about entrepreneurs at all. We’re talking about people who have reached financial independence, specifically your relative. All of this would still be true if they were an employee who had enough money to stop working tomorrow.
No, both of you have the exact same amount of time each day.
But it seems like he has more freedom in how he spends that time? It's just that you don't agree with how he chooses to use it? The reason I say that is that you say spend your time "largely doing what I want." Doesn't your rich relative spend ALL their time doing what they want?
The difference is that I work far fewer, less stressful hours, and have much more time to myself.
That's not to say that all businesses turn our like that, but the point is that having more money doesn't necessarily mean you have a better lifestyle.
I can count a number of people who have more money than me but who have awful, stressful or tedious jobs.
> I have a family member who is a multi-millionaire and who owns multiple businesses. He has more money now than I'll have in my lifetime
Why can’t he sell the businesses or hire an operator to run them while he collects checks?
> The difference is that I work far fewer, less stressful hours, and have much more time to myself.
You both have 24 hours to yourself each day.
You choose to spend yours one way, he chooses to spend his in another.
On the second point, still nope. He took on the businesses for lack of a better option. It's true that it was a conscious choice, but my career path was actually harder to obtain, and more deliberate.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a business owner, but hopefully I'm making the point clear that there is more to the life equation than the quantity of money you make.
Basically, a business owner can find themselves in a theoretical situation where they have a boat load of money but are also overwhelmed with work and have no other options.
Granted, he probably will retire earlier than me, but in my scenario many of my co-workers actually choose not to retire, because they like the work.
No, it is that simple.
> Yes he could retire, but then he'd be sitting around, doing nothing
So? Is that not a valid choice?
> So the work that he does have to do just happens to be stressful and time consuming.
Imagine that he doesn't have to do this. That doing it is something that he gets to do.
Doesn't everything this person does tell us that they enjoy stress and having their time consumed by their business?
> Basically, a business owner can find themselves in a theoretical situation where they have a boat load of money but are also overwhelmed with work and have no other options.
There are always options.
He can start a rock band. He can paint.
He can get a job at Vons to get a discount on health insurance.
The couple that founded Sierra Online woke up one day and made a new game. Being wealthy they had no economic pressure to do this.
If I woke up rich tomorrow I’d probably work on video games and open source them. Which is what I’m doing now, just after my day job.
Dream level 1: A game studio that makes quality open source games.
Level 2: An easy open source game engine.
Level 3: A programming language with 3 built in levels of abstraction. LLM level, just write what you want to the application to do and it’ll “build” the functions in real time.
Scripting level: Something like C# or Typescript.
Systems level:
Low level like Rust or C.
Mixing and matching each level in the same project is encouraged.
Dream Level 4- which would require billions upon billions of dollars to even attempt.
A completely open source OS along with open source hardware, phones, computers, tvs, etc. It scales from a 40$ Raspberry PI like device to a 10k super computer.
Your phone belongs to YOU, want to run your own code on it, cool.
I’d build the OS in the same language described in Level 3. Linux is great, but it’s also bloated from needing to run on billions of devices. If you instead say no, you make your hardware fit the OS, not the other way around much of the code could be removed.
Anyway, I think I’ll be able to retire bit early ( early 50s) and then just work on weird open source games.
Everything else in this post would require much more money than I’ll ever have.
But I declare the contents this comment CC0/MIT. Maybe a lurking billionaire will read it and do it.
Give the people back their freedom!
How hard were you actually trying when you were trying to get rich? How close did you come to getting rich?
Why didn't you start a plumbing business or become a dentist or something?
Did you ever have a concrete definition of "rich" or was it always some nebulous "more" amount compared to what you had at any given time?
E5s at Facebook make around 200k a year in pure stock. Assuming it grows in value, do that for a decade and your at 2.5 million or so.
Even after the taxes, that's enough to retire overseas.
Now I'm old. It didn't happen so I'm content to write code for a middle class wage
I guess not a tbh. I really thought a FAANG job would have just fallen in my lap by now.
I’ve worked at one BigTech company (only for a little over 3 years ending a couple of years ago) and turned down opportunities to make almost six figures more than I make now because stress wasn’t worth it.
I’ve given up the big house in the burbs to live in a condo one third the size, more access to amenities and much better weather.
My short term needs are met in abundance and my long term needs are being addressed by putting money in investments every pay period.
I make good money by any objective measure - but it’s equivalent to slightly less than what a mid level developer makes in BigTech.
I figured out how to make money - go to work for 40 hours a week, get good in my niche and companies with money put some of that money in my account in exchange for labor.
There's a season for heat/fire.
There's a season for cooling off.
I'm in the same boat, where I've cooled off.
I think it's okay.
The other way to go increase energy and light a fire again.
I would love to join a product team and build something more durable. Consulting is very transactional and fleeting.