I sold my startup for close to a million. what do you think I should do next from your experiences ?
Sorry, I cannot disclose my startup details, so I have created this throwaway account.
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You haven't given us enough information to even try to answer your question. How old are you? How risk averse are you? Where do you live? (In Palo Alto, $1M pre-tax is close to $700K post-tax and will get you one-third of the way toward one of the cheaper single family homes. Not exactly a fully funded retirement.) Of course this also may be a troll.
Take half and invest it in a safe and boring way so you don't have to worry about day-to-day expenses for a while even if your next venture fails horrifically.
Pay off any outstanding debts. Help your parents out if they need help with anything (within reason).
Take 20K and spend it on a four month vacation where you don't have to stress about anything and unwind from running a startup.
Use the rest of the money to start a new project where you don't have to raise any money until you have a solid proof of concept or even positive cash flow. Or don't. jwz bought a nightclub instead of staying in software, and he seems quite happy with his decision.
Money is a resource that buys you time.
Time to think about what you want out of life.
Time to think about what you want to do next.
This brings up an interesting question, what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money? Let's assume you're set for life and can live whatever lifestyle you choose for the rest of your time on earth. What do you do then?
I would take at least half use it as down payments towards multi-family properties. Or find a commercial real estate investor and he may be able to lead you into some safe investments.
I would suggest stash most of it safely.. under 250k in different banks. Take a holiday, tour the world. Who knows you may get some idea. Come back and start afresh. Real estate appears to be in a froth so I might just wait.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadPay off any outstanding debts. Help your parents out if they need help with anything (within reason).
Take 20K and spend it on a four month vacation where you don't have to stress about anything and unwind from running a startup.
Use the rest of the money to start a new project where you don't have to raise any money until you have a solid proof of concept or even positive cash flow. Or don't. jwz bought a nightclub instead of staying in software, and he seems quite happy with his decision.
Read Derek Sivers' blog post on what he did after selling cdbaby: http://sivers.org/laboratory
Just because you had one startup exit successfully doesn't mean your next one is guaranteed success.
Just because you have no guarantee of further success, does not mean you should not try again.
Congratulations, and good luck!
This brings up an interesting question, what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money? Let's assume you're set for life and can live whatever lifestyle you choose for the rest of your time on earth. What do you do then?
The relevance of this answer might depend on your location though
Congrats and ATB for future venture.