I left amzn after 1 year of my options vested. Compared to almost all Americans, it made me rich. It let me spend 10 years as an at-home parent raising my daughter. Had I stayed the full term, I'd have owned 1% of the company (I got ripped off in my initial negotiations with Jeff :).

Occasionally I wonder what I'd have done with all that money, but very rarely. I don't miss the billions. The $1M (plus or minus) that I got out of it was more than enough to count myself deeply fortunate. Nobody "earns" that much money - I just got lucky.

I prefer the path I took - a great life, much happiness, low stress, and for the last 20 years, the fun and games of building one of the most successful libre software projects around.

Would you be keen to come on my podcast (https://www.raddadshow.com) to talk about this? IMO buying 10 years of freedom with 12 months of work is a pretty good deal! Many people that have money end up with less. It would be fun to explore your life, and maybe inspire future generations to reconfigure priorities.

I'm glad you found happiness and out of the rat race. how did you get ripped off?

I had no idea what percentage to ask for. I asked a few friends who had been in startups, and that convinced me that the 1% I was being offered (over 5 years) was a good deal. What I didn't realize till about a year later was that my friends had all joined their respective companies as, say, employee #20 or #30. I was coming into a company with zero employees, and it turns out that I should have been pushing for on the order of 5x was I was being offered.

OTOH, I did tell Jeff that I was having a daughter in several months and planned to go to a 3 day week after that happened. He agreed to that ("I knew when I met you that you'd think about work 24/7 anyway"), so there was a tradeoff there.

I'm not really complaining, but when I did find out what some other early hires had negotiated, it stuck in my throat for a bit.

Decisions can only be evaluated in the context in which they were made.

A friend invested much of his savings equally in ~5 promising Seattle-area businesses in the early 2000s. Four went to zero, one was AMZN. Had he chosen only slightly differently, five might have gone to zero.

Reminds me of Ronald Wayne, the third co-founder of Apple who sold his 10% stake for a total of $2,300 USD. Rough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne

And that reminds me of Andrzej Sapkowski and CD Project Red deal

https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/2/17927916/the-witcher-autho...

> “I was stupid enough to sell them rights to the whole bunch,” Sapkowski said at the time. “They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, ‘No, there will be no profit at all — give me all my money right now! The whole amount.’ It was stupid. I was stupid enough to leave everything in their hands because I didn’t believe in their success. But who could foresee their success? I couldn’t.”

Do you think he would have returned the lump sum if the game failed and they went broke?

You give up risk when you ask for a lump sum

Why not split the difference? A lump sum and a smaller percentage.

For the author? Since he didnt believe in it, any slice would have been timny. His regret and words would likely be close to the same.

And one could argue that the gamemakers were much more motivated to create a successful product when they started out in the red, but got the keep all of any profits.

CD Projekt Red is a computer game company who created a game based on sapkowski’s books. The games and company did very well.

That's the point. He gave up royalties for a lump sum, when the game seems to currently be the 23rd best-selling game of all time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

That guy really has bad luck. From the Wikipedia article,

"In the early 1990s, Wayne sold the original Apple partnership contract paper, signed in 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak, and himself, for US$500. In 2011, the contract was sold at auction for $1.6 million.[15] Wayne has stated that he regrets that sale.[5][6][16]"

Bezos works on wall street before Amazon I think most of his F&F were quite well off already, anyone who can easily dump $50K into a friends project doesn’t have money problems.

One trait successful investors share is that they don’t cry over missed opportunities.

Being well off doesn't make you a successful investor. You could simply be have inherited your wealth, or worked in a profitable industry.

Lots of people on HN could quality as accredited investors just from having being a part of a double income couple, getting paid tech worker salaries.

Just to cite a source...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp

To be an accredited investor, a person must have an annual income exceeding $200,000, or $300,000 for joint income, for the last two years with expectation of earning the same or higher income in the current year. An individual must have earned income above the thresholds either alone or with a spouse over the last two years. The income test cannot be satisfied by showing one year of an individual's income and the next two years of joint income with a spouse. The exception to this rule is when a person is married within the period of conducting a test.

A person is also considered an accredited investor if they have net worth exceeding $1 million, either individually or jointly with his spouse. The SEC also considers a person to be an accredited investor if they are a general partner, executive officer, director or a related combination thereof for the issuer of unregistered securities.

Exactly. If I were to ask my F&F for money they would ask me if I'm in trouble, what's wrong, and if I can pay this month's rent. All in who you know whether your business launches or not.

In the last 10 years (well... even the last year) I have passed up many multi million dollar ideas. All that means is there will be another.

And somewhere out there today is a penny stock or "sketchy"/high-risk investment that will go to the moon. And it will seem to straightforward in hind-sight, but ignore a lot of other failures.

Analyse the fundamentals. Thats what hedge funds do.

There are a lot of companies that transform themselves. They start some initial project, pivot, get a cash cow and then follow the market. Some don't.. all the typewriter manufacturers missed the computing revolution. Mainframe to the micro pc etc... Even say, nokia to iphone.

Yeah im not referring to that. Every year there is at least one million dollar idea in stocks that doesn't involve penny stocks.

even in hinsight i dont see how amazon's success was straightforward

Oh c'mon, books ---> not books ---> computing services.

Crap, maybe Kodak does have a future.