Undoubtedly, there are many successful founders with talent and brains that were able to exit successfully, and to those people, kudos. But a tremendous amount of immense family wealth is controlled by people that are in no way, shape or form smarter or more talented than the average person. Their wealth just demands an unhealthy amount of control and influence in whatever it is they're investing, regardless of how knowledgeable they are.

I saw it in multi-family real estate about 5 years ago. A multi-family property company I was associated with was making an absolute killing (and still are) when all of a sudden, leadership wanted to start investing in AI because their investors demanded them to.

They signed a massive deal with a custom software shop to build them an AI tool to decide which properties to buy, and the entire project was an absolute joke. It wasn't AI of any kind, it was just a dashboard that pulled data from various real estate APIs for things like walkability score, etc. But they showed their investors and called it "AI", who absolutely loved it, not knowing at all what actually was, partially because these execs were old school real estate guys that didn't understand themselves what the tool really was either. They raised millions more for their next fund, and the whole time I'm wondering how what this company was doing wasn't fraudulent.

In the end, it didn't even matter, the next fund performed incredibly well and at the following Christmas party, one of the employees involved in the project received a $50k Escalade as a gift to reflect the success of the "AI" project.

I will never again assume that just because someone has a ton of money knows anything about they're talking about.

You'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise.

I look at the ultra-wealthy make a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder

Also, $7.5m is still low enough to be threatened by healthcare costs and end-of-life care and such (x2 for a couple, plus if a kid gets very sick before they're out, or even after but you don't want them to be ruined by it, et c). Not enough to wipe it out, probably, but enough to diminish it substantially if you get a bad roll of the dice. I wouldn't even need that much to stop having any motivation to try to make more, if I lived somewhere with decent universal healthcare where having your savings eaten by the healthcare/hospice-care industry is practically unheard of.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....

Apples and oranges. Most of the wealth is not most of the wealthy people.

Theranos

ZERA food recycler

Nikola electric truck

What are your favourites?

His observation was that a "normal" person has to work hard to find ways to make money. A person with lots of money to spend has people queuing at their door, offering ways to make even more money. It becomes a case of picking the best opportunities from the menu.

Well, apparently they did know, how to increase their avaiable money. And this is what matters to most people, not solving real problems. The problem seems, that those 2 things are not really aligned often.

Any schmo can open a Wealthfront account with no minimum balance that returns somewhere in the realm of retail investment returns, but only people with obscene amounts of money can go invest in the real estate firms like the one I referenced, which return many times more to the investors than anything in retail would. That firm was returning many multiples above anything you could invest in on the retail side. So having a million dollars to put into these kinds of firms winds up making so much more percentage-wise than the tens of thousands that I can put into my retirement account. It's a self-perpetuating system that allows the wealthy to continue out-earning everyone else. That's how wealth inequality works in a nutshell.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too would know how to make that kind of money. Only, you wouldn't be able to without being able to make the minimum required investment. It's not that they have some secret knowledge about making money, it's that they can buy access to the high-return investment firms that you and I just can't.

So true. My rich uncle once told me "The hardest million I made was my first million". Then you look at how the banking system works: the more money you have in the bank, the more money the bank pays you. But if you don't have enough money in the bank, then the bank charges you. So it's actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, and the richer you are, the faster you become richer.

It's as if you're first place in Mario Kart, and all you get are stars, while the last place car keeps getting banana peels that they then slip on. Not a very fun game, but that's life.

Not only banking, everything is more expensive, when you are poor.

Miss a payment, because the money was gone before the end of month? You still have to pay it fully, plus fees.

Can only afford a old car? Pay more with repairs and tax.

You need money but have low bank reputation? Pay way higher interest rate - if you are lucky to even get the loan.

You get screwed over, but cannot afford a lawyer? Bad luck.

Etc. etc.

... ish?

Generally speaking, rich people may not be smarter than anyone else but they probably aren't dumber. In other words, they are likely to be making fewer mistakes and taking more favourable risks, even if they aren't particularly any more likely to spot an extraordinary opportunity.

You're kind of proving my point here though by making the argument that rich people probably just make better decisions than the working class. It's not really about making better decisions as it is about having access to better financial opportunities that others don't have. As I stated elsewhere, the real estate firm I described offered massive returns that you could not dream of getting in retail investment situation, but it required a minimum $1M investment, which obviously excludes most people.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too could know how to make that crazy money, but if you don't have the million, you're SOL. It has nothing to do with how smart you are, it has everything to do with how much money you have.

The products worked great so nobody cared. Nor should they.

To be clear, the companies started as AI. They just pivoted until they found a market and product that matched.

Isn't that the smartest possible way to deal with investors who demand AI?

1. What do you sell? Hardware or some kind of management software? Looks like latter, then why there is image of PiBox all over the page?

2. What is cluster? Is it a single PiBox/another Linux or something more? Word "cluster" implies to me there are many somethings grouped, what are these somethings?

3. Price plans mention proxied traffic. What it is and how does it fit into big picture?

4. I signed up, clicked add cluster -> "Bring YourOwn" and nothing changes, it still offers me to buy PiBox with shipping date in July(!! I know it's not your fault, but damn). How do I add my own "cluster" (whatever it is)?

5. Once logged in, I can't get to the homepage anymore, it is all dashboard now.

1. We sell both hardware and software, although our software works with almost any computer that runs Linux - it doesn't require our hardware and can run on anything that can run Kubernetes. Obviously, this is somewhat "the deep end" for many users, so our PiBox comes plug-n-play ready.

2. Cluster is a Kubernetes term, which we really should stop using, although we have a core value of educating instead of shielding our users - so we've tried to keep the "upstream" terminology as much as we can. It simply means "one or more Linux servers". Most of our customers simply run one machine as their "cluster", but a small handful have dozens of machines in the same group.

3. We're trying to bundle everything that's needed to host apps and websites at home. For most users, home internet connections aren't very good for this - the IP address changes often, and sometimes ISPs do not even allow port 80 or 443 to be exposed to the internet - we solve this by proxying traffic directly to your cluster, bypassing firewalls and avoiding the need for port-forwarding, router configuration, etc. This means you can plug in a PiBox, install, say, PhotoStructure, and access `photos.home.erulabs.k8g8.com` (for example), without needing to know anything at all about networking or firewalls or DNS. We also offer backups, as another example of trying to make home-hosting "complete".

4. Ack! I broke this last night! Thank you for pointing that out, fixed now!

5. You can click "home" in the footer, but yes, some polish there would be nice... One day we'll hire a proper designer ;)

Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.

This should be written somewhere on your website. A good simple use-case description like this cuts through some of the jargon to quickly explain what is is you're actually helping a user to do apart from describing features and technical ways you enable them to do actually do that thing.

edit: so this is on the site, but I had to scroll down further. I'd highly suggest moving the "What would you say you do here" at least to the top of the black box it is in, if not the top of the page.

It is much more informative, while the other paragraphs are more confusing to read first, I left the page without scrolling down further.

a lot of sites do this, see github.com (I'm not a fan of the pattern)

1. Get VC style investment, become unicorn, pay yourself 500-1000k a year immediately, ride the roller-coaster. Ending = derail ? feel burned, but have some dosh to show for it, possibly swallowing feelings of contempt towards investors due to overriding decision that forced you to watch your baby burn : Homerun, now watch everything you worked for be monetised into a souleless husk of it's innocent beginnings, you can't help but feel you sold out, quit once you had enough, dosh to show for it.

2. No investors, go the hard way, grow slow. If you make the right decisions, you will be able to afford to gradually increase your salary to something modest, and eventually perhaps even "good", you maintain full control of your product and peace of mind of ownership and decision making. OR, you keep making the wrong decisions, you burn through all your money, possibly burn through your enthusiasm too if you don't know when to quit.

#1 can be risky for the soul 2# can be risky for the pocket

If you aren't very materialistic and don't want expensive toys, #2 can be quite attractive because of the sanity you are able to create for your everyday worklife... the other thing is that just because it isn't a 100B business idea, doesn't mean it isn't a good business idea, it might just have a different scale, maybe it can't pay 10k workers and a pile of investors, but it could pay pay 10 or 100 people with the same salary, minus all the corporate BS... it just takes longer to get there. VCs want relatively quick money, but that is only applicable to certain ideas that can reach a certain scale, even then it comes at a non monetary cost that can be hard to stomach.

When I go to a landing page, I expect to be given a reason to give the company my money. (And in fact I'm hoping to be convinced of that, because it means my life is better.) I visited your landing page and do not know what problem you are claiming to solve. It looks like a competitor for Digital Ocean, but DO is easier to use and just as cheap. IMO your landing page should make me say "I want to give them my money so I don't have to think about [problem] again."

Excluding backups, essentially the pitch is, 'Pay us money to run a server to serve apps you have never heard of.' Are Element, Jellyfin, NextCloud things you expect your target customers to know about?

My perception is that Plex is moderately well known, I suggest you highlight that.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, all opinions are my own.

I may have misunderstood, this appears to be B2B?

Edit: I went on the blog. My current understanding is:

"KubeSail" is the physical box (some sort of pi with a sata adapter).

"KubeSail Templates" is some standardized wrapper around opensource cloud software.

"KubeSail Platform" is some sort of B2B deployment platform for the open source wrappers.

Everybody just focuses on two possible outcomes that are easy to define -- what is the probability it goes bust and what is probability it is going to add a letter to FAANG.

I think the answer is laziness. If you invest money you shouldn't care much about the size of the company you are investing. From a purely financial point of view should be looking at return on your investment where return is defined as an integral over all possible future payouts adjusted for their probability and adjusted for your risk tolerance.

If an investor wasn't lazy they wouldn't be an investor and have a real full time job, OR they would be Jason Calacanis.

I'm not saying that they are bad people, I totally understand the appeal of getting a cushy, but potentially profitable job.

If you have a safe path to 20% or even 100% returns, just get a loan. There's absolutely not point in the VC process at that level... or reason for them to exist.

Have you had businesses try to make this part of an internal provisioning process?

It looks like you're aiming for hobbyists, but I'd take a guess you could be integrating with businesses at a premium.

PhotoStructure is one of our favorite YC friends - and for example - a “buy a photostructure box!” Button on their site will hopefully be a great source of revenue for both KubeSail and PhotoStructure.

We’d love to sign some large enterprises (and we’re working on that too) but we’re extremely keen on making open source / self-hostable software financially viable for its authors (and easier to use for its users!)

I'm hoping that KubeSail can help my less-technical users self-host the stuff they care about. It's certainly a tall order, but it seems like the pieces are coming together...

“Bad request”

Can I learn more?