Riding through empty valleys at sunset with a herd of deer pacing alongisde me was enough to break me into tears. It's what I needed to move on.
It's 4 years later, and I'm still searching...
The second time around, you may discover that finding success, getting rich, etc., wasn't actually the reason you were doing it.
My issue is product market fit. I've been building different ideas for the past few years, but traction has eluded me.
- AI Agent Generator: Created no-code platform for customizable AI agents with a MidJourney & RAG/VectorDB document and crawled website integration.
- AI-Enabled Town: Crawled all of my tourist town's destinations, retail stores and their products and then tied them into a React Shopify sales channel. Built an agent to interact with and it links to products and locations as it chats.
- Job-Matching Browser Extension: Developed Chrome/Firefox extension to analyze job fit and generate multilingual resumes/cover letters in 26 languages.
- Job-Searching Agent: Developed MacOS and Winows Electron app to perform a number of searches on popular job website and stream a list of jobs and a % of how the user matches up, so they can focus their time applying instead of sifting through job descriptions.
Ultimately, because competition eventually grew like crazy, I don't think the market timing is worthy of trying to rebuild it at this point. Maybe some analog for AI instead of e-commerce.
Oddly, after looking at your profile, it looks like I've been building the last few years in the same space as you. But product market fit has been elusive.
Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless
But yes!
I'm also friends with people who became very rich. In their own ways, they all continue working hard.
> They value their leisure and live a good life.
There's an inherent contradiction here unless you believe you can live a 'good life' (which I would expect to be free from excessive discomfort?) while also living 'not comfortably by any stretch'.
You also have to consider what 'safely' means here. Sure, it means walls and a door so that you don't freeze to death or get eaten by dingoes or (insert local hazard here), but beyond the immediate, it also means having resources to obtain medical aid if required, ensure food supply and other necessities even in the face of unforeseen circumstances, etc.
It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
Yes, wrt safety it's hazy. Eastern Europe, so it's reasonably safe, and also we don't take safety as seriously as the Westerners. Our medical aid is all right. They have enough money to eat, but you'd be surprised how cheap and basic a diet can be.
> It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
Oh. It's possible to suffer even with infinite resources. Things can go horribly wrong. Health problems. Death. Other kinds of trauma.
> On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
Yes, though some are learning and have improved a lot :)
and if you were a millionaire, I bet you could hook that up. Chicks dig dudes with money.
I also know a founder couple I was close friends with who had a sizeable exit, who moved to Costa Rica where they could spend little and focus on writing, a side interest that ended up leading to their next company.
I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
It seems so strange to me to hear stories about people suddenly coming into a bunch of money and not finding contentment or even ending up depressed. If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money. Lots of it would be spent on hiring experts to teach me things.
Before coming into that amount of money, you can be distracted by the survival aspects of living in society where you're just trying to make money and live comfortably. There isn't any necessity to have to figure out what you truly want out of life or what your passions are.
Once you do have money, now you have to face that. You have to truly find who you are. Otherwise, you're depressed or you go and blow all the money on things to distract you from finding who you are.
I most certainly don't have life figured out and I'm not particularly passionate about much but I do know as a 54 year old, I'm on the downward side of this mountain and there's so many things that are interesting to me. I'd love nothing more than to be a full time dilettante, living my life quarter-by-quarter, exploring a new topic every 3 months.
I guess what I'm really wondering is how some people with more money than they will ever need don't wake up in the morning excited to work on some topic they find interesting. A certain portion are just depressed or dealing with some other mental illness, but isn't the typical person interested in lots of stuff that they don't pursue due to life getting in the way?
They might be, but is the typical person interested in doing it alone? Everyone else still has their lives getting in the way. They can't realistically skip going to work because you want to spend time with them. While some people are comfortable exploring life by themselves, I suspect the typical person is not.
You could use that newfound wealth to buy friends, but then you're effectively back to managing a business again, assuming business is the source of money per the grander discussion here. If that is what drives you, you are apt to do everything you can to avoid the exit in the first place and thus not ending up in this situation. Like Zuckerberg once said, if he sold Facebook he would focus on building another tech company and therefore there is no point in selling the one he already has.
Even still, if you do go down that road, and you want people of quality rather than grifters trying to scam you, to fill that role you are going to need some semblance of marketable goals for them to get behind. "Played friend for Richie Rich" doesn't advance their career or look good on a resume. They don't have the luxury of not having to worry about that kind of thing. Now you are truly back where you started, which, again, questions why walk away in the first place?
It might not be impossible to find something to keep you going, but it is easy to see how it could be really hard.
I buy lotto tickets for the same reason! Their expected value is very low but the maximum value is thought-provoking. For me, $50k would be life-changing. One billion is hard to imagine.
edit: with that in mind, leanfire is on my mind since I'm single/don't actually need much to live
There are many people like me.
When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, even just $10K in credit card debt at 30% is enough to keep you down. ~$250/month merely pays the interest.
Maybe there's medical stuff that needs to get done. Maybe the car needs fixing. Maybe you haven't gone on vacation in YEARS and it's taking a huge toll on mental health. I mean, consider how many people work jobs that don't offer ANY PTO, so even going on a stay-cation costs money due to lost wages.
Mind you by hn standards this is on a miniscule income. Still, many people are struggling hard and a windfall like this can make a huge difference in quality of life.
So, people suddenly get taken out of "the grind" which was their only approximation of the drive-reward cycle that their brain depends on. So what now? Unfortunately, they've been freed to confront man's ultimate foe: philosophy. And lots of people aren't cut out or ready for that. (One could even say most philosophers aren't, given how much many of them suffered).
Having said that ... I'm also not in that situation, you never know.
Different goals. If your goal is pursuing hobbies or a certain lifestyle, work is a means to achieve that. Getting money just lets you skip the work part.
Their goal is creating a successful business. Having money and leaving the business means now they have no goal.
You probably underestimate the little voice that will show up at some point, aksing what is the point in doing that thing?
Is there a word missing in this? How did they join after acquisition and have a meaningful financial windfall? And being an early employee?
You'd be surprised how far you get ahead with S&P 500 + Treasury inflation adjusted securities.
It's really hard to beat S&P500. Most funds after fees don't beat it. If S&P500 goes to shit, inflation adjusted securities give you guaranteed returns.
The richest IMO people are those who live a modest lifestyle only from their interest, never having to touch the principle. Maximizing who and what they spend their time on.
Agreed. It should happen to more & more people.
(Not saying that this is the case here, just pointing that out)
EDIT: As some are already pointing out, yes the title says "bootstrapped". I missed that initially, so apologies.
Or at least, I hope they did. What a fantastic win for them.
so probably it's picking one of those ideas or investing in it!
I was financially independent even before this sale (benefit of running a bootstrapped company is that it _has_ to be profitable). Moreover, I had been gradually reducing my operational involvement in the company for years by grooming the team.
So, day to day, not much changes.
But I do have a nice chunk to do crazy-ass experiments in future, which I fully intend to do.
I'm curious... what do people do after something like this?
Vacation?