[shoo]

the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading:

https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/

https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

[Etheryte]

A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like:

> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.

We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.

It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.

[nostrademons]

It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.

This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.

[sangnoir]

> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America

I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.

[mcdeltat]

I don't know about America, but keep in mind that having an income which is a large number doesn't necessarily mean you have tonnes of wealth (in most general sense of the word), due to cost of living. In my country, you could be in the top 5% of earners and still not be automatically set or life or anything like that, because tax and housing is so bloody expensive it's ridiculous. Even on $200k+ you're still stuck at that job for a decade or more to afford a low-to-mid tier house/apartment, unless you have generational wealth. No, you won't be homeless, which is a lot to be thankful for, but you're still pretty locked in to being a wage minion. In my country, I reckon the top 5% earning is more like where the average should be, in order for the average person to have a decent life.

[amrocha]

Being “stuck” at a job for a decade, living a life with zero financial worries, does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore.

Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.

[mcdeltat]

Yall are missing the point and reading what you want to read. I am quite aware of the perspective. There are people on the streets in my city because the median income is $70k and the median house is $1.5M. They are thoroughly screwed by the system. My point is not to garner sympathy for the top earners. My point is that almost all of us are earning far below what we should when you look at the grand scheme of things. The war is not between the average man on the street and the average man at a tech company. It's deeper than that.

[dataflow]

> does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore. Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.

The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.

[saagarjha]

That depends on how you live your life. Most of the people who are making even the top 1% of the salaries in the US are probably not set for life. They could be if they quit immediately and moved to Vietnam maybe, but otherwise their cash is probably locked up in a house or spent on things like their car or school for their kids.

[sangnoir]

What does "set for life" mean? If you're earning $788,000 per year (top 1%), there are many places you can live and be set for life in the US, or even in the state one is currently living in after working for a few years.

Obviously you won't be set for life at any income level if you spend money as quickly as you earn it - hedonic treadmill and all - but there is an income level sufficient to meet all of ones needs, and the rest can be saved and invested.

Rule of thumb is: if you can barely afford the lifestyle you have with an income, you probably can't maintain the same lifestyle without an income.

[elegantlie]

I worked in big tech in one of the coastal cities. Most of my coworkers, although great people, were delusional in terms of money. I was getting paid between 200k to 400k during my tenure, and after working there a few years, I was set for life.

Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.

[mcdeltat]

I agree with that most tech workers are delusional about money. Yet I still disagree with being the set for life, in my area.

Out of curiosity, what are the tax rates and housing prices where you are?

In my area, the maths would work something like this. Let's say $400k income (extremely high for my city). After tax, more like $200k. Rent might be $30k, plus other costs, let's be generous and say $40k total. That comes out around $160k savings per year. Lets say you work there for 5 years (which IMO is a long time at the start of your career), that's $800k. Median house is $1.5M. You could probably buy a substandard apartment and be back to 0 savings. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it better than what everyone else is getting? Absolutely. But I don't think it's exactly "set for life" given you've achieved pretty bare minimum...

What I've also found is there's a correlation between people in tech who don't seem to care about money, and having already started from wealth. Oh, how are you saving so much money? Right, you live in your parents' second house... How did you afford that apartment? Oh, your parents paid for half of it... (For added effect, add in a rich partner too.) Etc etc. Strip away generational/systematic wealth and even at the top of the layperson ladder, you're barely getting anywhere.

[SR2Z]

At $300k, your "cost of living" argument falls apart pretty much everywhere in the US.

Even at $200k, only NYC/SF are so expensive that cost of living changes are meaningful.

[safety1st]

Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses used to be a larger share of the economy and a more viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses - most people understand that intuitively but the anti-trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US really punted on protecting the small businesses from the big ones over the last few decades. You aren't going to find many people in the working class who disagree with the idea that big corporations should be cut down to size and we should have an economic system that's friendlier to people who want to be their own boss.

[SideQuark]

Small businesses are no less viable than ever. Read some historical BLS and SBA stats, SUSB at Census.gov, or pretty much any proper place that tracks historical businesses data.

There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.

Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.

[chickenzzzzu]

Hold on, you are conflating two things. How many first gen millionaires got there through their own small business, compared to big corp RSUs?

[rswail]

Given who was supporting the MAGA candidate, we can expect that these anti-trust cases will disappear as of January 20, 2025.

[avereveard]

Side of the same coin. Salaryman earning millions are still salaryman. You're bounded to the whims of the employer, and can lose it all from the ups and down of the personal relationships that surround you. The American dream is not the rich employee, is moving out to that relationship and build something you own.

Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.

The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.

[amrocha]

No they’re not. A “salaryman” earning millions has financial independence in 5 years maximum if they so choose.

Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not the same.

[avereveard]

> has financial independence

well yeah the dream is not the salaryman lifestile, but the financial independence, thanks for agreeing with me

[nostrademons]

It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive structure.

I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.

When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.

When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.

[VirusNewbie]

>Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system

not great

>and then whether you listen to your manager.

I mean that's part of the job, no?

I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.

G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.

[shostack]

Your attempt to sow a divide among people by labeling them the derogatory "elites" in line with GOP talking points isn't helpful here.

If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's a few for you to chew on:

1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you compare them against people with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who control capital.

2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay Area still likely cannot afford what historically was considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.

3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy and be largely dependent on their ability to continue receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth who can take loans against like billionaires.

The reality is, someone earning that much is likely financially comfortable where a major disaster likely won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more than most of America for sure right now and that sucks, but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda machine that you and so many others think that.

That used to simply be "the American dream."

[fragmede]

20% down on a 3 million dollar home is $600k. If they can't save that much in 5 years making $500k/yr, dare I say they're really not trying hard enough? say you only see half of that 500k after taxes (which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in). $250k/yr - saving $120k, still gives you $130k post-tax, or $10,800/month to rent, pay for groceries, utilities, fuel, retirement, entertainment, everything else.

People are living on half that, if not less. $3,000/month? $2,000? Saying that $500k doesn't go very far just because they have to have the $3,000,000+ house isn't likely to garner much sympathy.

Oh no, it's going to take a couple of years to save up for the down payment on a $3 million house. How about not making enough to be able to save for a down payment on any house in the prime parts of the Bay Area!

$500k/yr is enough to buy a lot of luxuries that are denied to those making $50k/yr, and it's stupid to try and deny it.

But that's simple jealousy. Some software person at Google writing ad software isn't the one that moved manufacturing jobs out of America, nor do they have the power to bring them back. They can't vote on a tarrifs or fund a stimulus in Congress to help American workers. They don't set public policy at all. The best they can do at stealing from the government is to cheat a bit on their taxes, or be a NIMBY after they've bought that house.

[cipheredStones]

I agree with you in general, but this part is off:

> which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in

Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.

[500ktc]

With all due respect, you're disconnected from reality.

- Earning 500k TC for 15 years equals financial independence and retiring at age 45 if you're careful (even if you lived in a HCOL)

- Earning 50k means working until you're 65 with a meanger 401k and spend the rest of your life depending on social security

Just because high earners aren't billionaires doesn't mean they can relate in any way to someone earning 50k or even 80k, that is absurd.

[j7ake]

If they graduated from Ivy or Stanford or Berkeley, they are elite even if they are unemployed after graduating.

[rvnx]

A big factor for early employees (not N. 1 or 2, but the first XXXX) is purely being lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-of-...

This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.

The Chef as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers

paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.

So half a billion USD for this.

(same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)

[away271828]

I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and modest travel sums.

[teaearlgraycold]

You really shouldn't quit Google if your plan is to get rich. You should quit if you don't care too much about money and want more interesting work than being a cog in a lucrative machine.

[matwood]

Yeah. Google or any of the big techs are the lowest risk paths to economic stability and independence. Anyone with the ability to work on one should absolutely take it.

[saagarjha]

Those who have the ability to take such a path often have other paths available to them that they can take with more risk–because the low risk path is always available to them as a fallback.

[lotsofpulp]

> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.

That has always been the case. If anything, software development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get rich other than stuffy “elite” colleges that feed into NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.

[I_AM_A_SMURF]

> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.

I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else, there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".

[whack]

> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.

Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.

[fullshark]

Same as it ever was. The company man is hardly a new phenomenon.

[WalterBright]

At one point Musk was within $100,000 of personal and business bankruptcy when Tesla ran short of funds.

[ouddv]

I would bet a substantial sum that Tesla was insolvent early in the m3. They suddenly were firing people all over the place and not paying many vendors, and paying others quite late. Additionally, the finance pros kept quitting right then....

I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and then pretend it never happened...

[WalterBright]

If you're that interested, read the Musk biography I linked to in this thread. It's a good read.

[oblio]

Based on which source? Musk?

[WalterBright]

The biography "Elon Musk" by Vance.

https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-Shaping/...

[pkaye]

There is no guarantee of success. There is a lot of luck involved.

Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera

Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point they were thirty days from going out of business.

Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.

https://jetkvm.com/

[rvnx]

(Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there is a case also where you can be a very average performer, just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects or join a small start-up, reality hits.

[rozap]

Ain't this the truth. So many mediocre people hide in a giant company, learn how to hit their kpis and think they're crushing it, but get smacked in the face by reality when they leave.

My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)

[disqard]

I assure you that Imposter Syndrome is a daily reality even for Senior Engineers at Google.

[I_AM_A_SMURF]

I thought once I reached Staff at Google it would go away. It in fact made it even worse now that I have a whole slate of incredible peers to compare myself to.

[cmrdporcupine]

The internal culture at Google outright fosters it. Everything from the interview process on.

My mental health is 5x better since leaving.

[WalterBright]

It's a lot harder to found a business successfully than most people imagine.

[cromagnum]

Incorrect. In fact YC’s (i.e. the website you’re on) whole thesis is that it’s a lot easier to found a business successfully than most people imagine. Yeah, they’ve drifted from their roots a little but I think it’s been proved out.

The irony is killing me.

[Swizec]

It’s incredibly easy to found/start a business.

It’s incredibly hard to build that beginning into a profitable money machine.

[WalterBright]

80% of businesses fail within 5 years.

[cromagnum]

Well, less than 1% of lifeforms are born as humans but that doesn’t seem to scare people into not having babies.

[snicky]

Interesting, but I don't get it. Are you saying people aren't scared of having babies even though they can randomly give birth to an ant or an elephant?

[theptip]

How many have you founded? Important data point for such an opinion.

[Simon_ORourke]

> It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.

Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.

[sgerenser]

You don’t really have to wonder, Google (really all big tech) stocks mooned since 2018, so he’d likely be far wealthier.

[yard2010]

I love the part of the story in which a guy in a windbreaker knocks on his door on Sunday morning and tells him that he has to come with him since a sprinkler popped in his office.

I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source