[alxbrun]

I recently sold my company and I agree with Jake.

What most commenters don't understand, in my opinion, is that real entrepreneurs don't start their company to get rich. If getting rich is your priority, become an investment banker (If you really want to code, make some automatic trading algorithms and financial models for investment bankers.)

In that regard, selling your company is, very often, a failure.

In my experience, the worst is to have to give up your values. As a young entrepreneurs, I started my first company 10 years ago with not only a strong vision for my product, but also an quite idealistic goal for the values of my company and my team. We wanted to be different. We wanted to do things as we thought it was right to do. And nobody could tell us what we had to do. It was such a strong feeling. It drove the success of the company. Ten years later, we got acquired by a large corporation that is not better or worse than you normal large corporation. And we had to give up all that. That's failure.

[mikeg8]

You didn't describe failure, you described Regret. As a young entrepreneur trying to do the same thing you did in the past (establish a company that is strong, independent, has great values) I can see how "abandoning" those values feels like failure. But it really depends on your definition of success and also what you do after. An acquisition could provide someone with the financial freedom, knowledge, and business network to execute an idea with even greater ambitions, values and impact on the world. That's why I don't think it's always a failure. It's only a failure if it was the best thing you could ever do. But to me, the best entrepreneurs are incapable of thinking like that. You can always do better, be better, make something better.

[randallsquared]

> If getting rich is your priority, become an investment banker

People keep saying this, but it's a whole different category of thing than "become a programmer". You can't start with no particular skills and no education, work hard at learning for three months, and get a job as an investment banker (or, if it's possible, it's not so easy as to be a common route to investment banking, like it is for programming).

Being an investment banker requires knowing people; being a top programmer only requires knowing stuff.

[alxbrun]

Fair enough, it was a little bit of provocation. As I said if you like maths and programming, just design trading algorithms for them !