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Real Wealth Is Owning Your Time: Why I Walked Away from Half a Million

51 points by tuckerp 6y ago

xwdv 6y ago
Most people would still argue money is a big part of wealth.
- toast0 6y ago
  Yeah, it's not like he walked from half a million and had nothing. He walked from having half a million more. (In RSUs, subject to vesting, not including salary).
- monadic2 6y ago
  I imagine that’s precisely the crowd this is aimed at.
- johnwheeler 6y ago
  Yes, money is a way to buy others’ time so you don’t have to use your own. So we can talk about independence all we want, but we must factor in standard of living.
raldi 6y ago
> Thursday, September 12th, 2020 I think you meant 2019. This coming Sept 12 will be a Saturday. Also it hasn't happened yet.
- Hoasi 6y ago
  > Also it hasn't happened yet. Or maybe that's the twist.
drcross 6y ago
This is why I like the Tech Lead on Youtube. He's now retired but he encapsulated the typical engineer playbook we are all striving for, get highly educated, get a good job, be happy. From examining his outlook we can see that there rarely is satisfaction at these high stress jobs, and that there are other goals in life that are far more wholesome.
- binaryfour 6y ago
  techlead is a scam artist brother
  - drcross 6y ago
    Caveat emptor
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  How come I’ve only heard negative things about tech lead? I always assumed based on that. Especially from people I’d normally trust. That he’s a charlatan not being honest.
  - drcross 6y ago
    Watch his videos of don't. Make up your own mind.
xedrac 6y ago
Time is subjectively more important to me than money right now because I have enough money to meet my needs and not enough free time to explore my interests. But I'd add that if you don't have your health, you have nothing.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >if you don't have your health, you have nothing But everybody loses their health eventually, so that means nobody has anything. On the other hand, if you can't have anything, then you can't lose anything.
reidjs 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your story, it reminds me of the 'golden handcuffs' phenomenon. You wrote about how true wealth comes from relationships with others. Are you going to try to reconnect with the folks from your past, or maintaining the relationships you already have? Are you going to try and build new relationships through entrepreneurship? All of the above?
- tuckerp 6y ago
  A combo of the above. I have several close friends who were also colleagues at one point and have since left to pursue their own entrepreneurial paths as well.
curiousgal 6y ago
> Take big swings and bet on yourself. Oh please. It's easy to take big swings from the comfort of your $600k house. Everything is conditional in life. Yes time is important, but only when you have enough money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  Of course. But many people who have "enough" money nonetheless continue to take more money from the relatively sure thing even if they don't really like it and/or don't have enough time to do things they'd really be preferring to do.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Look man, it’s easy to take risks when you got nothing to lose. If the bet on himself fails do you think he’s finished? Lol no, he’s got savings and will just go crawling back to a FAANG. The guy who is taking real risk is the poor entrepreneur from south side Chicago betting his entire life savings and going into some debt for one last startup idea. If he fails he has no future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hogFeast 6y ago
"I was shocked when I found out they average 30% returns every year across the industry" Amazing. There are some real gems here but this...I thought I was reading Reddit. Very nice. "I made nearly $400k in my final year. I was respected by my peers and superiors and had a path to Director. I bought a damn $600k house with a movie theater when I was 26!" 5000 dollar suit...COME ON!!!
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  A great man for sure! Worked hard for everything he did. Keeps his head down and just works.
opportune 6y ago
Unvested RSUs aren't half a million it's just stock-based compensation. Stupid clickbait title. More accurately: "How I walked away from $200k-300k/year to go into Private Equity"
awillen 6y ago
Man, lots of critics here. I think this is great and even with the security of owning a home, it's still a big leap to go your own way. Where are you finding businesses to buy? I've been considering something similar and have been keeping an eye on Quiet Light Brokerage, which has some interesting ones. Also, are you looking at Amazon FBA or doing your own selling/logistics? How much time are you putting into the businesses? I have lots of questions about how one does this effectively :)
- tuckerp 6y ago
  That's fine--all of the criticisms were predictable. I never expected this to be for everyone. Quiet Light is great--there's a number of other brokers out there too, Empire Flippers and FEInternational are two other major players. I use those + sourcing off market deals which are generally the most advantageous to acquire. Off market takes a ton of time to source until you have a big enough reputation that people know you and just bring opportunities to you. Those happen occasionally for me, but still represents a small percentage of the deals I assess. Part of my screening criteria is to only acquire businesses with high automation in place, or high potential to automate. Shoot me a DM if you want to keep chatting!
  - twelve40 6y ago
    Just curious why is this getting downvoted, are those some scammy websites? It honestly looks like a benign comment to me, maybe I'm missing something.
  - awillen 6y ago
    Awesome, thanks - just sent you a DM on Twitter.
geoffbp 6y ago
Interesting blog post! not sure I agree with the premise though, you can have autonomy and good work life balance without working for yourself.
- tuckerp 6y ago
  I agree--in my experience though it was fleeting and not a long term guarantee.
gnicholas 6y ago
> I made four investments in 2019 and will double that in 2020. I’m targeting replacing my prior income by 2023. I think the rise of micro private equity investing is just beginning, and this is the perfect time to take advantage of the opportunity. Take big swings and bet on yourself. So is he investing in others or betting on himself?
- fierarul 6y ago
  He's betting on himself towards having an investor career.
atmosx 6y ago
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an engineer in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of blog post hits.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Especially if they worked at Amazon, I believe this is the second or third person to "walk away from a lot of money at Amazon" for the same reasons and now needs to tell the world about it. Maybe there's a I-Left-Amazon-To-Become-An-Influencer-SaaS somewhere that produces these posts.
  - exdsq 6y ago
    That and others from FANG. Before they start YouTube channels and courses on how you can get a job with them too.
    - binaryfour 6y ago
      techlead, joma, Clement, the list goes on and on and on and on...
      - exdsq 6y ago
        I genuinely cringe when their content pops up on YouTube. Suggesting anyone can get a $200k job if you memorise enough algorithms through their courses is just sad - especially around the state of the industry at the moment.
        binaryfour 6y ago
        tbh, I'm sick of working with leetcode engineers. Typically they're not actually very good engineers since an actual career in software very seldom involves those type of skills.
  - binaryfour 6y ago
    lol this is so true...
gnicholas 6y ago
I don't understand the chart. Typically the X axis is the independent variable, and the Y axis is the dependent variable. Is he saying that as his desire to own his time gets larger, his compensation goes up? Or are the axes flipped?
purplezooey 6y ago
This post reeks a bit of #firstworldproblems.
yibg 6y ago
There have been a few of these articles lately, about leaving a high paying job to pursue something more risky but more fulfilling. They've all contained bits about leaving behind hundreds of thousands in RSUs to do so. I wonder though where the cut off is. If it was a couple of million in RSUs, would folks still do it?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Depends on circumstances like everything else I assume. If someone has six figures of low seven figures in the bank and holding out for a couple years in a not-horrible situation will likely result in a couple of million, then it probably makes sense to hold on. After all, they could not unreasonably retire after that. If they already have FU money (however you define same) and they really hate their current situation and are maybe older, then, yeah, maybe.
rwalle 6y ago
I quit reading the post after halfway through it. When I saw the headline, I thought, "when you have enough money in your hands, you can walk away from anything", and the article just confirmed that. I don't need any of this dude's life advice.
- eloff 6y ago
  So much hate, jealous much?
gnicholas 6y ago
As others have noted, the title is not the best. Only someone with lots of money would say that time is the "real wealth" (ask a poor unemployed person if they agree). Perhaps a more accurate summary of the post would be "real wealth is having enough wealth that you can make money via passive income and thereby manage your time". But that's basically saying that real wealth is having tons of wealth.
- lbotos 6y ago
  You are missing the "wealth" vs. "riches" relationship. I am not rich by NYC standards, but working remote has made me "wealthier" because I have control over my time. I've often described it as I feel like a billionaire because I can go anyywhere, any time, as long as I handle my tasks. More riches may allow you more time, but also, you can get more "valuable" time, when you have the authority to "own" your time (aka schedule.)
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Only someone with lots of money would say that time is the "real wealth" (ask a poor unemployed person if they agree). I wouldn't agree there. I don't have lots of money, and the main reason for that is that I've focused on maximizing the personal utility of my own time. To me, that means doing work that I find personally and professionally rewarding, even if it's not the most financially-rewarding use of my time. I'm OK with the results, at least so far. Professionally, I do contract and original development work from a home office, and have for >10 years. There's rarely a day when I don't open HN or another tech site and count my blessings. I'm thankful that I don't work for a company that sells tools and data for corrupting the democratic process, or that sells their users out to advertisers while engaging in numerous dark patterns to retain and addict those users. Or where the UX that I work on is not geared towards user-friendly content discovery, but rather to keep subscribers from realizing just how little content my company offers. It's awesome that I don't work for a company where innovation means removing headphone jacks from portable audio devices and calling it "courage." Or for a company where I might be required to work on a new DRM scheme to lock users out of content they've paid for, to "disappear" books from their personal libraries, or to deny them access to hardware they own. I also don't have to work on force-feeding unwanted, barely-tested OS updates using tactics indistinguishable from malware, or to spend any time considering how the Chinese government (or for that matter my own) might react to a new feature. And I don't have to knife my own engineering sensibilities in the back by shipping trivial applications to locked-in users that waste memory by the exabyte and CPU power by the gigawatt. In short, I don't have to wonder if the users I do have are really better off because they've done business with me. I'm pretty sure they are. Frankly, it's never been more rewarding to not sell out to a FAANG.
john_moscow 6y ago
> However, if 95% of businesses fail within their first 5 years, was that the best risk/reward tradeoff? What if I could just buy something already successful? I started researching buying internet businesses because they could be run from any location. I was shocked when I found out they average 30% returns every year across the industry. > I made four investments in 2019 and will double that in 2020. As a person who has been running an online business for the past 7 years, I couldn't disagree more. Business is always about doing something better than your competition. Small business isn't about having more capital, or a better PR team. It's purely about efficiently aligning your own strengths with the market demands. Being able to understand the market and its changes, knowing how to sell to your niche audience, being able to successfully execute many things at once, since you niche size very much limits what can be hired out. When you sell a small business to a random "investor", all of this is lost. Sure, you will still have the market share for a couple of years, but unless you already know how to run that kind of business, you will lose to the competitors very quickly. It's like buying a trunk of a tree. You'll get the lumber, but it won't grow anymore. There's also a question on why would the founder want to sell a successful business that gives a 30% return. They could very well remortgage their house, or scale down and take a part-time job to survive the rough times. If they didn't, perhaps it's because they understand something about the market the the buyer doesn't.
- fragmede 6y ago
  Or they took a second mortgage on their house in order to start the business, have been doing contracting on the side to pay the bills, and are simply burnt out. Or, they don't own a home to start with. (or worse, it's still underwater from 2008's GFC!) Small business isn't about having more capital, but businesses fail because they don't have enough capital. It is entirely possible that there is lurking issue in the market that the seller hopes the buyer is naive of, but it's also possible the seller, as a human being, and not a perfectly rational economic automaton, has their own reasons for getting out that means it's a good deal for the buyer.
angarg12 6y ago
Pretty rich how many of this FIRE fellas are pretty well off to begin with. And here I am, in my mid 30s, with a mid level programmer job, no career progression and spending a significant chunk of my income in rent. I would love to have more free time but hey, I got bills to pay.
- aeyes 6y ago
  They seem to have too much free time on their hand to be brag about it. 99% of us just keep working quietly.
- kulig 6y ago
  Yeah its usually highly educated people from the upper middle class. Theyre not so rich that they still kinda have normal lives, but they definitely have enough money to not have to worry about things.
arbol 6y ago
This is a non-article. Not worth the time.
- binaryfour 6y ago
  click bait for him to get deal flow as an investor. Kinda sad to see it upvoted on HN and you be downvoted for pointing it out. EDIT: and now we've gone full blown meta as I'm getting downvoted ha ha...
dimitar 6y ago
Whoa he became a manager straight out of college? How does that happen outside of a startup?
- titanomachy 6y ago
  Amazon hires very inexperienced managers. This is unusual among top-tier companies.
  - supercollision 6y ago
    OP can maybe comment or correct (btw Congrats on making the jump, OP!) but given the business/operations language this might be the Ops Manager ladder, on which there is an entry-level manager position. IMO interesting, and cool if it works out for everyone. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/899809/amazon-operations-area-manager-2020-entry-level https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/899809/amazon-operations-are... (trivia, Amazon is listed as having 840k employees, I knew it was high of course, but wow)
    - dimitar 6y ago
      This is very interesting! So by getting the job you get the valuable experience of managing 50+ people, but the trade-off is that you are expected to works shifts, stay on your feet for more than 12h, if needed to physical work, and be willing to relocate. I understand why they will have a hard time finding experienced managers for this, but it is also a great opportunity for newly graduated young people who are serious about getting in to management.
baxtr 6y ago
Many are downplaying this and saying that it’s is easy to hold that position while you’re rich. At the same I agree with the notion that working towards financial independence is worthwhile. This can be achieved by an austere lifestyle.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >This can be achieved by an austere lifestyle. There are also degrees of everything. Some make a good salary and do fairly well with RSUs/other investments and make lifestyle choices that don't revolve around maximizing wealth without living "austerely." There's a big space between never going out for a nice meal or spending money on other "unnecessary" expenses like foreign travel and buying the most expensive house you can't afford in a high CoL area and generally spending extravagantly.
Mulpze15 6y ago
Again, people spreading false statistics, maybe to serve the "hero/risk taker" narrative? Yawn. About 50% of businesses close their door in the first 5 years, not 95%. [1] When someone makes such a common huge mistake, I am thinking that either they are not the slightest competent, or that they have an agenda that cannot be justified with realistic/honest numbers. [1] BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.htm https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.ht...
Traster 6y ago
I'm genuinely intrigued about what this article is attempting to achieve? Is this like brand building? No offence, but it's quite low effort - a graph of Compensation vs Desire to own my time? Not a completely uninteresting topic, but then just x=y? It's very vague on what he actually does, but is this brand building for deal flow for his investments? Maybe there is some alpha in this small scale investing, but in my experience small businesses aren't just about who puts the money in - they're almost always full time jobs for the founder, and that stops when they sell, making the business much less attractive.
naveen99 6y ago
Most financially independent early retirement (FIRE) types don’t preach “micro private equity”... especially in a time when leveraged people are getting margin called with Covid. good luck to OP.

51 points by tuckerp 6y ago

xwdv 6y ago

Most people would still argue money is a big part of wealth.

toast0 6y ago
Yeah, it's not like he walked from half a million and had nothing. He walked from having half a million more. (In RSUs, subject to vesting, not including salary).
monadic2 6y ago
I imagine that’s precisely the crowd this is aimed at.
johnwheeler 6y ago
Yes, money is a way to buy others’ time so you don’t have to use your own. So we can talk about independence all we want, but we must factor in standard of living.

raldi 6y ago

> Thursday, September 12th, 2020 I think you meant 2019. This coming Sept 12 will be a Saturday. Also it hasn't happened yet.

Hoasi 6y ago
> Also it hasn't happened yet. Or maybe that's the twist.

drcross 6y ago

This is why I like the Tech Lead on Youtube. He's now retired but he encapsulated the typical engineer playbook we are all striving for, get highly educated, get a good job, be happy. From examining his outlook we can see that there rarely is satisfaction at these high stress jobs, and that there are other goals in life that are far more wholesome.

binaryfour 6y ago
techlead is a scam artist brother
- drcross 6y ago
  Caveat emptor
skinnymuch 6y ago
How come I’ve only heard negative things about tech lead? I always assumed based on that. Especially from people I’d normally trust. That he’s a charlatan not being honest.
- drcross 6y ago
  Watch his videos of don't. Make up your own mind.

xedrac 6y ago

Time is subjectively more important to me than money right now because I have enough money to meet my needs and not enough free time to explore my interests. But I'd add that if you don't have your health, you have nothing.

perl4ever 6y ago
>if you don't have your health, you have nothing But everybody loses their health eventually, so that means nobody has anything. On the other hand, if you can't have anything, then you can't lose anything.

reidjs 6y ago

Thanks for sharing your story, it reminds me of the 'golden handcuffs' phenomenon. You wrote about how true wealth comes from relationships with others. Are you going to try to reconnect with the folks from your past, or maintaining the relationships you already have? Are you going to try and build new relationships through entrepreneurship? All of the above?

tuckerp 6y ago
A combo of the above. I have several close friends who were also colleagues at one point and have since left to pursue their own entrepreneurial paths as well.

curiousgal 6y ago

> Take big swings and bet on yourself. Oh please. It's easy to take big swings from the comfort of your $600k house. Everything is conditional in life. Yes time is important, but only when you have enough money.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
Of course. But many people who have "enough" money nonetheless continue to take more money from the relatively sure thing even if they don't really like it and/or don't have enough time to do things they'd really be preferring to do.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Look man, it’s easy to take risks when you got nothing to lose. If the bet on himself fails do you think he’s finished? Lol no, he’s got savings and will just go crawling back to a FAANG. The guy who is taking real risk is the poor entrepreneur from south side Chicago betting his entire life savings and going into some debt for one last startup idea. If he fails he has no future.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

hogFeast 6y ago

"I was shocked when I found out they average 30% returns every year across the industry" Amazing. There are some real gems here but this...I thought I was reading Reddit. Very nice. "I made nearly $400k in my final year. I was respected by my peers and superiors and had a path to Director. I bought a damn $600k house with a movie theater when I was 26!" 5000 dollar suit...COME ON!!!

skinnymuch 6y ago
A great man for sure! Worked hard for everything he did. Keeps his head down and just works.

opportune 6y ago

Unvested RSUs aren't half a million it's just stock-based compensation. Stupid clickbait title. More accurately: "How I walked away from $200k-300k/year to go into Private Equity"

awillen 6y ago

Man, lots of critics here. I think this is great and even with the security of owning a home, it's still a big leap to go your own way. Where are you finding businesses to buy? I've been considering something similar and have been keeping an eye on Quiet Light Brokerage, which has some interesting ones. Also, are you looking at Amazon FBA or doing your own selling/logistics? How much time are you putting into the businesses? I have lots of questions about how one does this effectively :)

tuckerp 6y ago
That's fine--all of the criticisms were predictable. I never expected this to be for everyone. Quiet Light is great--there's a number of other brokers out there too, Empire Flippers and FEInternational are two other major players. I use those + sourcing off market deals which are generally the most advantageous to acquire. Off market takes a ton of time to source until you have a big enough reputation that people know you and just bring opportunities to you. Those happen occasionally for me, but still represents a small percentage of the deals I assess. Part of my screening criteria is to only acquire businesses with high automation in place, or high potential to automate. Shoot me a DM if you want to keep chatting!
- twelve40 6y ago
  Just curious why is this getting downvoted, are those some scammy websites? It honestly looks like a benign comment to me, maybe I'm missing something.
- awillen 6y ago
  Awesome, thanks - just sent you a DM on Twitter.

geoffbp 6y ago

Interesting blog post! not sure I agree with the premise though, you can have autonomy and good work life balance without working for yourself.

tuckerp 6y ago
I agree--in my experience though it was fleeting and not a long term guarantee.

gnicholas 6y ago

> I made four investments in 2019 and will double that in 2020. I’m targeting replacing my prior income by 2023. I think the rise of micro private equity investing is just beginning, and this is the perfect time to take advantage of the opportunity. Take big swings and bet on yourself. So is he investing in others or betting on himself?

fierarul 6y ago
He's betting on himself towards having an investor career.

atmosx 6y ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an engineer in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of blog post hits.

luckylion 6y ago
Especially if they worked at Amazon, I believe this is the second or third person to "walk away from a lot of money at Amazon" for the same reasons and now needs to tell the world about it. Maybe there's a I-Left-Amazon-To-Become-An-Influencer-SaaS somewhere that produces these posts.
- exdsq 6y ago
  That and others from FANG. Before they start YouTube channels and courses on how you can get a job with them too.
  - binaryfour 6y ago
    techlead, joma, Clement, the list goes on and on and on and on...
    - exdsq 6y ago
      I genuinely cringe when their content pops up on YouTube. Suggesting anyone can get a $200k job if you memorise enough algorithms through their courses is just sad - especially around the state of the industry at the moment.
      - binaryfour 6y ago
        tbh, I'm sick of working with leetcode engineers. Typically they're not actually very good engineers since an actual career in software very seldom involves those type of skills.
- binaryfour 6y ago
  lol this is so true...

gnicholas 6y ago

I don't understand the chart. Typically the X axis is the independent variable, and the Y axis is the dependent variable. Is he saying that as his desire to own his time gets larger, his compensation goes up? Or are the axes flipped?

purplezooey 6y ago

This post reeks a bit of #firstworldproblems.

yibg 6y ago

There have been a few of these articles lately, about leaving a high paying job to pursue something more risky but more fulfilling. They've all contained bits about leaving behind hundreds of thousands in RSUs to do so. I wonder though where the cut off is. If it was a couple of million in RSUs, would folks still do it?

ghaff 6y ago
Depends on circumstances like everything else I assume. If someone has six figures of low seven figures in the bank and holding out for a couple years in a not-horrible situation will likely result in a couple of million, then it probably makes sense to hold on. After all, they could not unreasonably retire after that. If they already have FU money (however you define same) and they really hate their current situation and are maybe older, then, yeah, maybe.

rwalle 6y ago

I quit reading the post after halfway through it. When I saw the headline, I thought, "when you have enough money in your hands, you can walk away from anything", and the article just confirmed that. I don't need any of this dude's life advice.

eloff 6y ago
So much hate, jealous much?

gnicholas 6y ago

As others have noted, the title is not the best. Only someone with lots of money would say that time is the "real wealth" (ask a poor unemployed person if they agree). Perhaps a more accurate summary of the post would be "real wealth is having enough wealth that you can make money via passive income and thereby manage your time". But that's basically saying that real wealth is having tons of wealth.

lbotos 6y ago
You are missing the "wealth" vs. "riches" relationship. I am not rich by NYC standards, but working remote has made me "wealthier" because I have control over my time. I've often described it as I feel like a billionaire because I can go anyywhere, any time, as long as I handle my tasks. More riches may allow you more time, but also, you can get more "valuable" time, when you have the authority to "own" your time (aka schedule.)
CamperBob2 6y ago
Only someone with lots of money would say that time is the "real wealth" (ask a poor unemployed person if they agree). I wouldn't agree there. I don't have lots of money, and the main reason for that is that I've focused on maximizing the personal utility of my own time. To me, that means doing work that I find personally and professionally rewarding, even if it's not the most financially-rewarding use of my time. I'm OK with the results, at least so far. Professionally, I do contract and original development work from a home office, and have for >10 years. There's rarely a day when I don't open HN or another tech site and count my blessings. I'm thankful that I don't work for a company that sells tools and data for corrupting the democratic process, or that sells their users out to advertisers while engaging in numerous dark patterns to retain and addict those users. Or where the UX that I work on is not geared towards user-friendly content discovery, but rather to keep subscribers from realizing just how little content my company offers. It's awesome that I don't work for a company where innovation means removing headphone jacks from portable audio devices and calling it "courage." Or for a company where I might be required to work on a new DRM scheme to lock users out of content they've paid for, to "disappear" books from their personal libraries, or to deny them access to hardware they own. I also don't have to work on force-feeding unwanted, barely-tested OS updates using tactics indistinguishable from malware, or to spend any time considering how the Chinese government (or for that matter my own) might react to a new feature. And I don't have to knife my own engineering sensibilities in the back by shipping trivial applications to locked-in users that waste memory by the exabyte and CPU power by the gigawatt. In short, I don't have to wonder if the users I do have are really better off because they've done business with me. I'm pretty sure they are. Frankly, it's never been more rewarding to not sell out to a FAANG.

john_moscow 6y ago

> However, if 95% of businesses fail within their first 5 years, was that the best risk/reward tradeoff? What if I could just buy something already successful? I started researching buying internet businesses because they could be run from any location. I was shocked when I found out they average 30% returns every year across the industry. > I made four investments in 2019 and will double that in 2020. As a person who has been running an online business for the past 7 years, I couldn't disagree more. Business is always about doing something better than your competition. Small business isn't about having more capital, or a better PR team. It's purely about efficiently aligning your own strengths with the market demands. Being able to understand the market and its changes, knowing how to sell to your niche audience, being able to successfully execute many things at once, since you niche size very much limits what can be hired out. When you sell a small business to a random "investor", all of this is lost. Sure, you will still have the market share for a couple of years, but unless you already know how to run that kind of business, you will lose to the competitors very quickly. It's like buying a trunk of a tree. You'll get the lumber, but it won't grow anymore. There's also a question on why would the founder want to sell a successful business that gives a 30% return. They could very well remortgage their house, or scale down and take a part-time job to survive the rough times. If they didn't, perhaps it's because they understand something about the market the the buyer doesn't.

fragmede 6y ago
Or they took a second mortgage on their house in order to start the business, have been doing contracting on the side to pay the bills, and are simply burnt out. Or, they don't own a home to start with. (or worse, it's still underwater from 2008's GFC!) Small business isn't about having more capital, but businesses fail because they don't have enough capital. It is entirely possible that there is lurking issue in the market that the seller hopes the buyer is naive of, but it's also possible the seller, as a human being, and not a perfectly rational economic automaton, has their own reasons for getting out that means it's a good deal for the buyer.

angarg12 6y ago

Pretty rich how many of this FIRE fellas are pretty well off to begin with. And here I am, in my mid 30s, with a mid level programmer job, no career progression and spending a significant chunk of my income in rent. I would love to have more free time but hey, I got bills to pay.

aeyes 6y ago
They seem to have too much free time on their hand to be brag about it. 99% of us just keep working quietly.
kulig 6y ago
Yeah its usually highly educated people from the upper middle class. Theyre not so rich that they still kinda have normal lives, but they definitely have enough money to not have to worry about things.

arbol 6y ago

This is a non-article. Not worth the time.

binaryfour 6y ago
click bait for him to get deal flow as an investor. Kinda sad to see it upvoted on HN and you be downvoted for pointing it out. EDIT: and now we've gone full blown meta as I'm getting downvoted ha ha...

dimitar 6y ago

Whoa he became a manager straight out of college? How does that happen outside of a startup?

titanomachy 6y ago
Amazon hires very inexperienced managers. This is unusual among top-tier companies.
- supercollision 6y ago
  OP can maybe comment or correct (btw Congrats on making the jump, OP!) but given the business/operations language this might be the Ops Manager ladder, on which there is an entry-level manager position. IMO interesting, and cool if it works out for everyone. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/899809/amazon-operations-area-manager-2020-entry-level https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/899809/amazon-operations-are... (trivia, Amazon is listed as having 840k employees, I knew it was high of course, but wow)
  - dimitar 6y ago
    This is very interesting! So by getting the job you get the valuable experience of managing 50+ people, but the trade-off is that you are expected to works shifts, stay on your feet for more than 12h, if needed to physical work, and be willing to relocate. I understand why they will have a hard time finding experienced managers for this, but it is also a great opportunity for newly graduated young people who are serious about getting in to management.

baxtr 6y ago

Many are downplaying this and saying that it’s is easy to hold that position while you’re rich. At the same I agree with the notion that working towards financial independence is worthwhile. This can be achieved by an austere lifestyle.

ghaff 6y ago
>This can be achieved by an austere lifestyle. There are also degrees of everything. Some make a good salary and do fairly well with RSUs/other investments and make lifestyle choices that don't revolve around maximizing wealth without living "austerely." There's a big space between never going out for a nice meal or spending money on other "unnecessary" expenses like foreign travel and buying the most expensive house you can't afford in a high CoL area and generally spending extravagantly.

Mulpze15 6y ago

Again, people spreading false statistics, maybe to serve the "hero/risk taker" narrative? Yawn. About 50% of businesses close their door in the first 5 years, not 95%. [1] When someone makes such a common huge mistake, I am thinking that either they are not the slightest competent, or that they have an agenda that cannot be justified with realistic/honest numbers. [1] BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.htm https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.ht...

Traster 6y ago

I'm genuinely intrigued about what this article is attempting to achieve? Is this like brand building? No offence, but it's quite low effort - a graph of Compensation vs Desire to own my time? Not a completely uninteresting topic, but then just x=y? It's very vague on what he actually does, but is this brand building for deal flow for his investments? Maybe there is some alpha in this small scale investing, but in my experience small businesses aren't just about who puts the money in - they're almost always full time jobs for the founder, and that stops when they sell, making the business much less attractive.

naveen99 6y ago

Most financially independent early retirement (FIRE) types don’t preach “micro private equity”... especially in a time when leveraged people are getting margin called with Covid. good luck to OP.