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IMO in the age of insanely high tech salaries, early stage funding is very overrated. I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no e

IMO in the age of insanely high tech salaries, early stage funding is very overrated. I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits, and I didn't even work at FANG. I have friends who saved more than twice as much as me. And then YC gives out 150k? 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Why not save 2 million and then start your company at age 29 instead of 21 begging people for tiny money for huge share of your company? The YC model made sense back when it was founded and engineers made 60-80k. Now after the second tech boom, you are much better off working for FANG for 5-10 years and then starting your own company owning 100% of the equity until a real money $10M+ series A

sushshshsh 6y ago
I really agree with this, though I suspect some young bright 20 year olds are desperate to work hard for the little cash VCs throw at them, especially if FAANG says no to them for arbitrary reasons. The thing that has always stopped me from starting a business is the fear of being sued, the fear of failure, and the fear of just breaking even compared to working for a normal company. I also am not very good at sales despite years of trying-- my personality is hardwired towards laying all my cards down on the table immediately. My question to you is, if you have 2 million, why not continue to work for FAANG or retire semi-frugally to do hobbyist work, when considering that starting a startup involves immense downside risk (getting sued）
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  > is the fear of being sued... I can't discount it entirely, but... for many situations, that's probably a somewhat overblown fear. It's why you get insurance, pay professionals to do legal/paperwork stuff, and get on with your business. Almost anyone can sue for anything, but it probably doesn't happen anywhere near the number of times you might think it does. When you start, you're going to be too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers, so you're already doing something right.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    > too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers Apparently I'm the exception, but my business was pretty small (under $1M ARR), and one of our investors (which was also our largest client), sued us to pay his convertible note back. The company went bankrupt and after bankruptcy he sued my cofounder and I personally for the note. Still dealing with the whole thing. Every step of the way our other investors and lawyers were caught off guard, because the situation is apparently very rare, however, it still happened. Having said that, knowing what I know now, I'd prefer to start a business, with all the issues and risks that it might entail, rather than let fear keep me from doing it. It's also been a hell of a learning experience and I'm sure it's all going to help me in the future.
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      Wow, sounds pretty crazy. Did the note have personal guarantees? My understanding is that kind of thing is very rare. If not, what grounds did he have for suing you personally? Fraudulent conveyance or breach of fiduciary duties? Something else?
      - sushshshsh 6y ago
        It is not crazy and not rare. I can sue you right now, personally, and you would need to pay someone to defend you in court. If you've never owned a business and have no relation to me, then probably you'll survive the suit just fine. But as you can see, OP had a business relationship with the person involved, and though OP probably won the suit in the end, he still had to pay oodles of money to protect himself. And if he lost, well, then there's my point.
      - ta1234567890 6y ago
        The note did not have personal guarantees. But that didn't stop him from trying to claim alter ego. Like the sibling comment says, even if we win, we still need to pay tons of money to lawyers just to deal with it, and put in a lot of our time as well. Our lawyers and other investors do think this situation is pretty rare, as the guy ended up killing the business that could have given him a better return on his money, and also screwed everyone else involved in the process.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vmception 6y ago
  This is so interesting because you could watch a 5 minute video on "limited liability" and dissolve all of those fears. The company concept is a shield. Money is allowed to pass through to you, outside capital is not a tax event and everything you spend is deducted against the much smaller salary you paid yourself. You can have negative AGI, actually have a high compensation, and still get $1,200 checks signed by the President. Risk is allowed to stay with the company, whether it has anything left to pay to the aggrieved investor or not. This knowledge alone acts as a deterrent to many risks. You're really overthinking this.
  - heipei 6y ago
    This. Add on to the fact that none of your customers has any incentive to sue you or screw you (i.e. it almost never happens) and that you can get insurance for all kinds of eventualities. And you still have a limited-liability corporation.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    I'm actually not overthinking it, because judge's remove the protection an LLC gives your personal assets for arbitrary reasons. Additionally, you need a multi member non spousal LLC to even get the protection in the first place. I have a lot of assets to protect.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Arbitrary reasons being? Generally this happens if you’ve been grossly irresponsible with your companies’ funds.
      - sushshshsh 6y ago
        As mentioned the first one is not having a cofounder who isnt in your immediate family, which for some people is fine and for me is honestly a waste of time and equity. Just another vector for failure. Beinf grossly irresponsible with your companies' funds is an interesting way of saying "I tried to pay myself without the detailed advice of a skilled accountant and I made an oopsie and now the judge says I need to pay a lawyer ${sum_i_dont_have} to protect a random plantiff from becoming the new owner of my house" Again, how amazing is your idea and execution and business networking capabilities that you somehow think you are gonna make more than $2.2M in 10 years of work, like you would at Google?
xiaolingxiao 6y ago
what range is your annual comp if you don't mind me asking? 2.2 is very impressive given how high the rent is in SF. Or did you invest your savings very well.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Sounds like a crazy amount to save unless you managed to keep living at home and not paying rent, along with saving every dime and investing (investing being the easiest part around 2010, everything went up). I’m assuming it’s a non FAANG salary (sub 200k), but even then the best numbers I could come up with is about 600-800k over 8 years (the top end only being achievable by aggressively investing every dime). Regardless, it’s got me thinking if I should pump most of my paycheck into Delta and all the distressed market sectors for the bounce when this all ends.
  - vecter 6y ago
    They probably got very lucky with stock appreciation.
gnicholas 6y ago
I'm curious about the numbers — you saved $275k (annually, on average) after taxes and living expenses as a regular engineer? That implies a pre-tax salary of $420k if you ignore living expenses, which add at least another $30k in pre-tax earnings. I'm sure there are engineers who make $450k in SV, but you imply that this is possible/easy for folks who are 21. Maybe I'm wrong, but that seems pretty high for someone straight out of college. Note: I'm not including interest/investment income from annual savings, and perhaps that's part of how you made money. Certainly it has been easy to make money buying tech stocks in the last 10 years. But that's not always the case, and even including investment gains I'm having a hard time seeing $2.2M being a typical or easy amount to save from age 21 to 29. That said, I worked as a lawyer for 7 years, saved a decent amount, paid off my loans, and then started a startup. It was a good path for me, but man I never had $2.2M in the bank, even having worked at a well-known international firm and being on the partner track.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  The full amount wouldn't be savings. There would also be return on investment. And the stock market has had a crazy decade after the great recession. From June 2008 to June 2016, stock market had an 84% return on investment with dividend reinvested. Someone starting saving this decade may not get the same chance. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
  - realityking 6y ago
    I would not be shocked to learn that decent share of those 2.2 million was earned by either mining or speculating with crypto currency. There definitely was some money to be made there in the past 10 years.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    Yeah, but relying on a good decade of outside returns is not a good strategy for the future.
- austenallred 6y ago
  He or she was likely paid in equity for some portion, and that equity grew.
zhdc1 6y ago
Assuming your annual expenses came to $50K, you had to have made $225K-$325K a year before tax to save up that much in eight years. Shave or add a couple tens of thousands in either direction. $225K is a high salary almost anywhere in the states that's not on the coast. It's an absolutely ungodly amount outside of a small number of countries. You're likely to make a third of that in the EU or Asia. Maybe half that in cities with large tech scenes. Advising someone to save up $2M before they're thirty is like telling someone to be born rich, except that the odds of being born rich are much higher (~40M millionaires in the world vs ~3M programmers in the States, of which the majority make less than $90K a year). You start a company and go through hell to get $2M in a bank, not the other way around. I'm not nuanced in the ins and outs of YC, but $150K on fair terms is a sizable amount in almost every reasonable context.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I think your salary estimates aren't high enough. In California you're paying around 35% in state/fed income taxes, which means that with $225k gross you have $145k net of taxes and under $100k after living expenses. With $325k gross you're $160k after taxes and living expenses. Even starting at the top of your range, it gets you just over halfway there before investment gains.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    So OP was making 300k (roughly standard for a mid-level engineer in the Bay Area at about 20+ different companies here) and dumping 160k of it into index funds every year. With the market basically doubling over the past 8 years with no inflation, and those returns compounded, it's clear to see how he got to $2m. This doesn't account for any returns on company stock OP held on to (tech companies have basically doubled the return of the S&P over the past 10 years). Whether you could replicate OP's experience over the next 10 years, is debatable.
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      The scenario you describe makes sounds plausible, but it isn’t “I saved $2.2M over my 8 year career”. “Save” ≠ invest in the stock market. The commenter made this seem like the low-risk alternative to taking VC funding, so relying on stock market returns is antithetical to that.
austenallred 6y ago
While I believe this is your experience, I don’t believe it’s possible for the average engineer in the Valley to save anywhere close to $2m over 8 years.
CalRobert 6y ago
Fortunately, $150k is not a joke to the many people not in your situation, which is akin to winning the lottery. I work remote for low six figures and it'd make a huge difference for me.
johnloeber 6y ago
It makes no sense from a risk diversification POV to spend your life savings (pre-)seeding your startup.
- imtringued 6y ago
  If you can pull in that much money it probably makes more sense to get a loan with favorable conditions and then pay it off in your 30s if your business fails.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  It makes no sense from any kind of rational investment strategy to found a startup.
onion2k 6y ago
The fact you believe the $150k is where the value in an accelerator like YC lies says a lot. If I was running another startup and I could join YC for $0 in return for 7% I'd still seriously consider it.
randomsearch 6y ago
Peak SV bubble right here. Hard to begin but: most people cannot earn anything near these ludicrous sums; most founders are much older and can not afford to wait; the chances of failure justify the terms.
not_a_moth 6y ago
"Regular engineer" If you distribute your $2.2M over 8 years and gross it up with 35% withhold and minimal living expense like $30k/year you'd have to average over $400k/year. This post is simply a lie? Fwiw I think top value from an accelerator whether YC, 500, First Round or EF is about a customer network that makes it easy to bootstrap b2b, not about the cash at all really.
JimDabell 6y ago
> I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits > 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Your income is an outlier in the US and an extreme outlier in the rest of the world. Your perception of what "a decent job" pays, the value of $150k, and the chance most people have to obtain this kind of money is massively skewed.
rvn1045 6y ago
At that point your unlikely to take the plunge for various reasons: Once you have saved that amount of money your only going to be a 'few' more years from hitting some version of FIRE. You've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle and friend group that will be hard to walk away from. You've lost skills having worked with some internal tech stack your entire career and don't know how to do anything. Skills you learn at your FAANG equivalent job don't transfer over to entrepreneurship its just a different domain. You've never actually 'worked hard' and it's just going to seem plain silly to quit your 250k+ job to work all the time when the chances of success are low. People who get into entrepreneurship generally can't stand their jobs and have ideas running through their head all the time to the point where going to the job is pure torture. Why not work at a FAANG equivalent company for long enough to give you 2-3 years of runway and then take the plunge? The longer you wait the less likely you are to do it.
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  > Once you have saved that amount of money your only going to be a 'few' more years from hitting some version of FIRE. > You've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle and friend group that will be hard to walk away from. > You've lost skills having worked with some internal tech stack your entire career and don't know how to do anything. > Skills you learn at your FAANG equivalent job don't transfer over to entrepreneurship its just a different domain. > You've never actually 'worked hard' and it's just going to seem plain silly to quit your 250k+ job to work all the time when the chances of success are low. Can confirm all of the above (except lifestyle inflation, I watch that carefully). At this point, it really does make more sense to grind for a few more years, go have a nice FIRE and then maybe work on something on your own just for fun. So, essentially, golden handcuffs all the way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- DSingularity 6y ago
  Maybe some people don’t agree with the ethics of FB/amz/google/Netflix and are not interested in a career with Apple? I think for a lot of people money isn’t everything in life.
bashwizard 6y ago
Seems reasonable. If you want to live with your parents until 30 and at the same time is one of the highest paid engineers in the whole world.
pyb 6y ago
I have not heard of any of these wealthy FAANG engineers ever starting a great startup. Are there any examples we should be aware of ?
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
Your trolling comment pushed the right buttons around here. You did everything except mention the time when the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell.
greendesk 6y ago
You do it to change the world.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brainless 6y ago
I do not know if you are joking or insulting engineers, mainly those outside a tiny hole in the Valley, more so globally.
noychery 6y ago
The author of the article here. I agree wholeheartedly! Not a solo founder myself, but I've been advising GrowthClub and leading my bootstrapped startup Panda Training, based on my experience - funding is definitely overrated and often brings trouble. Many of the founders (both solo and not) in GrowthClub bootstrap.
nnurmanov 6y ago
In 8 years things will change, I had an idea to start a used book selling platform back in 1998. The same idea won't work now.
TechBro8615 6y ago
I don't mean to sound like I'm gatekeeping, but IMO, this thought process is not conducive to successful entrepreneurship. A true entrepreneur doesn't care about things like job security or financial independence. They take risks to make something and try to invent the future. Money has little to do with it.
sjg007 6y ago
Wow.., how did you save that much?

sushshshsh 6y ago

I really agree with this, though I suspect some young bright 20 year olds are desperate to work hard for the little cash VCs throw at them, especially if FAANG says no to them for arbitrary reasons. The thing that has always stopped me from starting a business is the fear of being sued, the fear of failure, and the fear of just breaking even compared to working for a normal company. I also am not very good at sales despite years of trying-- my personality is hardwired towards laying all my cards down on the table immediately. My question to you is, if you have 2 million, why not continue to work for FAANG or retire semi-frugally to do hobbyist work, when considering that starting a startup involves immense downside risk (getting sued）

mgkimsal 6y ago
> is the fear of being sued... I can't discount it entirely, but... for many situations, that's probably a somewhat overblown fear. It's why you get insurance, pay professionals to do legal/paperwork stuff, and get on with your business. Almost anyone can sue for anything, but it probably doesn't happen anywhere near the number of times you might think it does. When you start, you're going to be too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers, so you're already doing something right.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  > too small to get sued in the first place. And being sued probably means you have paying customers Apparently I'm the exception, but my business was pretty small (under $1M ARR), and one of our investors (which was also our largest client), sued us to pay his convertible note back. The company went bankrupt and after bankruptcy he sued my cofounder and I personally for the note. Still dealing with the whole thing. Every step of the way our other investors and lawyers were caught off guard, because the situation is apparently very rare, however, it still happened. Having said that, knowing what I know now, I'd prefer to start a business, with all the issues and risks that it might entail, rather than let fear keep me from doing it. It's also been a hell of a learning experience and I'm sure it's all going to help me in the future.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Wow, sounds pretty crazy. Did the note have personal guarantees? My understanding is that kind of thing is very rare. If not, what grounds did he have for suing you personally? Fraudulent conveyance or breach of fiduciary duties? Something else?
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      It is not crazy and not rare. I can sue you right now, personally, and you would need to pay someone to defend you in court. If you've never owned a business and have no relation to me, then probably you'll survive the suit just fine. But as you can see, OP had a business relationship with the person involved, and though OP probably won the suit in the end, he still had to pay oodles of money to protect himself. And if he lost, well, then there's my point.
    - ta1234567890 6y ago
      The note did not have personal guarantees. But that didn't stop him from trying to claim alter ego. Like the sibling comment says, even if we win, we still need to pay tons of money to lawyers just to deal with it, and put in a lot of our time as well. Our lawyers and other investors do think this situation is pretty rare, as the guy ended up killing the business that could have given him a better return on his money, and also screwed everyone else involved in the process.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vmception 6y ago
This is so interesting because you could watch a 5 minute video on "limited liability" and dissolve all of those fears. The company concept is a shield. Money is allowed to pass through to you, outside capital is not a tax event and everything you spend is deducted against the much smaller salary you paid yourself. You can have negative AGI, actually have a high compensation, and still get $1,200 checks signed by the President. Risk is allowed to stay with the company, whether it has anything left to pay to the aggrieved investor or not. This knowledge alone acts as a deterrent to many risks. You're really overthinking this.
- heipei 6y ago
  This. Add on to the fact that none of your customers has any incentive to sue you or screw you (i.e. it almost never happens) and that you can get insurance for all kinds of eventualities. And you still have a limited-liability corporation.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  I'm actually not overthinking it, because judge's remove the protection an LLC gives your personal assets for arbitrary reasons. Additionally, you need a multi member non spousal LLC to even get the protection in the first place. I have a lot of assets to protect.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Arbitrary reasons being? Generally this happens if you’ve been grossly irresponsible with your companies’ funds.
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      As mentioned the first one is not having a cofounder who isnt in your immediate family, which for some people is fine and for me is honestly a waste of time and equity. Just another vector for failure. Beinf grossly irresponsible with your companies' funds is an interesting way of saying "I tried to pay myself without the detailed advice of a skilled accountant and I made an oopsie and now the judge says I need to pay a lawyer ${sum_i_dont_have} to protect a random plantiff from becoming the new owner of my house" Again, how amazing is your idea and execution and business networking capabilities that you somehow think you are gonna make more than $2.2M in 10 years of work, like you would at Google?

xiaolingxiao 6y ago

what range is your annual comp if you don't mind me asking? 2.2 is very impressive given how high the rent is in SF. Or did you invest your savings very well.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Sounds like a crazy amount to save unless you managed to keep living at home and not paying rent, along with saving every dime and investing (investing being the easiest part around 2010, everything went up). I’m assuming it’s a non FAANG salary (sub 200k), but even then the best numbers I could come up with is about 600-800k over 8 years (the top end only being achievable by aggressively investing every dime). Regardless, it’s got me thinking if I should pump most of my paycheck into Delta and all the distressed market sectors for the bounce when this all ends.
- vecter 6y ago
  They probably got very lucky with stock appreciation.

gnicholas 6y ago

I'm curious about the numbers — you saved $275k (annually, on average) after taxes and living expenses as a regular engineer? That implies a pre-tax salary of $420k if you ignore living expenses, which add at least another $30k in pre-tax earnings. I'm sure there are engineers who make $450k in SV, but you imply that this is possible/easy for folks who are 21. Maybe I'm wrong, but that seems pretty high for someone straight out of college. Note: I'm not including interest/investment income from annual savings, and perhaps that's part of how you made money. Certainly it has been easy to make money buying tech stocks in the last 10 years. But that's not always the case, and even including investment gains I'm having a hard time seeing $2.2M being a typical or easy amount to save from age 21 to 29. That said, I worked as a lawyer for 7 years, saved a decent amount, paid off my loans, and then started a startup. It was a good path for me, but man I never had $2.2M in the bank, even having worked at a well-known international firm and being on the partner track.

smnrchrds 6y ago
The full amount wouldn't be savings. There would also be return on investment. And the stock market has had a crazy decade after the great recession. From June 2008 to June 2016, stock market had an 84% return on investment with dividend reinvested. Someone starting saving this decade may not get the same chance. https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
- realityking 6y ago
  I would not be shocked to learn that decent share of those 2.2 million was earned by either mining or speculating with crypto currency. There definitely was some money to be made there in the past 10 years.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Yeah, but relying on a good decade of outside returns is not a good strategy for the future.
austenallred 6y ago
He or she was likely paid in equity for some portion, and that equity grew.

zhdc1 6y ago

Assuming your annual expenses came to $50K, you had to have made $225K-$325K a year before tax to save up that much in eight years. Shave or add a couple tens of thousands in either direction. $225K is a high salary almost anywhere in the states that's not on the coast. It's an absolutely ungodly amount outside of a small number of countries. You're likely to make a third of that in the EU or Asia. Maybe half that in cities with large tech scenes. Advising someone to save up $2M before they're thirty is like telling someone to be born rich, except that the odds of being born rich are much higher (~40M millionaires in the world vs ~3M programmers in the States, of which the majority make less than $90K a year). You start a company and go through hell to get $2M in a bank, not the other way around. I'm not nuanced in the ins and outs of YC, but $150K on fair terms is a sizable amount in almost every reasonable context.

gnicholas 6y ago
I think your salary estimates aren't high enough. In California you're paying around 35% in state/fed income taxes, which means that with $225k gross you have $145k net of taxes and under $100k after living expenses. With $325k gross you're $160k after taxes and living expenses. Even starting at the top of your range, it gets you just over halfway there before investment gains.
- pembrook 6y ago
  So OP was making 300k (roughly standard for a mid-level engineer in the Bay Area at about 20+ different companies here) and dumping 160k of it into index funds every year. With the market basically doubling over the past 8 years with no inflation, and those returns compounded, it's clear to see how he got to $2m. This doesn't account for any returns on company stock OP held on to (tech companies have basically doubled the return of the S&P over the past 10 years). Whether you could replicate OP's experience over the next 10 years, is debatable.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    The scenario you describe makes sounds plausible, but it isn’t “I saved $2.2M over my 8 year career”. “Save” ≠ invest in the stock market. The commenter made this seem like the low-risk alternative to taking VC funding, so relying on stock market returns is antithetical to that.

austenallred 6y ago

While I believe this is your experience, I don’t believe it’s possible for the average engineer in the Valley to save anywhere close to $2m over 8 years.

CalRobert 6y ago

Fortunately, $150k is not a joke to the many people not in your situation, which is akin to winning the lottery. I work remote for low six figures and it'd make a huge difference for me.

johnloeber 6y ago

It makes no sense from a risk diversification POV to spend your life savings (pre-)seeding your startup.

imtringued 6y ago
If you can pull in that much money it probably makes more sense to get a loan with favorable conditions and then pay it off in your 30s if your business fails.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
It makes no sense from any kind of rational investment strategy to found a startup.

onion2k 6y ago

The fact you believe the $150k is where the value in an accelerator like YC lies says a lot. If I was running another startup and I could join YC for $0 in return for 7% I'd still seriously consider it.

randomsearch 6y ago

Peak SV bubble right here. Hard to begin but: most people cannot earn anything near these ludicrous sums; most founders are much older and can not afford to wait; the chances of failure justify the terms.

not_a_moth 6y ago

"Regular engineer" If you distribute your $2.2M over 8 years and gross it up with 35% withhold and minimal living expense like $30k/year you'd have to average over $400k/year. This post is simply a lie? Fwiw I think top value from an accelerator whether YC, 500, First Round or EF is about a customer network that makes it easy to bootstrap b2b, not about the cash at all really.

JimDabell 6y ago

> I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits > 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Your income is an outlier in the US and an extreme outlier in the rest of the world. Your perception of what "a decent job" pays, the value of $150k, and the chance most people have to obtain this kind of money is massively skewed.

rvn1045 6y ago

At that point your unlikely to take the plunge for various reasons: Once you have saved that amount of money your only going to be a 'few' more years from hitting some version of FIRE. You've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle and friend group that will be hard to walk away from. You've lost skills having worked with some internal tech stack your entire career and don't know how to do anything. Skills you learn at your FAANG equivalent job don't transfer over to entrepreneurship its just a different domain. You've never actually 'worked hard' and it's just going to seem plain silly to quit your 250k+ job to work all the time when the chances of success are low. People who get into entrepreneurship generally can't stand their jobs and have ideas running through their head all the time to the point where going to the job is pure torture. Why not work at a FAANG equivalent company for long enough to give you 2-3 years of runway and then take the plunge? The longer you wait the less likely you are to do it.

cyberdrunk 6y ago
> Once you have saved that amount of money your only going to be a 'few' more years from hitting some version of FIRE. > You've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle and friend group that will be hard to walk away from. > You've lost skills having worked with some internal tech stack your entire career and don't know how to do anything. > Skills you learn at your FAANG equivalent job don't transfer over to entrepreneurship its just a different domain. > You've never actually 'worked hard' and it's just going to seem plain silly to quit your 250k+ job to work all the time when the chances of success are low. Can confirm all of the above (except lifestyle inflation, I watch that carefully). At this point, it really does make more sense to grind for a few more years, go have a nice FIRE and then maybe work on something on your own just for fun. So, essentially, golden handcuffs all the way.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
DSingularity 6y ago
Maybe some people don’t agree with the ethics of FB/amz/google/Netflix and are not interested in a career with Apple? I think for a lot of people money isn’t everything in life.

bashwizard 6y ago

Seems reasonable. If you want to live with your parents until 30 and at the same time is one of the highest paid engineers in the whole world.

pyb 6y ago

I have not heard of any of these wealthy FAANG engineers ever starting a great startup. Are there any examples we should be aware of ?

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

Your trolling comment pushed the right buttons around here. You did everything except mention the time when the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell.

greendesk 6y ago

You do it to change the world.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brainless 6y ago

I do not know if you are joking or insulting engineers, mainly those outside a tiny hole in the Valley, more so globally.

noychery 6y ago

The author of the article here. I agree wholeheartedly! Not a solo founder myself, but I've been advising GrowthClub and leading my bootstrapped startup Panda Training, based on my experience - funding is definitely overrated and often brings trouble. Many of the founders (both solo and not) in GrowthClub bootstrap.

nnurmanov 6y ago

In 8 years things will change, I had an idea to start a used book selling platform back in 1998. The same idea won't work now.

TechBro8615 6y ago

I don't mean to sound like I'm gatekeeping, but IMO, this thought process is not conducive to successful entrepreneurship. A true entrepreneur doesn't care about things like job security or financial independence. They take risks to make something and try to invent the future. Money has little to do with it.

sjg007 6y ago

Wow.., how did you save that much?