Well it started slow, and I spent my twenties working very hard, but by 30 I had a few million dollars and decided to take a few years off. I had never really t

Well it started slow, and I spent my twenties working very hard, but by 30 I had a few million dollars and decided to take a few years off. I had never really traveled, so I spent most of the next few years living out of a suitcase and at one point hadn't been back to my home country for a couple of years. I went from only having visited a few countries briefly to having seen quite a lot of around 70 countries. I did lots of mountaineering, skiing, diving, and tried my hand at quite a few other sports. I went to a bunch of tech conferences all over Europe and Asia, just for fun. I flew so much that I was in the air for over 2% of my total hours a couple of years. After a few years of that I slowed down the travel some, and by luck I had just signed a year lease for a beautiful home overlooking the sea in a country I kept coming back to just a couple of months before the pandemic shut down air travel. Since then I have been taking up the hands-on hobbies that I thought looked fun and just never had enough time/space/funds for when I was working. I had a daughter with my partner, and am incredibly glad for the joyous little being I'm starting to raise. I have even recently gotten back into doing some software engineering for fun. About a decade ago I had an idea for something that felt too big to be what got me setup to pursue what I wanted early on. The project was too complex, too long-term, and there was too little existing ecosystem to tap into. In the intervening years the ecosystem has started to come together and I've managed to strike well enough to have my freedom elsewhere, so I'm looking at getting back to being a founder within a couple of years.