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Real estate and starting companies. That's how the richest people I know got there without being bankrolled by their family. The rest of us can keep heads down

Real estate and starting companies. That's how the richest people I know got there without being bankrolled by their family. The rest of us can keep heads down on a W2 and argue about compounding interest, day trading vs long term investing, IRA's and getting faster promotions via interviewing often.

chii 4y ago
> That's how the richest people I know got there without being bankrolled by their family. > The rest of us can keep heads down on a W2... which, if they weren't bankrolled by family or inherited money, they would've had to keep their heads down on a W2, and save enough capital to start investing.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  some of us do that longer than we should is my point
- raiyu 4y ago
  That’s become less and less true as the capital required to start a business has diminished and virtual products allow for rapid and unprecedented scale. For me and my brother we were immigrants, divorced household, single mom as some bread winner, didn’t attend Ivy League schools, paid for college through debt, and started a business with savings from working full time at system administration, which was self taught, while being in college. Fast forward 20 years, DigitalOcean IPO’d. Our mother did provide a roof over our heads but we had no inheritance, and no friends and family round. We built a service oriented business doing web hosting first. Service businesses are traditionally much cheaper to start because there is no product development cost to front with zero revenue. Then after a decade of that we built digitalocean as a product business which was financed from the cash flow of our original business. By the time we closed our series Seed in Digitalocean we were already well past $1MM ARR and in one year went from $100k ARR to $18MM ARR. Having less resources does force you to be more scrappy and figure things out that other people who have a safety net often give up on. Point is it can be done either way.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Congratulations.
    - raiyu 4y ago
      Thank you =]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    Doesn’t matter if you were raised by an alcoholic who fed you beatings for breakfast. Many people will still claim luck and argue that no one should ever try to do great things, much safer to wagemax and invest in index funds and not step out of your lane. Your story is the correct attitude and the reality of creating real wealth. Unfortunately many will denigrate your story.
    - chii 4y ago
      but one must also temper the idea that you can be self-made, just as long as you put in the hard yards. Wasn't there a recent ask HN front-page thread about how the poster was ready to give up being an indiehacker and an entrepreneur? it is indeed much safer to min/max wage & work-life balance, and spend that time improving yourself. Then, use the capital to invest. But you will not reach billionaire status doing this - but you can make enough to be comfortable.
      - raiyu 4y ago
        Hard work alone will not garauntee success, but I think there is also a tremendous amount of knowledge that you can pick up that a lot of entrepreneurs seem to ignore, that greatly increases their likelihood for success and also reduces how much time they spend going in the wrong direction. Likewise there are also so many great mentors out there now, and many of them are happy to give a helping hand, expecting nothing in return, because they recognize how much others have helped them, that if you aren't reaching out to those folks and finding them, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Don't build in a vacuum. And by that I don't mean simply get customer/user feedback, but I mean have mentors, both active, and inactive - that are constantly reviewing your ideas with you. The inactive ones come from reading books like innovators dilemma, and the active ones, you need to find and reach out to and get them on-board, just like you would reach out to VCs and pitch for funding.

chii 4y ago

> That's how the richest people I know got there without being bankrolled by their family. > The rest of us can keep heads down on a W2... which, if they weren't bankrolled by family or inherited money, they would've had to keep their heads down on a W2, and save enough capital to start investing.

Xeoncross 4y ago
some of us do that longer than we should is my point
raiyu 4y ago
That’s become less and less true as the capital required to start a business has diminished and virtual products allow for rapid and unprecedented scale. For me and my brother we were immigrants, divorced household, single mom as some bread winner, didn’t attend Ivy League schools, paid for college through debt, and started a business with savings from working full time at system administration, which was self taught, while being in college. Fast forward 20 years, DigitalOcean IPO’d. Our mother did provide a roof over our heads but we had no inheritance, and no friends and family round. We built a service oriented business doing web hosting first. Service businesses are traditionally much cheaper to start because there is no product development cost to front with zero revenue. Then after a decade of that we built digitalocean as a product business which was financed from the cash flow of our original business. By the time we closed our series Seed in Digitalocean we were already well past $1MM ARR and in one year went from $100k ARR to $18MM ARR. Having less resources does force you to be more scrappy and figure things out that other people who have a safety net often give up on. Point is it can be done either way.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Congratulations.
  - raiyu 4y ago
    Thank you =]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter if you were raised by an alcoholic who fed you beatings for breakfast. Many people will still claim luck and argue that no one should ever try to do great things, much safer to wagemax and invest in index funds and not step out of your lane. Your story is the correct attitude and the reality of creating real wealth. Unfortunately many will denigrate your story.
  - chii 4y ago
    but one must also temper the idea that you can be self-made, just as long as you put in the hard yards. Wasn't there a recent ask HN front-page thread about how the poster was ready to give up being an indiehacker and an entrepreneur? it is indeed much safer to min/max wage & work-life balance, and spend that time improving yourself. Then, use the capital to invest. But you will not reach billionaire status doing this - but you can make enough to be comfortable.
    - raiyu 4y ago
      Hard work alone will not garauntee success, but I think there is also a tremendous amount of knowledge that you can pick up that a lot of entrepreneurs seem to ignore, that greatly increases their likelihood for success and also reduces how much time they spend going in the wrong direction. Likewise there are also so many great mentors out there now, and many of them are happy to give a helping hand, expecting nothing in return, because they recognize how much others have helped them, that if you aren't reaching out to those folks and finding them, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Don't build in a vacuum. And by that I don't mean simply get customer/user feedback, but I mean have mentors, both active, and inactive - that are constantly reviewing your ideas with you. The inactive ones come from reading books like innovators dilemma, and the active ones, you need to find and reach out to and get them on-board, just like you would reach out to VCs and pitch for funding.