4 ms·
great write up. > $920k over four years so this gives an average yearly salary of 230k. Very close to FAANG senior salary with much more risk, effort and (pr
by ffjffsfr 2y ago
great write up.
> $920k over four years
so this gives an average yearly salary of 230k. Very close to FAANG senior salary with much more risk, effort and (probably) worse life-work balance. OP quit from google in 2018 and ran some other business, and this is his biggest sale so far. I think it shows how hard it is to make better money outside FAANG even when extremely talented and lucky like OP. But it's probably more about lifestyle choices.
- ragnot 2y agoKinda sobering when you think about it.
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s not worth it. Neither is freelancing. One of the appeals of freelancing was being able to work from anywhere in the world and still make money, but with wider availability of remote jobs that advantage evaporates. Working for a good company is still the best most consistent way to make good money and have a good life.
- fragmede 2y agoHow many companies let you work 3 days a week? Not from home, just three days a week aka5 day weekends every week?
- deadbabe 2y agoDepends. Are we talking hours? Because if so, then most companies barely give 2 days worth of work per week. And in many cases, people probably work half of that, maybe 4 or 5 hours of actual focused work per day. A freelancer spending very little time working probably isn’t making much money. But an employee who spends little time working, is still bringing in those same paychecks, week after week.
- tempworkac 2y agointeresting to reconcile this with calls to tax the rich. maybe we should be rewarding such effort after all? think about the tens of thousands of jobs created from people working at Google who'd make L3 or less at Google working twice as much...
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoI'm not sure I follow what you're saying. People who work at Google should pay more/less tax? Or that people who start companies should get more tax breaks (or pay more?) I'm European so I don't really click with the obsession some places have with avoiding tax, so you may have to explain it like I'm 5 :-)
- thrw42A8N 2y agoLol, Europe is the home and crown palace of tax evasion, look to the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Jersey...
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoIn Europe most average people are happy to pay tax, despite there being a number of tax havens as you point out. I'd say most people have a low opinion of them. Versus the USA particularly, where it seems many people dislike paying tax.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoI have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know a single person happy with the tax rate or the general performance/effectiveness of government spending. Practically every single restaurant, bar or other kinds of brick-and-mortar shops is evading VAT and income tax, it's so normal that when I was buying winter tires this morning, they straight up asked me whether I need a receipt or want to skip the VAT over phone. Every single aspiring entrepreneur I talk to asks me how to incorporate in one of the tax havens and otherwise lessen the tax and bureaucratic load. My city is full of immigrants from western EU countries who wanted to pay less tax.
- antupis 2y agoA big part is that you are not working for man but yourself.
- yen223 2y agoIt's not quite apples-to-oranges, because he started a hardware company, which historically has much smaller margins than software. The difference isn't just working for FAANG vs running a business, the difference is also working in software vs working in hardware.
- lokimedes 2y agoThe difference is working for yourself. It’s the business version of achieving adulthood (for some).
- rco8786 2y ago> Very close to FAANG senior salary Base salary maybe. But more like ~40% of FAANG TC. (Which only furthers your point)
- ericjmorey 2y agoHigh risk activities are never going to be accurately represented by a single data point.
- sharemywin 2y agogood point it's the 99 out of 100 cases that fail miserably that more accurately reflects expected value.
- riku_iki 2y agoSure, its educated gambling, but it is not fair to exclude high value exits too.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoIt is when they’re effectively lottery tickets.
- optymizer 2y agoSenior devs are closer to 400K-500K total comp. Very senior devs are above that. Still, the value of working on your own project full-time (rather than someone else's thing) can easily justify accepting the difference.
- yen223 2y agoI'm surprised no one here has factored in the very real risk of getting laid off.
- negus 2y agoDo you think that this risk is bigger than you business being hit by the market?
- yen223 2y agoProbably not, but it's still not 0
- ozim 2y agoI am very surprised no one factored - starting own company can be much more realistic to achieve than landing $400k/year gig at FAANG - it is not like one walks into a lobby and gets a job. Keep in mind stories of people telling how they were passed on by some big name corp just to go on to build something big.
- throwaway23453 2y agoIt's not clear to me if the $920k is including his salary. If he paid himself a good salary, the numbers will look different.
- nakovet 2y agoIf you are maximizing income, go work for the company that pays you the most. If you consider other things then it's not that simple: * control on which project you work on * choose your cooworkers * choose your office location * return to office policies * choose process and bureaucracies It's about how many degrees of freedom you want.
- fuzzythinker 2y agoMoney wise, FAANGs are more like 2x of $920k with comps. If the output is guaranteed, and stress is kept at 2x FAANG, it's like trading stress and the thrill and difference in experience for money. I would choose this.
- vdvsvwvwvwvwv 2y agoMeh. He could have made 10M or 0. Google founders themselves could have got a nice job at IBM. Op is free as in bird too.
- fsckboy 2y ago>so this gives an average yearly salary of 230k. Very close to FAANG senior salary with much more risk this is just bad analysis, and as part of that you don't understand risk. Financial risk is the variance of the expected outcomes, it is not a component of the expected value. The risk that you will fall short is always balanced by the risk that you will strike it rich; otherwise, you have calculated your expected value wrong. Expected value does not include variance, it's the missing factor. your faang salary is your upper bound on income, is the cost you bear eliminating the risk; the risk the entrepreneur takes is rewarded by the option on vast riches. You are looking backward as if you could have guessed a priori what would happen. If you could guess looking-backward-in-advance that you'd wind up with a faang salary running your own gig, definitely worth "the risk".
- navane 2y agoI don't understand this. Afaik the parent argues that the 230k/yr is a lucky outcome of starting a business, far more people end up with less or nothing. And this "winning" situation of gaining 230k/yr is barely in range of a "sure" outcome of being employed at Google. Concluding that if even a successful entrepreneur is set to gain less then an employee at faang, entrepreneurship is not a sound decision for fang employees. How is risk portrayed wrong here?
- fsckboy 2y ago>How is risk portrayed wrong here? because he portrayed risk as "the risk of losing money", but that is not a proper definition of risk. it's easier to understand the concept with the stock market because there is a market price (there is not a market price for startups). If a stock in the market has a price, what does it mean to say that it's a risky stock? that it might drop? No, not if you say that to the exclusion of the risk that it might also go up. If a company has a price in the market, and you are an omniscient who can definitively say that there are a bunch unaccounted for factors that increase the probability that that stock will go down, what you would conclude (because you are an omniscient who also understands risk) is that the price of the stock is wrong, not that the riskiness has been mis-assessed. This is an important area of finance, it's the basis, or rather the inescapable conclusion, of option pricing, the famous Black-Scholes model. It turns out the option price calculation does not contain any of the probabilities of what might happen to the stock/company in the future, the option price is only based on the variance of the outcomes. How can that be? Turns out the probabilities (the expected value) have already been accounted for in the market price of the underlying security. If a market is fairly pricing stocks, riskyness means degree of variation in outcomes. There is a probability in variance, the probability "that you will wind up away from the mean". the FAANG salary is the mean, with no risk, meaning you aren't going to fall below or go above. He called out the other option as "risky" and somehow decided that the outcome this founder experienced was the upper limit, had no chance of being higher. He had no basis to think that, and his analysis is basically Monday night quarterbacking. "Since you didn't make the field goal, you shouldn't have tried, should have tried for a touchdown instead", ignoring that on average it's easier to get a field goal.
- foobiekr 2y agoDepending on how he managed things, possibly tax advantaged; especially if he could take advantage of the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) tax exemption - 100% capital gains with no taxes.