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There's a very big difference between what you can achieve as an entrepreneur with low net worth and an entrepreneur with a war chest of hundreds of millions of
by solatic 2mo ago
There's a very big difference between what you can achieve as an entrepreneur with low net worth and an entrepreneur with a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars.
When you start out with effectively nothing, you are forced to take a day job while you build something out on nights and weekends. The pressure is high to take early investment - and essentially work for your early investors, instead of working for yourself, just so that you can work on your baby full-time.
When you have a war chest, then many more capital-intensive opportunities are available to you. Want to build hardware (i.e. without crowdsourcing)? Factories? Pharmaceutical R&D? Training open-weight LLMs? Hell, you want to start an airline? Take your pick, and I'm barely scratching the surface.
It's hilarious to think that an $800 million exit would force you to never work again. That's crazy. It only forces you not to work on that company you exited from. The exit enables you to work on almost anything else you can think of. You put $25 million away in close-to-zero-risk investments to let you live off quite an insane amount of interest (even if you only get 2% interest, that's $500k/year) and then have $775 million to work with.
- mathgeek 2mo agoRetirement generally implying “not working” is the disconnect here. For example, a person in poverty who quits their salaried job at 62 and has to go work at Walmart to keep up would be retired for some folks, not for others. Same difference for someone independently wealthy at 25 who pursues new businesses.