Ask HN: Would you deploy/utilize/invest –$1M to maximize wealth

Scenario: - ~$1M in liquid assets - SWE, but burned out of working in big tech - no dependents or major financial obligations - not tied to a specific geographic area

In your opinion what would be the best way to deploy this amount of capital to grow wealth?

I'm not interested in safe, passive investments like 'index funds', I want something more active whether it requires part or full-time work and am also willing to accept higher risk.

If you want more effort and more risk, start with Ernest Chan's books:

https://epchan.com/

I would stick with the index funds myself.

IMO, if you’re burnt out I am not sure that’s the best time to take on a risky endeavor. Taking risks means dealing with a greater chance of failure, regardless of how calculated that risk may be. I don’t think one can reason about failure well if they’re emotionally and physically exhausted.

If your $1M isn’t a loan, like from a retirement account or similar, my suggestion is to park it in a high yield, low risk investment while you recuperate from burnout. If you put it in a savings account with a high interest rate, for example, you could even draw monthly compounded interest as income, precluding the need for a job, if you manage your expenses well.

In the meantime you can decide on your next venture. But I think your Ask HN is a little misguided, tbh. No one takes on a risky thing and sticks with it unless they have a reason to do it. What’s your reason, what do you care about?

If you ask what you’re passionate about, you’ll come up with a problem space to search for either an investment opportunity or startup idea. If you’re a solo founder, $1M is enough to sustain you while you tinker, pivot etc. Just don’t outlive your income.

If you’re looking to invest without doing anything yourself, go to any AI/ML or robotics conference and look for startups or founders you’d like to invest in. For example, I once met people from a company making neurotech devices for astronauts. There’s a lot out there, I suggest reading MIT Tech Review to get an idea.

This speaks to a software product. If all you want to do is make money then fuck all this and just hire a money manager to invest that payload for you.

1. Form a vision for a product. This should comprise a problem statement and a solution. It should also be something at least vaguely original in either the problem statement or the product's means to address a solution.

2. Form a product plan and start building it, just you. It needs to get so far as it can demonstrate the solution to the problem in the most crude of ways just to demonstrate your thoughts. You need to be able to explain what your product is in about about 7 words or less, but having a thing people can actually use seals the deal.

3. Iron out your implementation policy for future hires. The only purpose of software is automation, the elimination of labor. So, your implementation plan needs to be automated as possible to defeat and eliminate deviations you don't want. This can comprise custom types, custom lint rules, CI magic, and so forth.

Be great at test automation. Test automation that can execute end-to-end tests of all aspects (several hundred tests at least) of your product within 30 seconds is magic. Its your jinni in a bottle. Its the thing that requires a supremely level of disciple to get right and that effort does not scale, but once you do have it right you can scale absolutely everything else at very low risk/cost.

4. Move to a supremely low cost of living area of a supremely wealthy nation to which you are already familiar. Don't worry about who lives there, their political leanings, or whether the right kind of potential job candidates live there. Do worry that there exists the proper political climate to foster original business idea generation, such as proper tax policy and elimination of non-competes.

5. Hire a staff. When it comes to tech talent fuck all the good advise. At this point you should already know exactly what you want in product delivery and quality of output. Don't fuck with a tech stack, frameworks, and all that other superficial bullshit. You were given a million bucks so you have some runway to do this right. Instead develop a training plan and very crude training materials to hire people off the street who have the potential to see your product vision through.

Of course this assumes prior leadership experience, that you are vaguely gifted at written communication, you have empathy, and that you can read people. When it comes to software this list is, ummm... If you don't that then forget product quality, use a common tech stack, hire incompetent people with padded resumes, and just rush something to market. You problem won't succeed against existing incumbents, but you have all that money to burn. You could also just hire a CEO with prior experience being a CEO.

6. Be draconian about product quality and keep it stupid simple in scope. It should do only one thing until after you have customers and revenue. Simultaneously you, not anybody else, need to be doing sales. If you cannot sell it then just put that money in a money market account and have a nice life.

7. Add features to your product to up-sell it for new customers on the fence. Use feature creep to take market share over time. Keep in mind product quality, and prior established automation controls because product quality is the only thing that prevents feature creep from becoming the cancer death by tech debt.