I am rich and have no idea what to do • Hacker News Board

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#791

Post by ryukoposting » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

iancmceachern wrote: post #672

I can't imagine a world where I wouldn't know what to do. There is diarrhea on my building, trash in the street, people needing medical help in the alley, and potholes in the street. Just walk out your front door and start doing things. My recent triumph was getting a building owner on my street to finally repair the hole in front of their building. Imagine what I could do with a backhoe. Start small, think big. Help…

Ah, but you don't understand! Those are NPC activities! You must join DOGE to have in impact!

I hope I'm never such a loser that I actually believe what I just wrote.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#792

Post by rhubarbtree » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

My instinctive reply is - go back to work and fix Loom because it sucks. OTOH, it's super impressive that they managed to make such a success from a pretty bad realisation of a reasonable product idea. The founders clearly did a great job in terms of marketing/sales and selling the company. That is no mean feat.

My next suggestion would be to go give some of the money away to individuals who need it. There are many many homeless people in the US if you need somewhere to start.

Beyond that, where are your friends and family? Might need to address that. Therapy will help. The NPC comment is disturbing, no well-adjusted person would write that.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#793

Post by purplethinking » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #143

cj wrote: post #73

I don’t think his problem is money. I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared. Now he needs to develop a new identity. This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things). Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identit…

William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.

I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#794

Post by thepuppet33r » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now.

It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback.

Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDrive. There are other screenshare programs that do the same thing.

The whole incentive for using it (according to the video) is to "avoid another all hands meeting." And AI is involved somehow?

I find it so fascinating how companies seem to be aware that the way many big companies work (usually in office, in meetings, sometimes on video calls) is flawed, but rather than revisit the model, we just try to map the existing structure onto new expensive shiny tools.

The only benefit I see to having someone send me a video of them reading their presentation or narrating their screen share is that I can watch it on 2x speed asynchronously. At that point, why not just send me a set of bullet points and the presentation or screenshots?

I look at these products and I get the same feeling I do when I watch a road worker paint a tiny bike lane on an existing 4 lane megaroad with no barrier. You're not fixing the problem - you're just causing new ones. The whole system has to shift somehow.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#795

Post by moralestapia » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

thepuppet33r wrote: post #794

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now. It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback. Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDriv…

[flagged]

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#796

Post by purplethinking » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #423

akamaka wrote: post #145

> I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.

I don't fault this guy for wanting to join DOGE and make a difference. The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust. I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the in…

You mean, what will happen when we get to Episode 5: The Deep State Strikes Back?

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#797

Post by RGamma » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

thepuppet33r wrote: post #794

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now. It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback. Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDriv…

Sounds like a proverbial multibillion dollar todo list SaaS.

Kinda wish big money would have left the CS-related space right about ~10 years ago, when things weren't quite as nonsensical (and culturally decrepit), so all the serial careerists would have chased something more viscerally useful, like maybe bracing us for the impacts of global warming.

Rational markets and all.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#798

Post by purple_ferret » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

thepuppet33r wrote: post #794

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now. It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback. Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDriv…

Loom is not for teams who use Microsoft 365.

It's for teams that exclusively use Slack, Notion, Miro, Vercel, Mux etc

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#799

Post by 4gotunameagain » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

thepuppet33r wrote: post #794

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now. It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback. Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDriv…

The shift would take a massive culture shift.

Everything and everyone seem to only be concerned about money. In music, in art, in popular culture, in the contemporary "thought leaders"..

It was the inevitable but hard to predict outcome of capitalism, the utter dissolution of everything that cannot be converted to capital, and the monetisation of everything else that could.

The zeitgeist is a thin, inconsistent and ever changing set of ethics (which of course are also swayed wildly by capital) and everything else is about money.

All the previous values are not only waining, they are also mocked.

A lack of greed is considered a lack of ambition, piety is disregarded as antiquated and evil, honour and shame are non existent.

We are living through tremendous sociopolitical changes, the most substantial and the most high paced humanity has ever faced.

I just hope it goes the right way eventually, although it is almost certain that none of us will be here to witness it. The only thing we can do is surf the wave and do our best to make things better.

Re: I am rich and have no idea what to do

#800

Post by JoshTko » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

TLDR, I've let how I think and what I value to be entirely determined by capitalism. I then (essentially) won capitalism. Hence I don't know what to do since capitalism has no meaning beyond achieving extreme relative wealth accumulation.