Ask HN: What to do after selling startup?

I have no particular intentions of exit-via-selling. Rather, I'm more of a mind to "hack capitalism": fit a job around what I want to do in life (find a nice young lady, spend more time with my family, feel the grass under my feet once in a while) rather than fitting life around mostly inflexible work obligations.

I like work, don't get me wrong. There's a certain dignity to it, and I'd go bonkers if I wasn't solving problems for somebody. I just don't feel the need to do the traditional 9 to 5 thing. Or the 8:30 to zomg o'clock thing, which is slightly more traditional for Japanese salarymen.

I got out of programming as a necessity and in to doing things for the love of it. Teaching, evangelizing, helping people out, mostly. For me, programming was/is a means to an end, not something I enjoyed doing.. but helping other people to learn and enjoy programming is something I enjoy. (As an aside, I can now sympathize with those professors who teach subjects without having any commercial experience of them. It helps, but I don't think it's a prerequisite to being a good educator.)

proving that P != NP

Interesting viewpoint. The one I've heard is: if you DON'T have an exit strategy, it's just a hobby.

That came across my Twitter stream yesterday, seems it's from Mark Cuban after Googling:

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/09/my-rules-for-startups/

To me personally, thinking too much about exit strategies in an early phase startup seems like premature optimization. Thinking about what you're going to be doing after you sell a company that's just getting off the ground is bordering on mental autoerotica. It's like debating what you're going to do after you win a gold metal in the olympics when you've just started training. There's so much ground to cover between here and there that it'd be better to focus on making sure you qualify.