How to Start Google

I disagree. The AI stuff seems pretty nerdy. Same for GitHub and other levels of abstraction. The disruption talk is just the branding by the media.

Maybe a big part of the founders' skill is to actually hire the right management which in turn is capable of hiring the right employees. In which case, the credit goes to the founders after all.

Or maybe the quality of employees does not vary that much (after controlling for the the obvious factors like location / funding / business area). In which case, the company's success is explained by something else. Again, founders' skill? Or maybe something else?

I tend to think that it's a combination of founders' skill and being lucky to start the right business at the right time. I'd understand if others put greater weight on the founders or greater weight on luck.

Sure, they aren't all mega behemoth tech companies, but what of it? Setting your ambitions high when you're young is still worth it. It can be a major difference maker in motivating you to learn the skills necessary to build a successful business, and it turns out that those same skills are helpful for landing good jobs, too.

Most of the people I know who are doing well now dreamed relatively big when they were young. And many of the people I know who stress about making ends meet never had anyone telling them to aim high when they were young.

If you believe you can, you might try, and you might make it. If you believe you can't, it's madness to true, so you won't try, and you won't make it. These are basic building blocks of motivation and success.

Your pessimistic message could be applied to anything. Why try to build the next Google? It's impossible! Why try to build a smaller business? The odds are against you! Why try to get a high-paying job? Most people work average jobs! Why go for an average job? You're competing with the vast majority of the country! Why get a less-than-average job? It's so stressful and barely worth it.

Currently Michigan's idea of business development is to write big checks to folks who promise thousands of jobs.

Yet when the automobile industry got started in Michigan no one wrote them any government checks yet it became our largest industry. We can do much better and more startups is the answer.

You’ll be exposed to tens of thousands in risk per year on top of (low) tens of thousands in premiums per year for a family Exchange plan. You’ll be burning nearly half of that (and spending all your free time trying to keep hospitals and insurers taking even more) if one of you gets cancer—or, if it’s you who gets cancer, you better hope someone else can handle that.

You also can’t withdraw at as high a “safe rate” as people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do, because your fund needs to last a lot longer despite inflation and such. $2m isn’t “retire at 35” (… or 45) money. It might be “take a big gamble and maybe get lucky… for a while” money. Or semi-retire money.

[edit] at constant 2% inflation (ha!) you need a very safe source of consistent (not average!) 6% returns to retire with 80,000/yr income on $2m, without eating into principal. Anything goes wrong (“whoops, ‘safe’ wasn’t as safe as I thought!” or “whoops, we had a year of 7% inflation and my investments didn’t benefit from that!”) and you can find yourself burning principal while your account value is already down. It won’t take a lot of that before $80k is no longer your safe-withdrawal amount. A couple such years and you may be back to work. 30+ years is a long time…

[edit edit] also damn under $10k max out of pocket on a family plan at the bronze level for $17k? I gotta get out of my shithole state. That’s better than our Gold plans (also our plans tend not to cover like 2/3 of area providers, which may include 100% of area specialists for certain situations)