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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#651

Post by kudokatz »

vundercind wrote: post #299
toast0 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Never work again” money is crazy-high for younger folks (like, not already close to qualifying for Medicare) in the US, on account of the costs and financial risks of our healthcare system. Exchange plans are fine enough, and like, they're not that cheap, but they're also not that expensive either. Depending on how much you make from investments on your never have to work again horde, you may be able to qualify fo…

> maybe you can just say if you've got enough to pull $100,000/year, you're good on healthcare too. 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 can…

> You also can’t withdraw at as high a “safe rate” as people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do

Solvable, including consideration of valuations via CAPE PE 10. Based on past data, the safe withdrawal rate (SWR) happens to be around 3.25-3.5% of assets to extend to a 60-year time horizon [1]

> 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.

For most of this research, "failure" constitutes running out of money. Preserving the initial portfolio value in inflation-adjusted terms can also be solved for. It takes the SWR closer to 2.8-3% for 60-year horizon with high equity valuation corrections.

> 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.

Better to cap expenses and be ready to pay for it than live in fear. Save, invest, and move on with life.

> $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.

Depends on how much money you need to spend every year to be happy. Sounds like you need a lot of it. For many, $2m would be fine, even with a very long time horizon. And if any problems crop up, there would be a 15-20 year warning during which a small income boost could top things up.

----

Things don't always have to be so gloomy.

[1] https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/09/13/the-ultimate-guide...

Re: How to Start Google

#652

Post by kudokatz »

rgmerk wrote: post #567
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threshold for wealthy enough to "never work again" is actually very high if you have a mortgage and a couple kids you want to put through school, and are thinking about living past 75. Even here in Canada where healthcare is not really a cost, retirement and nursing homes constitute a huge expense that could go on for years in your last phase. I'm sitting on the accumulated wealth of 25 rather up-and-downish years in…

Hmmm. I don't know exactly what your personal financial circumstances are...but from what I understand salaries and benefits to be at Google, you're getting paid plenty, and it should be possible to save at least some of that. Do it for ten years, put it in a nice boring low-cost index fund, and watch the investment returns roll in, and you're looking at a pretty big nest egg by normal people standards.

expected time to retirement is MUCH, MUCH higher at FAANG if you can save 50%+ of take-home pay after taxes.

Re: How to Start Google

#653

Post by kudokatz »

ojbyrne wrote: post #534
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior engineer (E5) is enough to get you $2-5M over 10 years. That's terminal cog level.

According to levels.fyi, E5 at Google gets you $385k TC annually. If you save a third of that (which is not easy) for 10 years you get to approximately $1.3 million. Maybe your investments get you above $2 million, but it would really depend on what decade that was. If you had the Great Recession in the middle of that, not so great. If you think it is easy to save more than a third of your income, remember you’ll hav…

> If you save a third of that (which is not easy)

This is very easy, actually. You just happen to like fancy things and houses, probably.

> Now if you’re dual cogs with no kids, maybe. If you do have kids, you’re not retiring until long after ten years.

I find it depressing that so many people use kids as an excuse to avoid facing their own problems with money and spending. Look deeper and you can find happiness with a lot less.

Re: How to Start Google

#654

Post by eggdaft »

rwalling wrote: post #630
eggdaft wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage. For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you. Lifestyle businesses are probably less depen…

Here are a couple links if you want to get started with my work, all focused on bootstrapping profitable SaaS companies: [Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping] https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-b... [Podcast] https://startupsfortherestofus.com [Book] https://saasplaybook.com [YouTube] https://microconf.com/youtube

Classic Hacker News moment. Thanks Rob, love everything you do! Your recent SaaS Playbook is awesome.

Re: How to Start Google

#655

Post by jdthedisciple »

berkes wrote: post #595
jdthedisciple wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your poetic metaphor of sons as bright stars ...

English isn't my native tongue. Sometimes stupid mistakes slip through. Apparently this one sounds like a metaphor. It was just a mistake, though.

Ofc, was just a light-hearted comment :-)

Re: How to Start Google

#656

Post by cmrdporcupine »

neilv wrote: post #642
applied_heat wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall once google came on the scene I ditched altavista and never looked back. I was a teen but my recollection was that Google included the relevant paragraph of text from the page shown in in the search results whereas altavista showed one line that was often indecipherable gobbledygook - perhaps the page title matched a keyword - and it made it so much easier to scroll through ten results and identify the one t…

I switched to using Google as soon as I saw it in the late '90s, because of much more relevant hits ranked at/near top. Maybe AltaVista improved after that, which could explain how the parent commenter could go back to it.

There was a brief window where AltaVista improved and I went back to it after being Google since 98. Probably only for a few months. I often preferred the query hints you could give it to get very specific output. No matter, they went out of business.

The turning point that brought me fulltime to Google from then on (until recently switching to Kagi) was when they started having almost live results. It's hard to remember or imagine but search indices were often days, weeks out of sync for critical things like news, etc and Google was really the first to fix that.

Re: How to Start Google

#657

Post by ojbyrne »

kudokatz wrote: post #653
ojbyrne wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to levels.fyi, E5 at Google gets you $385k TC annually. If you save a third of that (which is not easy) for 10 years you get to approximately $1.3 million. Maybe your investments get you above $2 million, but it would really depend on what decade that was. If you had the Great Recession in the middle of that, not so great. If you think it is easy to save more than a third of your income, remember you’ll hav…

> If you save a third of that (which is not easy) This is very easy, actually. You just happen to like fancy things and houses, probably. > Now if you’re dual cogs with no kids, maybe. If you do have kids, you’re not retiring until long after ten years. I find it depressing that so many people use kids as an excuse to avoid facing their own problems with money and spending. Look deeper and you can find happiness with…

This is just a thinly veiled ad hominem.

Re: How to Start Google

#658

Post by ojbyrne »

kudokatz wrote: post #653
ojbyrne wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to levels.fyi, E5 at Google gets you $385k TC annually. If you save a third of that (which is not easy) for 10 years you get to approximately $1.3 million. Maybe your investments get you above $2 million, but it would really depend on what decade that was. If you had the Great Recession in the middle of that, not so great. If you think it is easy to save more than a third of your income, remember you’ll hav…

> If you save a third of that (which is not easy) This is very easy, actually. You just happen to like fancy things and houses, probably. > Now if you’re dual cogs with no kids, maybe. If you do have kids, you’re not retiring until long after ten years. I find it depressing that so many people use kids as an excuse to avoid facing their own problems with money and spending. Look deeper and you can find happiness with…

Actually I just looked at my last year at a FAANG in California. I earned about $370 K (including 401K match). $135 K went to taxes (Federal, Social Security, Medicare, State).

If I save absolutely everything left ($235 K) for 10 years that gets me to 2.35 million.

The parent post mentioned saving $2-5 million. To get to $ 2 M I have to live off $35 K a year (I realize I'm ignoring investment activities).

EDIT: additionally to minimize taxation you’re probably doing some of that savings in a 401k. Let’s say $25k * 10 year (I was). But that actually creates a deferred tax obligation. Let’s say the tax rate you pay that at is 20% (very optimistic but by the time you pay it you’ll likely be used to living below the poverty line). That takes you down to $30k a year. Actually even worse the employer match is taxable when you withdraw it, so another deferred tax obligation means that to get to $2M (accounting for future tax obligations) in 10 years you need to live on $25K a year.

That seems challenging in Northern California. Also why would I want to do that? - living at that spending level is likely to affect my long-term health and happiness, so the motivation is not clear to me.

Re: How to Start Google

#659

Post by KETpXDDzR »

PG forgot two very helpful requirements:

* Have a rich family to get you into an elite university and to give you the financial independence to start a startup

* Be lucky. Only ~1% of all startups succeed.

Re: How to Start Google

#660

Post by dragonwriter »

llm_trw wrote: post #483
codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

>Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor. Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside. Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now. No…

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

There’s lots of reasons a Google is impossible to start today (the main one being “Google exists, whatever the next explosive startup-to-giant is [0], it will look nothing like Google, and such things aren’t cookie-cutter, each is sui generis), but the explanation you offer above is… unconvincing as a bare conclusion, but maybe could be fleshed out with more description and support.

> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.

The two halves of this sentence are in tension, and the first seems more reasonable than the second.

> Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

You don’t have to use a flavor-of-the-week JS framework in place of cgi-bin scripts. (And, in some ways, the lowest-friction backend options are lower friction to get up and running than cgi-bin scripts on a server you set up, because you’ve got things like “serverless” FaaS hosts.)

[0] OpenAI?

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