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Build Personal Moats

eriktorenberg.substack.com

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Re: Build Personal Moats

#71

Post by dzink »

neogodless wrote: post #56
dzink wrote: post #37

For the sake of good discussion about moats from different angles: The moats in the article seem to be for a public personal brand tied to a niche skill that could make you a go-to expert for a while (a tool for others to use). That may work if you want to be the next Jason, Tim Ferris, Naval, etc to attract people, jobs, deal-flow, or funding, but what if you don’t want to give up your privacy or be subject to const…

Just for my sanity, I assume "prompted" is a typo for "promoted"?

Yes, sorry, it should be “promoted”. I wish HN used content editable instead of an input field. Would make posts a little easier to review and edit on mobile.

Re: Build Personal Moats

#72

Post by mettamage »

WJW wrote: post #44
mettamage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get financial freedom How? In The Netherlands, I don't know how to do this other than working in the HFT industry.

I know you just want to bitch about the vermogensbelasting, but: - Go work in the HFT industry. :P - A good freelance dev can pull in about 80-100 euro/hour which leads to a monthly pretax income of >10k euro. This is almost four times the median monthly household income. Even if you maintain a level of spending double that of the median, you can still save 50% of your income. - Even a "normal" senior dev in the Amst…

> I know you just want to bitch about the vermogensbelasting

It's not only that, and I never need to pull out that argument as there are simply much better countries than The Netherlands for FIRE [2], most notably Switzerland. In Switzerland you make more [1]. Moreover, compared to Switzerland, the Dutch simply have worse purchasing power [2].

[1a] https://www.payscale.com/research/CH/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

[1b] https://ch.talent.com/en/tax-calculator?salary=95335&from=ye...

[1c] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Zurich

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...

Re: Build Personal Moats

#74

Post by jv105 »

dcl wrote: post #38
mettamage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get financial freedom How? In The Netherlands, I don't know how to do this other than working in the HFT industry.

How big is the HFT industry in the Netherlands? Is this just something you can chose to do?

Ex Optiverian here.

Amsterdam is one of the major HFT hubs. You can find more HFT opportunities in Chicago, New York, London, but after those, Amsterdam comes next (together with Sydney, Singapore).

Optiver, IMC, and Flow Traders are bigger players. There's also Webb Traders and DaVinci Derivatives, and smaller offices of other players, e.g. Jump Trading, Mako, and there's always a rumor that DRW is planning to open an office in Amsterdam, etc. etc.. There are also some non-HFT shops but I'm not very knowledgeable about them.

Speaking for software engineering (not quant or trader positions): They're quite selective but if you have a decent resume, you can get an interview and it's not extremely hard to get in. Although, you need to have strong interest in trading, and good CS fundamentals, and ability to think quickly on your feet.

Re: Build Personal Moats

#75

Post by a-nikolaev »

darkerside wrote: post #59
atoav wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely take life a little easier than most of my colleagues. The more they doubt their own skill the more they revert to scheming and try to make themselves irreplaceable — they do things purely because they think these things will fly, never because it is just the thing they'd like to do. I always wondered if — maybe — it is me that is too playful, too improvised, too spontaneous: what if they are right and I…

This mindset is also the product of a privileged life. With some exceptions, you need an abundance mentality to be able to operate without dear of losing your daily source of income.

Not at all, I think, these two traits are orthogonal.

I share this mindset without making much money at all (I'm a graduate student and an adjunct lecturer at a college). If you don't focus on your personal gain, but instead do something for the people around you, sharing your knowledge and skill, you also become valued and in some sense irreplaceable, without being protective about keeping your advantage. (Your moat is that you don't have a moat.)

Re: Build Personal Moats

#78

Post by heipei »

Personally I feel like my personal moat over my friends and peers is a unique combination of my skills (hard and soft), combined with my experience and outlook on life. Even if someone desperately wanted to become "me" (god, I hope not) and even if I gave them an exact blueprint, it's not something that could easily be replicated. So, I'm a little doubtful of generic tips like these. My generic piece of advice: Collect a lot of different experiences, talk to a lot of people, try and fail at different things, and be honest with yourself, your strong-suits and your limitations.

Re: Build Personal Moats

#79

Post by peteypao »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #28
taneq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your specialization continues to be valuable, it's still something that can easily and insidiously turn from a moat to a pidgeon-hole to a set of golden handcuffs. I think the distinction comes in how portable your specialization is, ie. "I'm really good at rapid prototyping" vs. your example of "I know everything there is to know about FAX". If anything, I'd be cautious of building a personal moat based on k…

unless the thing you know everything about - like say FAX - is something that keeps expanding all the time, then once you know everything about it you should be able to structure your time to learn a fallback you can switch to if the necessity arises, which is basically what I did when my specialty was no longer in great demand.

I'm curious... tell me more about this. What specialty did you have? What did you switch to?

Re: Build Personal Moats

#80

Post by Sophistifunk »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #3

Blah blah blah, of course, it would be amazing if everyone could build personal moats, but guess what, very few people can. There's one Elad Gil. One Tim Ferriss. If 10,000 people try, perhaps one of them could roughly replicate Tim's success. Personal moats are great. And incredibly tough to build. I prefer advice that is actionable, and can bring results for most people following that advice. This one is not advice…

I think the concept might be OK, but the examples are mostly survivorship bias. Shame without said examples the article's very lightweight.
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