891–900 of 1001 posts
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Bezos was born in 64, he's a year older than I am and Amazon was started in 1993. You can do the math for yourself.
Bezos once said in an interview that he was 38 when he started Amazon, after leaving DEShaw as a manager.
Focus on what you do best or what is less stressful for you to do in the area you work on. Make some new friends, share some stories and have a laugh about the worst parts of the job when you can.
A humble, but peaceful life is better than getting consumed by a vortex of false promises and lies.
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Unfortunately another component of the Nordic model that makes it work is that everybody trusts the government. This is what makes the Nordic model hard to translate to other settings in my opinion.
Rather, "trusting" a system which makes it so that you do not need to trust any government. Having many large political parties and a trend of (almost) always having minority governments also help limit possible damage.
This seems to be the toxic end result of “hustle porn”. The promise that you “Yes even you!” Can start the next unicorn, or even just bootstrap to ramen profitable & gain the attention of some VC money, maybe find a lucrative graceful exit if your runway runs out. It’s a subtle lie, because it directly or indirectly says “everyone could be…” when in reality it’s “anyone might be…” in the sense of “anyone might be the…
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Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives). Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifesty…
> and so o I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.
That is one key aspect. I'm not a workaholic and most other people aren't either. I do somewhat enjoy my work, but I work to pay for my live, not the other way around. I make a decent salary and work 35h/week with 36 days of vacation. I do pay a lot of taxes, but I live in a city with pretty good and affordable public transit, I got my university education for free (okay, I admit, I paid a total of 600€ for my bachelors), etc.
In a well governed country, you don't only pay taxes but also receive something in return.
> work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!
This isn't necessarily a result of high taxes, its also a result of Europe being much denser populated than the US (or Australia), limiting the supply side for construction land. The kind of the construction also plays a role, the average newly built European home is substantially more solidly constructed than the reference in the US.
> hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped
Have you ever considered that many people would much rather have more free time than more money? Beyond a certain level, increased income doesn't correlate with increased happiness/wellbeing. Where this level is certainly depends, but it is much lower than many people anticipate.
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1. Finland doesn't have oil, you're mistaking it for Norway. 2. Progressive taxation is the basis on which the best places to live were built. This is an empirical observation, make of that what you will, but it's strange to give your gut feelings of "basic economics / human nature" more weight than objective reality. 3. Why do is the word "rob" applied to taxation? Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce…
You should visit Tokyo. Japan spends very low on welfare.
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Indeed, this has been a topic of many discussions in the past and I do believe that connections and privilege form a more important factor in success than many would like to admit.
If this were true, wouldn't the other side of that statement be true? Since all startups seem to be privileged white males - shouldn't they all succeed and have funding?
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My all time favorite is Robert T. Kiyosaki's book "Poor dad, rich dad". Pretty much everything he teaches about financial success is fiction. In reality he worked a regular 9 to 5 job, failed at starting his own business, and finally made money by selling this book and providing seminars.
Just looked at his Twitter. Seems like he's gone off the deep end and is now grifting like Alex Jones. Posts about Fauci, woke liberals, FBI + KGB working in cahoots....pathetic, really.
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This is the right model. The vast majority of successful startups I've seen in my extended circle of friends didn't target other programmers or programmer-like consumers. Most startups try to build another database, web framework, or data service, or whatnot, because that's the problem programmers are familiar with. The next ones are consumer products, assuming consumers look like SFO. The competition is fierce, and…
I think one issue (for those of us who are the kind of people that read this site) is that "entrepreneurship" and "startup" are overloaded terms. Most of the discussion here is about "startups" with huge growth ambitions. But what you're describing here is just "starting a business". Both things are "entrepreneurship", but they are extremely different beasts, with different paths to and likelihoods of success. The bi…
- In some contexts, consulting is an easy way to get started building a product, to avoid needing much external investment. In others, it's a trap and a distraction which will prevent you from focusing on building a product.
- An initial product can stagnate into a lifestyle business / living dead (a business which pays the bills, but never grows beyond a few $M), or it can have a pathway into a larger market.
Technology (and not just software) is eating the world, and those pathways do exist. A lot of industries are being disrupted by technology plays. The connection is strategy. You want a good beachhead which has a nice growth path to a larger market, and ideally one no one is targeting.
There are risks from point A to point B to point C, of course, with strategy, execution, timing, luck, etc., and plenty companies cap out at much less, but plenty of them make it too.
What I'm a bit surprised at, thinking through this, is the number of times I've seen this sort of play work. I know at least a half-dozen companies in the >>$100M range where I know the CEO pretty well as a friend. All of those did take external investment at some point, but a few, much less than you'd expect.
We always only hear success stories. Its simply because no one writes or likes 'normal failure stories'. Once in a while we have such a beautiful story that goes viral, but for 99% of normal stories of 'it just failed' never see the light of the day. I believe I found my success (screen.studio), but first I had to give up on it to start having a healthy relationship with my career. Only then I was able to look at mys…