Were you born so rich that you can spend all day hanging out with your friends, without worrying about money? Most of us were not.

Many people here (myself included) claim that they are working really hard so that they can get enough money to be able to do whatever they want for the rest of their lives.

For me, at least, the idea of working really hard for a short period of time is way more appealing than some 9-5 job where I show up every day for the rest of my life, regardless of how hard (or not) that I am expected to work.

You aren't getting around the fact that you need money; until you solve the problem of food, housing and medical care for the rest of your life, earning money is going to be a problem that will take time away from finding whatever it is that makes you happy.

Even if working makes you happy, having enough money that you don't need to work gives you a huge amount of leverage and freedom that will allow you to turn down work that isn't conducive to your happiness.

pg, actually, has talked a whole lot about this, and about how maybe we should try to change things so that founders can take out more money early on because of this.

ref:

http://paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html

"My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash out partially in the Series A round. At the moment, when VCs invest in a startup, all the stock they get is newly issued and all the money goes to the company. They could buy some stock directly from the founders as well.

...

In fact, letting the founders sell a little stock early would generally be better for the company, because it would cause the founders' attitudes toward risk to be aligned with the VCs'. As things currently work, their attitudes toward risk tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter."

That's a false dichotomy. It's easy to have a job in technology that more than pays the bills but doesn't require the same sacrifices as working towards an exit or fame. You can be comfortable without being materialistic.

A goal to retire early doesn't address the "people" side of the "people vs. pleasure" idea. All the luck to you if you never want to work again, but the parent comment's points still stand.

> Even if working makes you happy, having enough money that you don't need to work gives you a huge amount of leverage and freedom that will allow you to turn down work that isn't conducive to your happiness.

Here it just seems like you're trying to scare people who have different values than you into having your values.

So for me it comes down to having the ability to spend lots of time with the people I love (which is always my first priority when forced to compromise), without having to sacrifice the fulfillment I get from my personal/intellectual/whatever pursuits.

I realize that this just means I "want it all," and people might reasonably think that's a harmful attitude to have. But it still seems quite different than "materialism," and I imagine that any negative personal consequences would be different, too.

My point is that if you are spending 40 hours a week working and 5 or 10 hours a week commuting, you don't have nearly as much time for your friends as you would have with a little more financial independence.

It should also be noted that the odds of startup success (to an extent where you literally never have to work again) is quite unlikely. You can spend time with your friends and family now - perhaps not all of your time, and not completely at your leisure and control, but if the alternative is sacrificing the people you care about for a tiny chance at spending all your time with them... I don't think that's a rational tradeoff.

Eh, I mostly agree, if you mean the typical "swing for the fences" kind of startup. But, I think there is awareness of this, for example, the PG essay I linked to a couple messages back mentioned that a 100% chance of a million bucks, to someone without money, is worth a heck of a lot more than a 20% chance at ten million bucks. (obviously, the latter is worth rather more to people who have enough money to amortize out the chances.)

The thing is, you don't need to do a swing for the fences kind of startup if you don't want to. Before this latest investment craze, HN was very big on bootstrapping. I've been running my own bootstrapped company for the last decade or so, and while I am right now attempting to recover from some very bad choices, and thus am doing poorly, for a while, it was pretty nice. I had a very flexible life. I have been able to hire nearly all of my siblings, at one point in time or another; as far as spending time with friends and family goes, my company has been quite successful. I was able to work as much as I wanted, or scale back to very little.

Being your own business, even if that business is, say, contracting, is one way to get a lot more flexibility out of your life. When my income was mostly selling my own labor, I'd sometimes work for other people one year on/one year off. (Timed so I worked 6 months out of each tax year)

Now, I mostly worked on my own stuff on the years off, but the strategy would work just as well if I wanted to work a tax-minimizing half-time schedule. As far as I can tell, it's way easier to get a good-paying part-time job as a contractor than as a full-time W2.

I have a reasonable amount of free time, but spend it on recovering from work (unfortunately, I need time off for that; so probably I'm an introvert), on time with my partner, on household activities, on learning. The actual time I have for friends is not that much. Admittedly, most of my friends seem to have even less time (mostly because they work longer hours), but others seem to have their life divided only between work and hangout time, so they're available pretty much always.

tl;dr if I had more free time, I'd have just enough time to hangout more with friends, as part of my free time is devoted to other things.

Nice time to play armchair psychoanalyst: some people who wish to retire early may be motivated by a desire to be friends with the (time and money) rich.

Lets think about that for a minute. Unless you're already filthy rich, getting enough money to not work requires a particular skillset. Lets say you're only moderately lucky and are exceedingly good, and that it takes you 5 years to get your fat stacks out of a company you put blood sweat and tears into. Disregarding that you statistically have a relatively small chance of that happening, you come out of the tunnel in 5 years, and what do you do with the rest of your life now? Well, all of your skillset is based around your business. You probably don't have a ton of things that give your fulfillment outside of that business. So what do you do, start at square one? Learn how to play the bongos or just go out and search for the real meaning of life? Or do what you've trained your whole life to do, what has given you the most meaning so far? I say you'll more likely become addicted to that feeling of mastery, and more than likely you'll be on the board of another startup or whatever you like, because you felt a lot more fulfilled when you were disrupting the world than being a person who's bad at playing bongos.

Spending time with family/starting one? Other hobbies besides bongos? Why are you being so dismissive towards music skills anyway? Developing OSS at your own pace? This is some kind of odd tunnel vision.

>because you felt a lot more fulfilled when you were disrupting the world than being a person who's bad at playing bongos.

Realistically very few of these startups "disrupt" anything. Are there that many people who can only be satisfied slaving away at startups?

What if that skill is only useful/usable in a 9-5 environment in a soul-less corporate environment? Do you recommend I continue to sit in that environment just to use it, since I have been using it for last 15 years and it would be a waste to throw that experience away? Let me be the judge of that, its my life after all.

I bet when we were not working, all of us enjoyed a bunch of things, right? Just because those things got sidelined in pursuit of this skill, which probably was acquired in pursuit of money, doesn't mean that when we finally have that money, we continue to sideline those things. We actually started working so that we had the luxury to enjoy those things, remember?

I truely enjoy working with computers and I probably will continue to do that even when I'm done working. But that'll be at my terms and those days when I feel like spending the morning reading the newspaper and sipping tea instead, I can do exactly that. Thats the point.

Edit: grammer

I used to be one of those people until I realized that if I had financial freedom I wouldn't know what I want to do with my life. I was a freelance developer for 7 years and never had to worry about money. I could work on average about 4 hours a day and spend the rest of my time on my own projects or whatever else struck my fancy. It was fun for a time - 7 years to be exact - but I eventually got lonely. I hadn't developed very many meaningful relationships with people I didn't know for 10 years already and I felt isolated. I would rail on the refresh button on various social media websites in search of some kind of human connection.

So I took a full time job and I based the company I chose to work for solely on the people I met there. It's been over 7 months and I've already built friendships with tons of new people and I feel more connected to the world than I have in years. I get to work on fairly interesting stuff without the stress of having to keep my pipeline filled and when I go home I don't take my work with me, which was a big problem I had when freelancing; keeping my work and personal lives separate.

That's why this article resonates with me, anyways. I made more money as a freelancer but past a certain point I didn't know what to spend it on and having the money didn't really make me happy. What makes me happy is building relationships with people and sharing in their struggles and triumphs. I really don't think I'll mind doing this for another couple decades.

The full time job simply put you in a situation where you got to interact with people without making any effort (except going to office which you would be doing anyway for any full time job).

Freelancing wasn't the reason for your earlier dissatisfaction and a full time job isn't the solution for anybody who is dissatisfied due to lack of human interaction.

But that's where you're wrong. I went to meetups regularly, participated in events like Rails Rumble, worked at co-location spaces, etc. I got plenty of human interaction but it simply wasn't the same as what I get now at my full time job. I liken it to home schooled kids. Sure, they can setup play dates and events with other home schooled kids or participate in out-of-school programs with public school kids, but they will never truly get the same level of social interaction public/private school kids get because they aren't going through exactly the same trials in exactly the same way.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the freedom I had when I was a freelancer and I will likely go back to that lifestyle some day but I would be lying if I didn't admit that there was a certain sense of disconnectedness I felt after all those years being on my own. I'm happy as a full time employee now and that's all that matters.

I think that having enough money that you can choose a job based on joy rather than monetary remuneration helps a lot with that. Having money also makes it a lot easier and less scary to leave jobs when the working environment turns bad.

Let us go in to this further. Yes, most of the technical people I know have pretty good working conditions.

However. Most of the technical people I know work for companies that either make weapons or sell advertising.

The vast majority of the available high-paying technical jobs actively contribute to making the world a worse place.

Now, I am not claiming to have clean hands either; I'm not trying to shame anyone else. I'm just saying that most of us would feel better if, you know, we could move away from killing people and/or making them spend money on garbage they don't need, and on to creating something that actually improves humanity.

The thing is, having a positive impact is difficult on it's own. When you've got rent to pay, the easy job solving interesting problems that ultimately make banzi buddy slightly more effective starts looking pretty good.

Clearly, that is the goal.

If you are claiming that having a safety net to fall back on doesn't put you in a better position to chose work you enjoy (or rather, avoid work you find unpleasant) - I don't think you are being honest.

If you can keep your expenses to $1,000 per week, and get your billable rate to $200 per hour, then you only need to work 5 hours a week to break even. If you work 80 hours a week for a year at this rate, that's $800,000 - which means you could then spend the next 800 weeks, or 15 years, doing whatever you wanted.

How you get to $200/hr is something of a question, but it has a much more direct path than being a founder, which you could spend 80 hours a week on and still be broke after 3, 5 or even 10 years.

Now, there are reasons to stick the cash under your mattress (or in an index fund) - that's not the choice I made, though; I chose to buy some means of production and manage those means of production myself. Not real-estate;servers. I had a few pretty good years; it really has yet to be seen if I'm a fool or not.

I do think it has been interesting; I've gotten to experience being a boss. I've hired family, I've hired friends. I've hired people who weren't friends, who became friends after they left. It has been an experience. It's really yet to be seen if this experience has been profitable or not. Estimating the value of a small company is difficult, and one could reasonably value my company at a level where I have done okay (not never work again okay, but at least buy a nicer condo okay) - you could also reasonably value the company at the 'buy a compact car' level. The only solid offers I've gotten were earn-outs that were heavily dependent on me sticking around for years, so it's unclear how much of that is the company and how much of that is, you know, me.

But yeah; the other option would have been to just contract half-time and spend the rest of that time hanging out in social situations. That would also have been a really interesting experience. Maybe it would have been better than what I did? I don't know.

Now, I'm not chasing investors or anything; That is a very different game. But it is a mistake to equate the hacker news crowd with funded startups. Yes, that's what everyone wants to be now - but that's only because of the amount of money available. Go back three years and it was all about bootstrapping.

The same could be said of start-up founders, which was the point.

But you can re-do the math at 40 hours a week if you like:

40 hours * 50 weeks * $200/hr = $400,000 / 52 weeks @ $1,000 per week = 7.69 years to do what you want.

And again, we're only talking about a year. Spend a year killing yourself, and then spend the next 5 on the beach or climbing Everest or writing a novel.

A lot can happen in a year not to just you but your family and friends that you could miss out on. Look forward to the future but don't rely on it because it might not come.

True, if you don't pay taxes.

Spreading out the income across tax years can make a fairly dramatic difference in the number of hours you need to work.

For a while I was trying to time my working for other people so I had one year on/one year off, and was attempting to time that I had 6 months of income to report in each tax year.

There are also more options to spread out income across tax years when you are consulting through a company that does business other than consulting (but it gets complex fast. You need a competent tax adviser if you go that route.)

I think that making money or fame have to be incidental goals to the things you care about.

* work really hard so you can cash out

* work really hard so you can build something really cool

Same method, different goals. SV attracts both types, though many people I know believe the balance has strongly shifted from the latter to the former. It certainly does seem like the discussion about post-exit has shifted from "How to found another, even better startup" (e.g. Elon Musk) to "How to retire at 23".

If your primary goal is happiness (both maximisation of, and minimisation of unhappiness), I would lay a fair bet that a start-up is one of the most unlikely to succeed, even in the long term.

For me, startups are all about having control and building something with my own two hands. Of course I want to achieve success in that, but I don't see that as an end. Getting the payout is about being able to fund whatever I want to do next (even if it's not a big money winner), and getting "famous" for me is just about meeting interesting people to work with and growing in my craft.

When I promised myself that I would never subject myself to corporate political cutthroat contentious BS ever again, this was what I was left with. It's definitely not monetarily optimal for me.