Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

Working on things you enjoy, making a positive impact on people's lives, and raising a new generation to carry on where you left off, that is success.

Stay focused there and you might accidentally accumulate so much wealth you have to work at putting it to use helping people like Bill does!

Let's not forget personal satisfaction. I'm a little leery of putting the entire assessment of my life onto other people (even though if I was going to, I could do a lot worse than number of people helped).

Hopefully helping other people leads to some amount of personal satisfaction for most people, and they'll have a fairly good life and good impact on others by the end. :)

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do wonder why those should be the only two metrics to consider. IMO, the range of metrics is nearly infinite and highly subjective.

Gumroad will be worth that in a few years at this rate, and he could cash million dollar paychecks along the way if he wanted.

That's why it's way to dangerous to just follow any guy and do a startup and waste a few years of your life.

Yep. For me it's "number of Mötley Crüe concerts attended" and "number of Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts attended".

(currently "4" and "4 or 5" respectively)

But of course those are highly correlated - it's easier to help a lot of people if you have plenty of surplus wealth and time to share out. I'd imagine that Warren Buffet will end up helping more people that almost anyone else in the past 100 years despite never really having a goal other than "make lots of money."

That's my best guess, yes.

> Meanwhile his investors lost all the millions they invested.

Well, some sold his equity back to him for $1, so yes.

> His employees lost all the time and vesting.

Well the employees could have exercised their grants when they were laid off, but I doubt they were inclined to double down on what was then a failing company.

> That's why it's way to dangerous to just follow any guy and do a startup and waste a few years of your life.

I mean, the employees got paid all along the way, and probably not that much less (if any) than they would have working for another company, and they got to work on something they loved.

Sad that it didn't work out. These things are risky, but having worked at startups and not gained anything from the equity I would do it again in a heartbeat.

But in addition to that, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the extremely wealthy are generally a positive force in society. Many give nothing or close to nothing back, and often work against the interests of others in so many ways (trying to decrease their own tax burden, hoarding wealth in assets, disproportionately damaging the environment, etc.)

Americans in particular worship the wealthy, but I really believe that it is utterly misguided.

And if, God forbid, they wanted to start their own company and waste a few more years of their life (your words, not mine!), well... Everything is easier when you’ve seen someone else do it.

With that said, optimizing for after you're dead might be selfish and reasonably desirable, but there's a lot to be said for optimizing for tomorrow instead. Life would be pretty pointless if none of us were supposed to optimize for some enjoyment while we're here.

But to address your question: people 'take the limit' and argue that life is just meaningless in every way all the time. If it were true, you shouldn't be bothered to make that effort in the first place. Obviously your actions matter to other people by the sheer virtue of the fact that you're optimizing for it. if you weren't, you wouldn't have bothered to ask the question.

Sometimes life is what you actually do, not merely what you think.

In both cases the founder made between 20-50 million.

By this logic, culture and society would die every generation, and have to be rebuilt from scratch each time.

We all leave behind a "small" but far-reaching legacy that ripples out from our short lifetime. Each of the thousands of interactions we have with with other people and our general environment have a tiny but real impact that doesn't necessarily diminish to zero after we die. The change that occurs then has a small domino effect on any other person or system that it touches. And so on and so forth :)

My life today is deeply affected by the concerted actions of billions of unknown individuals from centuries and millennia past in ways that I can't even begin to fathom. I'm grateful for some of those impacts. For other impacts less so, but I hope to contribute small changes for the benefit those who live in the untold distant future.

Founders own more of the company than employees, of course. The good news is anyone can start a company!

Nothing matters to you once your dead. Other peoples' assessment of your life is irrelevant to you.

I would rather live my life happy with my decisions (part of which is helping people because of my own morals) rather than helping a bunch of people in ways that make me miserable.

I'm also very happy that they've slowly been incorporating more old Savatage songs into their sets. :-)

You can be one of the people you help.

As far as Warren Buffet goes, I don't worship him - he got pretty lucky, was a little bit disciplined, and rode a wave of increasing value of American stocks for 40 years - but to say he has been a "premier monopolist" (hint: having high profit margins on the back of brand recognition like Coca-Cola and Apple have done is not what a monopoly is) or is a "parasite on economic growth," is only your own preconceived bias.

And as far as the behavior of the very wealthy in general, the things you describe are things that the middle class or the poor do as well. The vast majority of human beings are assholes, unfortunately. If you do happen to be a good person, though, I think the world is better off if you're wealthy than if you're poor. And if you set out to do the most good possible in the world, then choosing a career where you can make a lot of money, and then donating a large portion of it, is not a bad way to go. Doubly so if you can help people along the way, as many doctors or lawyers with pro bono hours do.

Even to pick a small part of it, 130,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project but a history of it that the average person would consume might name 10 key figures.

To use your example of the Manhattan project: only 10 people may be remembered in books, but they certainly would have never completed the project by themselves. The contributions of those other thousands of individuals was vital to the project's success. If they didn't exist, it's not a guarantee that you could have replaced all of them -- the project may have simply failed.

What you do in life, echoes in eternity.

I'm curious now: is there a story behind this ambiguity?