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Living the Good Life, Leaving Google Behind
inetsee writes with an article in the San Francisco Chronicle profiling seven early Googlers who have left the company, part of a cohort the article claims amounts to 100 out of the first 300 workers hired by Google. For these former employees, all the acclaimed perks of life at the Googleplex can't compete with calling the shots in their own lives. Google's chef is opening his own restaurant, Olana Khan has started a non-profit that makes micro-loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, and Aydin Senkut has become an angel investor. Others are simply enjoying retirement, making things in the garage shop or skydiving in South Africa.
I hope you are being sarcastic. If you aren't, you obviously have no understanding of the financial markets. In that case, I have a friend in Nigeria that I'd like for you to meet.
If you made multi-million dollars in a start up tech company would you:
1. Leave to pursue your interests.
2. Continue to work at the company until retiremennt.
3. Burn the money in a huge trash barrel and join a Buddist monestary.
4. Hire private detectives to stalk CowboyNeal?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
How does Google stay in business by offering so much of their stuff for free?
They are in the business of selling eyeballs, not search results or email services or... The latter are simply the costs of acquiring eyeballs.
Valid responses are along the lines of "oh noes!! Google is dying, eleventyone!!! They are so kewl!!!" or "Har har! Serve them right for being evil! What goes around comes around."
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Leave Google behind? I don't think so. Google will always find you. Google knows everything. Does this make Google God. Maybe the ancients screwed up the spelling?
At the peak of the dotcom boom, I was a millionaire. (at least on paper).
Yet I was a backline support technician, making a base salary of about $65k/yr.
Due to mistakes in judgment, bad investments (I invested in a construction company, and the guy ran it into the ground), and tax laws, I am no longer a millionaire (though I am in a nice house right now).
Let me tell you this: being a millionaire is nothing. You can lose it all overnight. And even when you have it, there's a great temptation to spend it, at least some of it - to "reward" yourself. (otherwise it's just numbers in a bank account somewhere). In any case - if you're a millionaire, just that alone doesn't make you "set for life". Your best assets are your marketable job skills, and your brain, and your connections.
I'd say that when you get up around TEN million in assets, then you can shield yourself from bad decisions or risky investments, and you can maybe quit your day-job, live off the revenue-producing investments.
One is not truly financially independent until one has probably fifty million dollars in assets.
I say again. A million dollars is NOTHING.
Most "middle-class" Americans think they're rich because they have a Ford Explorer and a DVD player, and a 45" plasma screen tv. They have no idea how poor they are.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.