luckystartup

It's fun to think about. I think it would be hard to make the most of the money and have a great lifestyle while keeping a low profile and not getting caught.

It costs a lot less than $10M if you want to move to Thailand and live off-grid in some remote area. You can probably do that for a lot less than $100,000, including a Thailand Elite Visa. If that's part of your plan, then just hold onto the money and earn interest, or maybe give it back and hope for a reward. Or just save up the money normally, it's not that much.

I wonder if it's still possible to change your identity in a developed country. Maybe you could move to a new country and start using a fake passport to establish your new identity over time. But I think that stopped being possible sometime in the 90s or early 2000s.

I found it stressful enough just to move to a new country and get a visa legally. I can't imagine also worrying about getting extradited and sent to prison at any moment. Sounds like a terrible life. I wouldn't keep the money.

EDIT: Just reading some of the other replies, and wow, there are some genius criminals in here. Maybe I would take the money!

SharesPost might be able to offer a similar loan [1]. Also have a look at Equidate and EquityZen.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180117005389/en/Sha...

Yes, right now I'm feeling trapped by "option paralysis", and I'm actually looking for some help to untangle a very complicated situation [1]. I'm very fortunate to be a professional software developer with a growing company, and a lot of different opportunities. But I actually have too many choices, and too many different factors to consider. I'm not sure how to organize everything and make a decision.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19659912

Interesting, thanks very much! I will have a look at these blog posts.

I have a very similar story: Was on the first 10 employees at a now unicorn, forward exercised with a few thousand dollars, and my shares are also now worth around $1.5m. But unfortunately the company blocked all attempts at selling any shares on secondary markets.

Something you might not be aware of: If you joined the company before they had $50M in assets, your stock would also qualify as QSBS [1], which means you don't have to pay any tax on gains of up to $10 million.

[1] https://www.andersentax.com/services/for-private-clients/bus...

Thanks, that was a great video!

I actually think the 0.5% was very fair, or even generous. I didn't have much startup experience before that, and it was my first "real" job. They were also taking a big gamble with the relocation and immigration lawyer fees.

The other thing is that more equity probably wouldn't have motivated me to stay longer, unless I was a cofounder. I really didn't enjoy working for the company. I felt like I didn't really have any impact on anything, the company didn't really need me, and I just didn't like the company culture very much. So I tried to estimate how many shares I would need to hit my early retirement target ($3M), and I left after I had vested enough shares.

I knew that the company would be very successful, and I left a huge amount of money on the table, but I have zero regrets. I've been much happier since I left, and it's been much more fun to work on my own startups.

I was one of the first 5 employees at a YC unicorn. They haven't had an IPO yet, but it's getting closer. My original offer was for 0.5% of the company, but I didn't vest all of my shares before leaving. The shares are currently worth about $1.5M, and I'm hoping that they will be worth about $3-5M after the IPO and lockup period.

My salary was $120K and I relocated to SF from a different country, so I don't really feel like I took a pay cut. But the cost of living was extremely high, so the money didn't go as far as I thought it would. Especially because my spouse wasn't able to work on a dependent visa.

New Zealand would be great, but I heard that there are some separate rules for foreign shares. Or is that only for dividends? I need to learn more about that. I saw on this Quora answer [1] that I would need to pay tax on an assumed 5% dividend each year. So if I was holding $5M in shares, then I'd have to pay tax on an assumed dividend income of $250K. But I think there are also exceptions for startups that haven't gone public yet.

Are you available for a consultation?

[1] https://www.quora.com/Im-from-New-Zealand-but-I-own-a-lot-of...

I'm a non-US citizen who moved to San Francisco to work for a startup. I left that job (and the US) many years ago, but that startup is now a unicorn, and they're very close to an IPO.

I believe that if I become a tax resident in Hong Kong, Singapore, Belgium, etc. then I won't need to pay any capital gains tax when I sell my shares. I've heard that California will go after people who try to move to other states to avoid CGT, but I don't know if that applies to non-US citizens who have left the country. (Please let me know if you can recommend a good international tax expert.)

I've been living in many different countries since I left the US, so I don't have any strong ties to any specific countries (not even my home country). My shares could be worth about $5M after the IPO. If I wanted to sell most of them and buy VTSAX, then I might end up with a tax bill of $1.5M if I happened to live in a country with a 30% CGT (or if capital gains are treated the same as income.)

I don't think it's unethical for me to become a tax resident in some country with no capital gains tax. The alternative is paying a huge amount of money to some random country just because I happened to live there over 183 days.

I wouldn't mind moving back to California and paying the tax like everyone else, but it's impossible. There's no visa for people who do freelance work while building a bootstrapped startup. Even if I wanted to go back to a full-time job, it's extremely difficult to get an H-1B or O-1 visa. My startup would need to have at least $100k in ARR before I meet the salary requirements for an H-1B visa. I'd also need to take some investment so that my investors could be on the board and sponsor my H-1B application. My company is already making $50K ARR. I enjoy being independent and going at my own pace, so I don't really need any investors. (EDIT: I just learned about the E-2 and L-1A visas. I might look into those.)

If I was still living in California after the IPO, I might end up paying $1M+ in LTCG tax when I sell my shares. I would be very happy to pay this if I could move back now, get a green card, and work on my own company. I guess California and the federal government would be making a bet based on the likelihood of an IPO, which is still nowhere near guaranteed. This is also an extremely rare situation which only applies to a handful of people. But it would be nice if I could get a green card if I promised to live in the US and pay these taxes.

The other option is to just live in Hong Kong for > 6 months, sell my shares, and pay $0 in capital gains tax. Then I can move to the US on an EB-5 visa, which only costs $500k.

Kaggle, which has about half a million data scientists on its platform, ...

Are there really that many data scientists? I thought it was a niche specialty. Is there enough work for that many people?

What do you mean by this?

Yes, definitely a good suggestion.

I already use Lastpass, which makes regenerating all my passwords a little easier.

Oh crap. I've entered my banking password into Transferwise quite a few times.

Welp, time to change all my passwords.

I wouldn't want to compete with this. It's a whole lot of schlep [1], and even if you match their features, you'd have to charge less than $19.99 per year. I don't think there's any more room for innovation or lower prices.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

This is amazing. How does one person build so many successful startups while everyone else struggles to just do one?

Maybe there was some momentum from his previous successes? If you're already a famous startup founder, then I guess it's easier to get users for your next startups. I've heard that this was the case for Slack, but I don't know how much truth there is in that.

Is it true that most of these bugs wouldn't be possible in Rust? I think Rust might have solved:

heap-buffer-overflows, stack overflow, use of uninitialized data, SIGSEGV, undefined shift, invalid enum value, memory leaks

I don't think Rust can protect you from infinite loops. And of course, actual logic bugs where the output is incorrect (including "assert failures").

Does this open up any investment or business opportunities?

I feel like the shipping and railroad industry is enormous and impenetrable, but there must be some smaller opportunities in here. Even if it's something sort of intangible, like "increasing transparency and fighting corruption". Because you know some percentage of this money went into the wrong pockets.

If you were just a programmer from a western country, how would you even begin to get started in developing markets? Not just this railway project, but Africa and Asia in general. I'm reading things like this [1]:

China, India and the rest of the developing world will eclipse the west in a dramatic shift in the balance of economic power over the next 50 years.

So I want to be where the growth is happening. How do I do that? Do I need millions of dollars before I can achieve anything? Should I learn Mandarin, Hindi, or Swahili? In the past, I would have had to visit some of these countries and talk to some local entrepreneurs. Now I can just do my own research, meet people online, and have Skype calls. There's really no need to travel in order to find opportunities.

EDIT: I just watched the "Empire of Dust" documentary... That's really eye-opening. I hate to think about how much all of those workers are being paid. Even the Chinese managers. I guess business is business, and they just pay as little as possible. It also seems like it is very difficult to get anything done.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2012...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M

This just makes me so glad that I don't have to spend my weekdays working with sharepoint, SOAP, excel, VBA, and internet explorer.

Wow. That's an enormous number of people. There are 54 countries with smaller populations.

Still, this is nothing to sneeze at. It looks like Amazon is now the 8th largest employer in the US [1]. Walmart is number 2, after the Federal government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_t...

Most server backends can easily scale horizontally, including Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and Elixir. The only requirement is that you don't keep any "state" in your server code. A novice programmer can make this mistake in any language, including Elixir.

Read about the "Twelve-Factor App": https://12factor.net/

The main bottleneck is usually your database, which can be tricky to scale. You set up things like read slaves and sharding.

Sure, why not? They might work with the FBI to store data for specific targets, and the NSA probably intercepts and copies a lot of data onto their own servers, but I see no reason why the company itself would lie about this. They probably do delete the data immediately for the vast majority of their users.

Yes, I think so.

I'm not sure about Twitter, Groupon, or Uber.

I've never heard of anyone keeping backups of these on their local laptops.

Hmm... That's an interesting idea!

You could do that on a separate (empty) branch. Maybe call it `__project`, and you could just have folders of markdown files. You could have two root folders for `issues/` and 'pull_requests/', and two subfolders in each for `./open/` and `./closed/`. And a simple command-line tool + web UI. You could just edit the file to add a comment.

It would be really nice to have a history and backup of all of your issues. I also like the fact that you could create or edit issues offline.

Then you could also set up a 2-way sync between your repo and GitLab / GitHub / Trello.

I've worked with a lot of tools. I've decided that I like things that are simple and don't cost much money to get started. For new projects I always start with Heroku, or Parse (on a free back4app plan now).

I love Ansible. Chef is alright. I've been using AWS OpsWorks recently, and it's not bad. Elastic beanstalk is ok, too.

I've spun up some Kubernetes clusters, and it's nice, although I have no need for it yet. I remember the database situation was difficult when I was trying it last year. Something about persistent storage being difficult, so you had to run Postgres on a separate server.

I still like Capistrano. You can automate it with any CI pipeline. For one client, I used the "elbas" [1] gem for autoscaling on AWS. It automatically created new AMIs after deployment. Not super elegant, but it worked fine.

I don't see much of a middle ground between Heroku and Kubernetes. Just start with the one free dyno. Maybe ramp it up to 3 or 4 with hirefire.io. Once you're spending a few hundred per month on Heroku, that's probably the time to spin up a small kubernetes cluster and deploy stuff in containers.

[1] https://github.com/lserman/capistrano-elbas

It's not hard to scale a Rails server, when compared to other frameworks and languages. It's exactly the same as scaling a server written in Java, Node.js, Python, or any other language. You just spin up more machines and put them behind a load balancer.

Yes, Ruby is slower than other programming languages, but this usually doesn't matter. If you are charging people to use your software, or even if you are serving ads, you will always be making money before you need a second server. Plus, Rails is super productive, so you'll be able to build your product much faster.

I'm not sure why GitHub used a patched Ruby version, but no, that's not necessary.

Having said all of that, I'm moving towards Elixir and Phoenix. Not just because of the performance, but also because I really like the language and framework.

Maybe it's because I'm familiar with almost all of the gems, but I don't see anything wrong with their Gemfile. It's a pretty complex project, and they really do have a ton of integrations and features that need those gems.

There's probably a few small libraries that they could have rewritten in a few files (never a few lines), but what's the point? The version is locked, and code can always be forked if they need to make changes (or contribute fixes).

I have at least 10 private repos on GitLab, and many public ones. Even so, this is no big deal to me. That's the beauty of git. Even if all of their backups fail, I can just do a push and everything is back up there.

I just hope my laptop doesn't die before they get it back online.

EDIT: Was fun to put this little command together. Run this from your code directory, and it will push all of your gitlab repos. I'm going to run it when GitLab is back online.

    find . -maxdepth 3 -type d -name '.git' -exec bash -c 'cd ${@%/.git} && git remote -v | grep -q gitlab.com && echo "Pushing $PWD..." && git push' -- {} \;

Probably not the best response for a CEO to be making on an online forum. This is not the message you should be sending to potential clients and employees.

I use Linux on my media PC. I actually switched to Windows for a little while, because it was preinstalled. I only switched to Linux because I wanted to SSH into the machine, run OpenVPN, duckdns updater, home automation scripts, etc. I was just more comfortable in Linux.

I run Plex Server, Plex Home Theater, Spotify desktop app (in the background), and EmulationStation. I've been very happy with it so far.

It would be nice if I could get Netflix integrated, but I just use my phone and a Chromecast for that.

I'm confused. That Mac Mini is still amazing. They didn't say anything about wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything. Maybe there are some problems with the harddrive, so just replace it with a new SSD. Check the RAM and see if any needs replacing. You need to do all of that before you go out and buy a new computer.

I'm using a Lenovo Q190 [1] that runs lubuntu. It's a little slow to start, but everything runs fine. I run Plex Server, Plex Home Theater, Spotify, and RetroPie.

I would gladly trade it for a 2010 Mac Mini. That's crazy. Just reinstall everything and run a scan on your disk and RAM.

[1] http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/lenovo/q-series/q190/#...