Comment by KronisLV

Comment by KronisLV 3 days ago

> Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress.

Some people would succeed eventually, others wouldn’t. I think it’s really hard to effectively gauge what the chances are cause you’ll see a lot of survivorship bias and a bunch of grifters with courses and blogs and stuff that try to pass it off as a reproducible skill.

I wonder what dataset would show real world outcomes well, especially since failed startups won’t be catalogued as well as people trying to enter the dining business and most of them going under.

raw_anon_1111 3 days ago

At 52, how large would my success have to be to make up for all of the years and compounding I could have made just working at a 9-5?

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KronisLV 3 days ago

Depends on the 9-5 and the country you work in.
If you'd work for decades in the Baltics, let's not even assume just software development, in absolute terms you wouldn't make that much: the median salary is below 2k EUR per month, the taxes also make a dent, as do the expenses.
You can look at the mean disposable income figures for Latvia here, for example: https://data.stat.gov.lv/pxweb/en/OSP_PUB/START__POP__MI__MI...
Effectively, the savings rate for most of the households is pretty bad: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/23.11.2023-latvia...
So with living relatively frugally and having 1000 EUR of disposable income per month, and a similarly optimistic savings rate of 5%, each month you'd be able to put away about 50 EUR, or 600 EUR per year. You can calculate how that might compound with investments but you're putting away 6k per decade.
Obviously it's better for software developers, but there might also be unexpected expenses along the way, and so on but the overall trajectory is clear - depending on the life circumstances, working a 9-5 will ensure you live pretty poorly and that might lead to higher risk tolerance for entrepreneurship (or crime, go figure).
As for those born (or living) in a prosperous country, good for you! The equation shifts there a whole bunch, as well as depending on class or other opportunities.

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