On Entrepreneurship
I know nothing about this, and that's exciting!
Yesterday, Friday 02/23/2024, was my last day of employment—just short of the 10-year mark since graduating college.
What’s next? I’m hoping to become unemployable via the terrifying-exciting path of entrepreneurship.
Why now? Some part of me wishes I’d started sooner, but another part realizes there really is a time and place for everything. If you’re curious, here’s my meandering path to this moment.
2014 - 2018: Firebase/Google in San Francisco
Graduated from college, moved to SF and found a coding job at a database startup. Very quickly and luckily, Firebase was acquired by Google, and I became a comfy FAANG engineer.
Despite that, life was honestly pretty crappy. I’d been a life long sufferer of an autoimmune inflammation disease, which got worse in my 20s. It’s a testament to just how cushy of a job Google circa mid-2010s was, for a cripple to hold a full-time engineering role and get promotions.
In 2017, I became one of the first public patients of a breakthrough therapy fast-tracked by FDA. Within a matter of months 99% of my symptoms disappeared. Modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous, and I owe my life to pharmaceutical research. I spent the next several years re-learning how to be a human again, simple things like exercise, eating normal foods, travel, etc.
At some point during this time, I encountered the FIRE movement, learned frugality, savings, investment, and decided my goal would be to race towards early retirement.
2018: Crypto Side Project
Towards the tail end of my Google employment, I got involved with a friend arbitraging cryptocurrencies across exchanges. This was still early days, so simple dumb strategies were extremely profitable, even for a total HFT novice like me. This worked for awhile and we made a nice chunk, but we parted ways over priority differences.
The most valuable takeaway was the feeling as an adult of being “wired” into a pursuit (I’d only experienced this as a child before). For months, I couldn’t think of anything but our trading program. Every morning I would wake up at 5AM, check our PNL, improve the algorithm for a few hours, go to work thinking about the algorithm, go home and code until 2AM, rinse/repeat every day, weekdays and weekends. Despite being terribly sleep deprived, this was the most fulfilled I’d ever felt.
2019: Aurora
I left Google in 2019 to join Aurora Innovations, a self driving car startup. This was a fairly naive decision process that went something like “What’s cool in tech? Self-driving cars are cool. Maybe I’ll be happy there.” I lasted about a year, realizing that cloud engineering for a self-driving car company isn’t much different than for an ad company.
2020 - 2024: Quant Fund in NYC
By 2020, I was getting tired of SF and I wanted to be closer to family on the east coast. I figured the best coders in NYC went to finance. So as Covid closed the world down, I snuck several last minute flights back/forth to NYC to interview with quant funds. Signed a good offer with one, and transitioned into a NYC life.
My career was in a good place, so I took this time period to get as much as I could out of NYC life. I started weightlifting and dieting much more seriously, dressing better, socializing better, etc.
2024+: The Exciting/Scary Future
It had always been in the back of my mind to do a startup, especially since my first employer was a small startup. But there was never enough motivation, and I always came up with reasonable sounding excuses: most fail, it’s not worth the sacrifice, other parts of life are more important, etc.
So what changed? I was feeling fairly stagnant in 2023—nothing was moving forward in my life (social life, travels, work, etc.). I’d also reached a point of serious diminishing returns on spending additional money (bought an expensive watch and realized how empty it was the minute I put it on). I knew the way out of this had to be something more internal.
I began searching, reading, listening, and looking for wisdom from others. Through a chance dinner conversation, I was recommended a podcast interviewing Pieter Levels, a solo-entrepreneur who just builds cool stuff (and is very financially successful from it). Watching that video was “the moment” for me. I had a “fever night” that evening, where I literally could not sleep out of excitement of the possibilities and regret for not realizing this about myself sooner.
I realized a few things:
I’ve been most happy in life when building stuff I was passionate and proud of—stuff I thought was “cool”.
If, rather than working for someone else, I double down on my own creations, there’s a chance and likelihood of greater financial success.
This won’t be that big of a risk for me, I have fairly good entrepreneur “starting stats”:
coding - I’m very technical and am well positioned to utilize the “permissionless leverage” of code.
perseverance - I have a history of taking on difficult years-long goals, and sticking with them despite not seeing progress.
capital - I’ve earned, saved, and invested a lot over the years, so I have a healthy runway to keep trying until something works. And I don’t have a family that will starve if I fail.
These are my advantages, my disadvantages would probably be lack of marketing/selling experience, and not too many connections. But overall I think I have a decent starting spot.
So with the above realizations made, it’s became basically illogical for me not to try starting my own thing.
All that said, here’s my current “flavor” of entrepreneurship:
Follow my curiosity, build something cool, build something that keeps me up at night with a smile on my face.
Bootstrap until something works. I have some small ideas, and some bigger ideas. Going to start with the smaller ones to get some experience with the whole “launching a business” whirlwind, before I tackle the bigger ideas which might require co-founders and funding.
And these are my keystone inspirations:
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - basically my new favorite book. I had actually started reading it before, and it left no impression. But I read it again this year and was consumed by it. My favorite lesson is that you should do things that you’re excited/curious about, do it in a leveraged way, and you’ll naturally achieve wealth as a side effect.
Paul Graham’s essays, specifically “How to Do Great Work” “How to Make Wealth”, and his book Hackers & Painters.
My First Million Podcast - Sam Parr and Shaan Puri are just awesome. Two hilarious tech dudes podcasting about money and business, and having a blast along the way. As mentioned before, I loved their episode on Pieter Levels, who’s a solopreneur digital nomad with multiple 7-figure bootstrapped startups.
Thanks for reading this somewhat rambling post. Looking forward to sharing all the mistakes and learnings from launching, finding product market fit, and scaling! Any thoughts? Comment below, or send me a DM at matthew@matthewtse.com.