Discussion

• @ramit Ramit Sethi on x

  Would you rather make money slowly or make it all at once? My entrepreneur friends and I noticed some differences: - People who make a lot of money all at once (e.g., sell their company) often still feel scarcity about money after the transaction. Hard to change their

• @matthewstoller Matt Stoller on x

  Basically an oligarchy sucks for everyone, even the superrich. It's a culture of fear and deference with no meaning.

• @anothercohen Alex Cohen on x

  This post is a nice reminder of why I don't miss living in SF. Loved the ambition, hated the culture

• @staysaasy @staysaasy on x

  When my wife was in business school, people would occasionally refer to someone else as “first-time cool” - meaning that they had been marginalized socially before (at prior jobs, college, HS, wherever), and were reinventing themselves in a new social arena. Often by trying a

• @yuchenj_uw Yuchen Jin on x

  I had my FOMO phase too: “If I hadn't started a company a few years ago and had joined OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI instead, I'd probably have $100M now.” But then I watched some of those rich people. Their daily focus became: “How do I minimize taxes?” “Where should I buy a house in

• @ilyasu Ilya Sukhar on x

  The solution to all of this is to have kids.

• @buccocapital @buccocapital on x

  I can't stop thinking about this post. If you do one thing today, I encourage you to give it a thoughtful, thorough read... And then commit to never living your life this way. Life has wasted success on the people described in this post. It really is completely pathetic. They

• @petergyang Peter Yang on x

  If you're stuck in the Bay Area tech rat race / psychosis, make time to travel to other places. Go to a small town in Europe or visit Asia - you'll see that life can be about much more than whether you're IC7 or IC8 or what company you work for. Don't be the person to put on

• @andrewcurran_ Andrew Curran on x

  >Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Never get where, though? Many of the people in this industry believe takeoff is imminent or already underway. Do these numbers matter in the world

• @staysaasy @staysaasy on x

  Literally every person I know that got rich quick seems incredibly sad (some for over a decade now).

• @packym Packy McCormick on x

  It is 70 and sunny in New York City, we're heading to a kite festival, and I haven't heard the words “agent” or “token” once all morning. Greatest city in the world.

• @jxnlco Jason on x

  At the tender age 30 for my birthday I gave myself the feeling of being enough. Now it's all just fun and games

• @agustinlebron3 Agustin Lebron on x

  Fascinating that it doesn't seem to occur to these post-economic people to pass on their knowledge and experience. Teach, coach, mentor some bright kids, etc. The fact it's seen as low status, when it even gets considered, says a lot about the solipsistic culture they're in.

• @devahaz Deva Hazarika on x

  My message to most of the people addressed in this post is you are incredibly fortunate and can simply make a choice to be happy about the position you've gotten yourself into

• @signulll @signulll on x

  what's interesting to me is that the previous gold rushes didn't credibly threaten the safe path simultaneously while dangling the jackpot. like you could sit out the dot com boom & keep your accounting job. the current bit where the same technology is both the lottery ticket &

• @lindytasteful TastefulLindy on x

  Only in SF do the $400k/year folks feel trapped in the “permanent underclass”

• @gris2049 Gris on x

  @deedydas This is what Heidegger called thrownness. you didn't choose your starting conditions, the year you graduated, whether your college roommate happened to be starting a company in 2018 or if you landed at Anthropic or OpenAI. The people outside that $20M circle aren't fail…

• @antoniogm Antonio García Martínez on x

  The implications of this are much larger than the mutual resentments of SF strivers. The ruthless boom/bust, winner-take-all competition means the place can never have anything like a normal culture, nor appeal to anyone outside the melée. There's a reason why tech punches way

• @antoniogm Antonio García Martínez on x

  Everyone's losing their mind over this post (and even I deleted my QT riff on it; too busy trying to escape the permanent underclass for X dramas). But it's perhaps the only recent honest take on an industry (and city) that live forever encrusted in a thick carapace of