Most middle class people can find the time to dedicate to things that are important to them (even if those things are a 100 patent challenge). Wringing $6k out of your budget is a different story.

Maybe not in this particular case, but I know someone about that age who grew up about 30 years ago off of Page Mill in the hills and he said their house was at least 20 times less than they are going for now, but sadly for him, his parents had to sell it when his family moved out of the area. This might have been before even 280 was built IIRC.

The article states he was a co-founder and the crunchbase page has two other cofounders