I've been meaning to put a blog post together for a Show HN advocating for buying lottery tickets and working a sane 35-40 hour week job versus slaving away at a startup for 80-100 hours a week with even worse odds of becoming wealthy.
I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday.
I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?
So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
This is the study I'm interested in performing.
> So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling.
I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.
But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.
We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.
As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.
Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.
Do what you enjoy, ensure someone is getting value out of it, but don't spend too much of your life on any one thing. Everything in moderation.
We really need to drop the facade that working a startup will always be beneficial to you, or lead you to wealth and/or success. Sometimes, its going to tear your soul from you and you may not come back from it for a long time.
Then again, I'm not much of a gambler in general.
It's time we started charging them for those options.
A successful startup is not an accident, and a failed startup is not just a lack of luck. Make good business choices, product choices, and infrastructure choices and you can make the startup a success. On the other hand make poor product choices, and poor business choices and your startup will fail.
On the other hand there is very little strategy or way to improve your odds of success when gambling.
Think of it as a really large poker game where you didn't have to put any money in the pot and can play a random hand for $2 and win the entire pot. Personally, once it's in the 100M+ range I'll grab a ticket while getting gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.