alt Hacker NewsI've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.
If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.
Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.
Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
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Forgive me for saying this, but I think you may be drinking too much of the kool-aid.
If some of your projects are monetizable, couldn't you move forward without VC help?
Perhaps related, why do you need to be worth billions of dollars? I feel your visions for what you want your future self to be are highly unrealistic and you're probably setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness.
Sorry for the bluntness, but I think one could be happy on a lot less.
> Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on
I can't tell if you're wildly underestimating how many circumstances are outside of your control or just have an extremely high opinion of how much of an outlier you are (or maybe this isn't meant seriously and just went over my head), but I think that there are vanishingly few people (if any) in the world whose only impediments to a high likelihood of becoming a billionaire are self-imposed. I don't think that even extremely smart and charismatic people are particularly likely to do that. For every one that reaches that level of wealth, there are far more who try and fail, and it's not always because they weren't willing to work on shady things or weren't smart enough; some factors are just beyond the ability of an individual human to overcome, and you might just be lucky or unlucky.