Why I Quit My $1.2 Million Engineering Job to Start My Own Business at 24 Years-Old

Early April 2022, I wrote a satirical parody aimed at GAFAM engineers that quit their highly-paid 6 figures jobs out of a sense of entitlement.

The article was written, edited, and published in two hours, from 23h to 1h (I went to sleep after that).

I wrote it for three reasons.

1. I suddenly felt inspired and creative.
2. It made me laugh.
3. I wanted to make fun of somebody

I posted the article on Medium that same night and it went viral after a few days.

I have therefore decided to post it here too.

When I read it today, I can see there is a bunch of stuff that’s wrong. A lot of sentences are too long, and there is a lot of digressing too.

However, I don’t want to do any edit since people liked the article how it was.

Enjoy!

My Very Normal Childhood

I was born in the 90s in a totally normal middle-class family, somewhere in the Western world.

My parents met at Oxbridge during their double-PhD in law and mechanical engineering.

At 6, I got a computer and taught myself how to code, because, why not.

I was so passionate about coding that the director of my school let me teach other students, all much older than I was. And I also won a national coding competition, or maybe it was judo, or math, who is keeping track, right?

At 17, I was accepted into Oxbridge (because I was born in December, don’t go think I skipped a year, because I am really not smarter than the average, as you can tell).

I quickly met a bunch of other dudes like me with the same story. We started a startup whose investors were my dad and their dad’s friends. But we failed because neither the market nor our customers wanted to pay us for our brilliant idea that was solving world hunger.

I graduated summa cum Lauda top of my class and got a summer internship at GAFAM.

However, I didn’t feel like the company shared my values as there were no vegan options in the restaurant, so I decided to interview with another company.

That one was great! It was a web3 startup selling pixelized pics of ice-creams as NFTs.

I interviewed but they didn’t hire me.

So I called my mentor at Oxbridge, Arthur McAdams (software engineer, PhD in English).

As it turned out, he knew a guy who headed a VC that had invested in the web3 ice-cream startup.

After a quick call, I was hired. The company had raised $50 million in a pre-seed round, and had so much fucking money no one knew what to do with it.

I quickly rose and became a senior tech engineer, doing database, Solidity, UI, UX, marketing, cooking, and fixing the elevator.

Everything was great at the company and my life was perfect. I had an anon Twitter account where I criticized mandatory vaccination, posted 10 times on Linkedin about climate change and how grateful I was to be vegan, and showed my car driving at sunset on Instagram.

After 18 months at the ice-cream startup, we got acquired by a big company that was actually profitable and my life became more of a routine.

Quickly, I felt that a 9–5 wasn’t good enough for me.

I wanted to be free. I felt like in a golden prison. And yes, despite I was making a reasonable $1.2 million a year, the cost — MY freedom — was too high to pay.

It’s not like I could retire after 5 years and live off the stock market, right?

Also, what happens if the company fires me? How long can I last with 2 million saved? Barely a few weeks.

Can you imagine the shame if I had to move back in with my parents? Where would I park my car, their garage is full.

By now it was clear that a job wasn’t safe. Also I was bored, there was no engineering challenges anymore.

But mostly, I was sick of seeing 18-year-olds making millions selling mindset courses and shitcoins. They kept saying how they were free and traveled constantly in south-east Asia.

So after scrolling Reddit and pondering the question for a week, I decided to hand in my resignation letter.

Since I had no idea of any companies to start, I took a month of holiday in the family’s second residence in Thailand.

When a friend saw on Instagram that I was in Bangkok, he called me up and we met in a WeWork.

Long story short, we identified an unmet need and decided to solve the problem.

My Business

The thing that I believe the most about starting a business is that it’s definitely a selfish thing to do.

I do it for myself because I want to reclaim my freedom from the outrageous slavery that the 9–5 is.

But don’t worry, I told the Forbes journalist who interviewed me that the secret to success was delivering value and listening to your customers (I might make it to the 30-under-30, how great is that?!)

The failed startup I did at Oxbridge taught me a lot, like we shouldn’t spend more than we earned, and profitability happens when we can sell what we do for more than what it costs us.

What a revolutionary idea, something that companies like Uber and Airbnb have not been practicing, likely because they’re not startups anymore, just big companies that are afraid to innovate their accounting.

Back to my startup. In the beginning, we worked 26 hours per day and slept on bean bag chairs like Sam Bankman-Fried.

We definitely had the money to buy beds, but the rule says that you need to sleep on the floor and shower at the gym next door, or you don’t have a startup, period.

We were racing and it was crazy. I never worked that much and I was never happier doing so because I worked for myself and it felt meaningful!

Working 26h for yourself, making less, and worrying about where the money will come from definitely beats working 2 hours at a job and making hundreds of thousands.

That’s because life is not about money, but time. I learned that from a cousin’s friend’s hamster who read the 4-hour Workweek.

Six months into my startup, we managed to automate everything and now my life is much better!

Don’t be deceived! No one really knows what our startup does, including me. But the website looks slick, we came second place on Producthunt, and we are making 25k in MRR 3 weeks after the release of the beta version, so it must be working, right?

You’re A Loser and I Am Better Than You

I am dating a Thai girl and she is the love of my life. We will have a sustainable wedding on that beach from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie which is normally closed, but I somehow managed to rent it out for the occasion.

I now travel the world 6 months a year, my business takes me 2 hours per week to take care of, and I am much happier than before.

I make less money but heh money isn’t everything.

My parents are rich AF anyway so I just need to survive until they die and inherit the whole thing (I’m a single child).

They already gave me the Thailand house, so I don’t need to pay rent.

In a couple of months, I will go to an Ayahuasca retreat to get to know myself better, then I’ll attend a bitcoin conference in El Salvador. I’ll try to learn Spanish but will fail.

Now, I will tell you the secrets of my success.

How to Succeed

Just work hard. I succeeded because I worked hard, and it wasn’t even that hard. Also, believe in yourself.

You need to have a good mindset. If you’re depressed, just be happy. Read the Power of Now.

Invest in bitcoin, meditate, go on a keto diet (animal protein is better than vegetable protein, who would have thought), do mushrooms, *something about Elon Musk*, go to the gym, and be thankful.

Fight oppression. I do not agree with everything Dan Bilzerian does but his book is fucking awesome. Naval Ravikant is a god. Vladimir Putin is evil.

Anyway, that’s my story, thank you for reading.

If you want to reclaim your freedom, buy my Udemy course now. Use the code MORON to get 40% discount.

Also we’ll launch a web3 education university soon!

Wanna rent my Airbnb?

This article is satire.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash