The $50 million question
If I worked on this for 5–10 years and was guaranteed the money, what would I go and do? The answer to that question is why a company shouldn't be a vehicle to wealth.
Packy McCormick’s essay The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff encapsulates a lot of what I felt at ClaimKit. I disagree with the idea of a company as a vehicle to wealth and status. The idea being, once you have wealth and status, you can do what you want!
But the thing that kept circling back to me at ClaimKit was: Ok, if I work on this for the next 5–10 years, and am GUARANTEED (which I know I’m not) 50 million dollars, what would I go and do? (That number is roughly real, not pulled from the air: I own 28% today; the couple more rounds it would take to get to an exit would dilute that to maybe 15–17%; and venture-backed exits mostly happen 8–10 years in, at — if you’re lucky — a few hundred million. 17% of $300 million is about $50 million, before tax.) I would think to myself: well, I’d spend time with family and friends I guess. I’d travel a bit. I’d buy nice things. That’d entertain me for maybe a couple months. But I know that I would need something to do.
So then I thought, what would I like to do with the rest of my time? I would probably want to go work on something cool. Something that brings the future that I want closer. Robotics, Drones, Defense Tech, Heavy Industry, Space. All of these are cool to me.
Ok, so I’m 35, how do I go work on those things? Well… the answer is that it would be quite hard. It’s already quite hard for me right now at the age of 26 to pivot into these things. Can you imagine what 5–10 years of working on R&D tax would do to me? Not to mention the fact that I’ll always feel like I spent those 5–10 years waiting for an outcome I could have now. That outcome being working on cool things, with smart people who I respect. And all of this assumes ClaimKit doesn’t fail.
So there you go. I want to go work on cool things, and I want to get into places where I can do that, and I want to start companies that let me do that in the future.