- Appointment reminder: how to ignore a business for four years, while not improving it and giving you stress
- financial planning using a spreadsheet, then moving to more expensive lifestyle, getting in debt and having the retirement fund turn negative when he has a wife and child and is closing down his companies. Something we can all learn from?
- when to borrow money and how to calculate risk: Except he says not to trust his calculation of risk when he encourages the reader to play poker against him if possible because he's so bad at risk estimation.
- when and how to sell your startup: again no, he says it put him in a bad position to be wanting to sell quickly, and he glosses over 'how' with "I know how because I've done it before". The only good read there is "don't wait until it is declining before selling, like Bingo Card Creator was".
- the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years): the trials of promising and pre-selling a thing, then changing your mind and doing a startup instead, and trying to turn that into a positive. (Aside: Three years? I wonder how long before there's a reasonable chance that some of the purchasers died before the release?)
- setting goals for the future: where he keeps saying he didn't meet his goals, or they have changed?
- the value of family: "I had not felt as effective as a husband / father recently as I wanted to be" - the value of family is lower than a side-business he was bored of and wants to sell? Lower than a "huge amount of personal fulfillment" that he got instead during that time? Lower than the guilt of refunding customers over his video series? If you were a potential customer and he said "I choose to spend more time with my family, I can't do this work justice, sorry, here's a refund", wouldn't you be fine with it?
I don't dislike him at all, I do respect him, and I like the transparent views into his life and businesses and plans and thoughts, but I'm not seeing the same things you are at all. If anything these are more cautionary tales along the lines of "you can sometimes get what you want with hard work, but it comes with a price".
> Aside: Three years? I wonder how long before there's a reasonable chance that some of the purchasers died before the release?
Assuming all his customers are roughly 20-40 years old, the annual mortality rate is ~0.1% IIRC on average (mortality rates, because of the exponentiality of the Gompertz curve, only begin substantially increasing post-40 years, up to the ~90s with annual mortality rates like 10-50%). So then the 3-year mortality rate would be 1-(1-0.001)^3=0.002997001 or ~0.3%. So roughly you would need ~334 customers to expect 1 death over 4 years (100/0.3, since 333.3333333 * 0.002997001 ~> 0.9990003332), with the full binomial distribution covering 2/3/4/5/6 deaths as well (but not much higher with any meaningful probability). I forget where I read it, but I feel like I remember that at least 1000 people pre-ordered the course, in which case the mean number of deaths becomes more like 3 with up to 9 deaths, etc.
This is a healthy way to critique it. I think the most positive element is not any of the tangibles he mentions, but that he's consistently found ways to pursue battles of his own choosing, and to artfully spin failures into the launchpad for a new adventure.
The hits he's scored are materially not so big, in part because he's avoided major commitments - and had he done more of the things he finds boring and stressful he would have more commitments, more hits, and probably be wealthier - but it's a sucker's game to get into comparative success. You don't get to have any of these experiences at all if you stick to the salaryman path, and that's the underlying appeal; the audacity of being able to strike out on your own and actually make it work for a while. It keeps a dream alive for a lot of clock-punching developers.
Eh, there's limited utility in trying to hide how much of an idiot I am.
If you want an honest comment, my main feeling was more of envy that patio11 could build and run and sell a six figure business he didn't really care about, and had the choice of a startup, a job, or consulting, with experience that he's well capable of all of them, and that he can stop off on the side to record some videos that even in a world of YouTube and online courses, people will pay in advance for, sight-unseen.
I really do respect him. And I really don't want to follow him into a life of consultant marketing, business reminder software, on-call phone stress, sign-on funneling or salarymanship.
- financial planning using a spreadsheet, then moving to more expensive lifestyle, getting in debt and having the retirement fund turn negative when he has a wife and child and is closing down his companies. Something we can all learn from?
- when to borrow money and how to calculate risk: Except he says not to trust his calculation of risk when he encourages the reader to play poker against him if possible because he's so bad at risk estimation.
- when and how to sell your startup: again no, he says it put him in a bad position to be wanting to sell quickly, and he glosses over 'how' with "I know how because I've done it before". The only good read there is "don't wait until it is declining before selling, like Bingo Card Creator was".
- the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years): the trials of promising and pre-selling a thing, then changing your mind and doing a startup instead, and trying to turn that into a positive. (Aside: Three years? I wonder how long before there's a reasonable chance that some of the purchasers died before the release?)
- setting goals for the future: where he keeps saying he didn't meet his goals, or they have changed?
- the value of family: "I had not felt as effective as a husband / father recently as I wanted to be" - the value of family is lower than a side-business he was bored of and wants to sell? Lower than a "huge amount of personal fulfillment" that he got instead during that time? Lower than the guilt of refunding customers over his video series? If you were a potential customer and he said "I choose to spend more time with my family, I can't do this work justice, sorry, here's a refund", wouldn't you be fine with it?
I don't dislike him at all, I do respect him, and I like the transparent views into his life and businesses and plans and thoughts, but I'm not seeing the same things you are at all. If anything these are more cautionary tales along the lines of "you can sometimes get what you want with hard work, but it comes with a price".