u/IndependenceSad1272

We kept it low-key. No security, no cameras, just two regular guys at the bowling alley.

He showed up with his own bowling ball for some reason. Not even a custom one—just a plain black ball with "BIBI" written on it in silver marker. He took the game extremely seriously too. Every frame felt like geopolitical negotiations.

Halfway through, he randomly told me he had actually owned the bowling alley for the past 2,000 years. I was like, "This place opened in 1998." He just looked at me and said, "The historical situation is more complicated than that."

I accidentally got a strike and he stared at the scoreboard for like 10 seconds and said, "Interesting development."

Afterward we got pizza. He folded his slice with alarming precision. Nice guy overall, very competitive. Said he'd be down for another round next weekend.

If your number one life goal is becoming rich, maximizing income should be treated as a primary objective, not an afterthought. I see a lot of people say things like "I just want to be rich" while pursuing paths where high earnings are uncommon, inconsistent, or heavily dependent on luck.

People sometimes act like wealth just magically appears through vague ideas like “follow your passion,” “work hard,” or “major in X.” But if maximizing wealth is the goal, then it makes sense to optimize for careers and industries that consistently produce high earners: medicine, dentistry, certain finance paths, specialized law, entrepreneurship, etc.

This doesn't mean everyone should become a surgeon or investment banker. It also doesn't mean money should be your top priority. But if someone explicitly says becoming rich is the goal, then choosing a path with a realistic pipeline toward very high income seems more rational than hoping things somehow work out.

Before everyone grabs pitchforks: yes, software engineers can make a lot of money. Some do. But I think a lot of people, especially high schoolers and early college students, have a completely distorted view of tech careers.

People act like CS = automatic $250k FAANG salary at age 23.

Reality check: most people are not ending up at Google, Meta, or OpenAI. A huge number of grads end up at normal companies making normal salaries. Solid salaries, sure, but not the internet fantasy version. I think the salary sharing subreddits are to blame for this somewhat, people on there are either in the like top 1% of 25 year olds, or they're just lying (more likely).

You are NOT gonna make $300K in your 20s. It just doesn't happen that often.

Meanwhile, look at careers where high income is actually the core objective: medicine, dentistry, certain finance paths, specialized law, etc. Those fields often have a much clearer "suffer through training → make a lot of money" pipeline.

Also, people compare salaries without accounting for volatility. A software engineer making $180k sounds great until you start factoring in the reality of layoffs. If you're unemployed for 6–12 months at some point and for many people in tech that's not some impossible scenario anymore. That lost income adds up fast. Suddenly your "high paying" career starts looking different when you average earnings over a decade instead of looking at a single offer letter screenshot.

Meanwhile, someone in a more stable industry making less on paper but steadily employed year after year may actually come out ahead long-term. And to everyone thinking, "that won't happen to me", people across every level of tech thought the same thing. Junior engineers, senior engineers, managers, people at top companies. Layoffs don't exactly ask for permission first.

And compare that to something like finance or medicine. In medicine, the path is brutal, but it's extremely clear: med school, residency, attending physician, and eventually you're making attending-level money. In many finance paths, especially things like investment banking or wealth management, there are established ladders with fairly predictable progression and compensation jumps. Tech feels far less structured. You can spend years trying to move from one level to the next while competing against layoffs, reorganizations, hiring freezes, and shifting company priorities. People see screenshots of Staff engineers making absurd money, but getting there can feel like trying to win a game where nobody fully explains the rules.

And even the startup mythology is weird. People idolize stories like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates dropping out young and becoming billionaires, but a lot of successful founders were already experienced executives with decades in industry, leadership experience, and VC networks.

I'm not saying "don't major in CS." I'm saying if your #1 priority is maximizing expected financial return, CS may not be the obvious answer people online make it out to be.

Curious where people disagree.

I heard somewhere that Europeans settled the Caribbean, brought slaves over, and then after like a year realized the Caribbean is a crappy place to live and went back to the USA and Europe, but just left all the slaves there.

The popular image is a 19-year-old college student coding in a dorm room. Reality is often much less exciting: many founders of major tech companies spent decades climbing the corporate ladder, building expertise, management skills, industry knowledge, networks, and investor connections before launching a company.

The odds of building a major successful startup with zero management or industry experience are much slim to none.

Eric Yuan, Founder of Zoom
-- Previously Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco. Founded Zoom at 41.

George Kurtz, Founder of CrowdStrike
-- Previously CTO of McAfee. Founded CrowdStrike at 41.

Michael Bloomberg, Founder of Bloomberg
-- Previously General Partner at Salomon Brothers. Founded Bloomberg at 39.

Manny Medina, Founder of Outreach
-- Previously Director of Business Development at Microsoft. Founded Outreach at 38.

Reed Hastings, Co-Founder of Netflix
-- Previously founder/CEO of Pure Software. Founded Netflix at 37.

Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder of Slack
-- Previously co-founded Flickr and led startups before Slack. Founded Slack at 40.

Marc Benioff, Founder of Salesforce
-- Previously Senior Vice President at Oracle. Founded Salesforce at 34.

Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of PayPal
-- Previously worked in law and finance before PayPal. Co-founded PayPal at 31.

Jensen Huang, Co-Founder of NVIDIA
-- Previously Director at LSI Logic and engineer at AMD. Co-founded NVIDIA at 30.

Travis Kalanick, Co-Founder of Uber
-- Previously founded Scour and Red Swoosh before Uber. Co-founded Uber at 33.

Jan Koum, Co-Founder of WhatsApp
-- Previously infrastructure engineer at Yahoo. Co-founded WhatsApp at 33.

Elon Musk, Founder of SpaceX
-- Previously founded Zip2 and X.com/PayPal. Founded SpaceX at 31.

Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba
-- Previously founded China Pages and worked in business roles. Founded Alibaba at 35.

Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder of Twitter
-- Previously software entrepreneur and dispatch systems developer. Co-founded Twitter at 29/30.

Jack Patrick Dorsey, Founder of Square
-- Previously Twitter co-founder and CEO. Founded Square at 33.

Marc Randolph, Co-Founder of Netflix
-- Previously VP of Marketing at Borland and founder of multiple companies. Co-founded Netflix at 39.

David Baszucki, Co-Founder of Roblox
-- Previously founded Knowledge Revolution. Co-founded Roblox at 41.

And many of the "exceptions" people idolize come with giant asterisks attached. The internet version is "college kid builds billion-dollar company from nothing." The real version often includes wealthy families, elite schools, safety nets, and family money.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
-- His parents invested roughly $245,000 into Amazon in its early days.

Elon Musk, Founder of Zip2 / SpaceX
-- Grew up in a wealthy family and has long faced discussion around family wealth and financial support, though many online claims get exaggerated.

Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft
-- Grew up in an affluent family with a prominent lawyer father and had rare computer access as a teenager through a private school.

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook
-- Grew up in an upper-middle-class household, attended elite prep school education, and had a father who invested heavily in early technology access and tutoring.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Co-Founders of Google
-- Both had highly educated academic parents and elite educational backgrounds.

None of this means these people did not work hard. But there is a huge difference between "I started with nothing" and "I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in family funding and a safety net if things failed."

The popular image of startup success is often a college student in a dorm room becoming a billionaire overnight, but that seems closer to a media narrative than reality. The Zuckerberg-style founder story became famous because it is unusual and dramatic, not because it is the norm.

In reality, many successful startups are founded much later in life by people who spent years or decades building industry expertise and professional networks. A 19-year-old usually has limited experience managing teams, understanding markets, selling products, or raising serious funding.

Startup success often depends less on raw intelligence and more on accumulated knowledge, relationships, and credibility. Many founders also benefit from networks that include executives, investors, former coworkers, and venture capital connections built over long careers.

Real examples fit this pattern more often than people realize. Michael Bloomberg founded Bloomberg after years at Salomon Brothers and leadership roles in finance.

Eric Yuan spent years working at Cisco and helping build WebEx before creating Zoom. Reed Hastings also had prior business and software experience before co-founding Netflix.

Many of these founders were not teenagers working in dorm rooms. They entered entrepreneurship with experience, industry knowledge, and networks already in place.

Okay so imagine this:

The United States and Canada both dissolve into their internal divisions.

So instead of 2 countries, we now have:

• 50 U.S. states
• 5 U.S. territories
• 1 federal district
• 10 Canadian provinces
• 3 Canadian territories

Which means North America suddenly becomes:

69 countries.

California? Country.
Texas? Country.
Ontario? Country.
Puerto Rico? Country.
Yukon? Country.

BUT — all 69 countries immediately join a new supranational organization called the North American Union (NAU), basically our version of the European Union.

So you'd still have:

• Open borders
• Shared currency
• Free movement
• Common trade policies
• Massive economic integration

But every state/province now has way more autonomy and identity.

Idaho would literally have an embassy in Florida.
You'd carry an Idaho passport instead of a U.S. passport.
Quebec and Texas would both act like semi-independent nations while still being tied into the NAU economy.

And before people say “isn’t that already basically how the U.S. works?” — not even close.

U.S. states are not sovereign countries.
Texas cannot negotiate treaties with France.
Florida cannot open embassies in California.
Washington state cannot join military alliances with British Columbia.
New York cannot issue internationally recognized passports or directly negotiate trade agreements with Ontario.

This would basically turn every state/province into an actual nation-state while still keeping most of the economic/practical benefits of staying unified.

In both the US and Canada, there are several states/provinces/territories that want to become independent:

• California
• Texas
• Cascadia (Washington, Oregon, British Columbia)
• Quebec
• Puerto Rico
• Alberta

Imagine if the entire EU become one country, Portugal and Poland having to share a country? They are so vasty different. Thomas Jefferson himself assumed that the West Coast would be it's own country.

For the NAU capital, I think we should do what South Africa does and split it between multiple cities instead of trying to force one “true” capital.

My proposal:

• Executive capital: Washington, DC
• Legislative capital: Kansas City or Minneapolis. We should try and make it close to the center of population
• Judicial capital: Vancouver

That way neither the U.S. nor Canada fully dominates the union politically, and the power centers are geographically spread out across the continent instead of everything being concentrated on the East Coast.

We could also open up NAU membership to maybe any carribean countries that want to join.

99% of your SaaS are bullshit AI slop.

Vibe coded quickly.

Not solving a painful problem.

Bad pricing.

Bad web design.

Bad marketing.

"Oh hey guys, I made an app to manage your paper towels and it emails you when to buy more". Do you really think someone would pay for that?? Would someone even use that for free?? Probably not. Add in a TERRIBLE vibe coded website, and yeah that's most SaaS on here.

Disclaimer: Thinking long-term like ST4 or even ST5.

One thing I think Seattle transit discussions miss is that everyone here focuses almost entirely on urban rail (Link Light Rail), while a lot of the biggest metro areas in the Northeast + Chicago also have extensive regional/commuter rail networks layered on top.

NYC, Boston, Philly, Chicago, DC, etc. aren’t just subway/light rail systems. They also have large regional rail networks designed for longer-distance travel across the metro area.

Seattle has the beginnings of this with Sounder, but imagine if we fully leaned into it.

Imagine:

• Sounder South and North running like Caltrain with all-day frequent bidirectional service
• The old BNSF ROW on the Eastside is restored forming Sounder East. SeaTac Airport -> Downtown Bellevue -> Bothell -> Everett.

Then integrate it into one regional rail network.

Potential branches/spurs:

• North Bend
• Snoqualmie
• Woodinville

And then there’s Kitsap County, which honestly could have something really unique:
a Staten Island Railway-style system.

Not physically connected by track to the rest of the rail network, but connected operationally through ferries.

Imagine:

• Bremerton
• Silverdale
• Poulsbo
• maybe Bainbridge

All connected by a north-south regional rail spine feeding directly into ferry terminals.

You’d basically have:

• rail → ferry → rail transfers instead of forcing everything onto highways.

It sounds weird until you realize Staten Island already effectively operates this way:

• separate rail system
• ferry connection to Manhattan
• still functions as part of the broader regional transit ecosystem

A Kitsap rail line paired with fast ferries could honestly be more useful than trying to force massive highway expansion across the peninsula.

At that point it stops being “commuter rail” and starts becoming actual regional rail.

Honestly, some of the planned/proposed Link extensions are also getting so comically far from Seattle that they almost feel like they’d function better as regional rail anyway.

Urban light rail is amazing for:

• dense stop spacing
• walkable neighborhoods
• frequent urban connectivity

But once you start pushing extremely long suburban corridors, regional rail starts making more sense:

• higher top speeds
• wider stop spacing
• more comfortable seating
• better suited for 30–60+ minute rides
• easier to scale for long-distance regional trips

A train from Everett or Tacoma into Seattle/Bellevue starts becoming a fundamentally different type of trip than Capitol Hill → Westlake.

I think Link is absolutely the correct backbone for urban transit, but regional rail solves a different set of problems:

• longer-distance travel
• suburb-to-suburb trips
• faster airport access
• bypassing I-5/I-405 congestion
• regional redundancy when highways fail

A lot of Seattle transit conversations feel very “light rail only,” when historically most major US transit metros evolved into a combination of:

• urban rapid transit
• regional rail
• commuter/intercity rail

And honestly, the Seattle region already has more rail ROWs than people realize. The challenge is mostly politics, freight coordination, and willingness to prioritize passenger rail.

Vibe coding is fine, aslong as it doesn't LOOK vibe coded.

If you're gonna vibe code, do it good. Refine it. Improve the design. Pick a font that isn't the same 3 fonts AI uses.

Your landing page should not look like it was generated in 10 minutes with Claude Code "hey claude create the landing page, make it look SaaS".

I think a lot of SaaS founders think people won't notice. We do. Yes we notice your AI generated logo. Yes we notice your AI generated text content. Yes we notice your lack of substance.

If I see any of these I am not spending a single dollar on your SaaS as a customer.

1. Emojis. Dead giveaway of vibe coding. Professional sites use high quality icons.

2. Tons of em-dashes.

3. Same basic font as all other vibe coded SaaS

4. AI generated logo

5. Landing page just lacks "substance". No demo videos, no screenshots from the SaaS platform. It just looks like you barely put an effort into it.

6. WAYY TOO MUCH text. AI loves to make sections have way too much text. Eyebrow labels. Sub-headers. Sub-sub-headers. Professional websites have simple sections.

7. Lack of "company info". no address, team, LinkedIn.

8. If anything is broken on the production website (i.e. what im using) I will assume you have no idea what you're doing, or your quality control just sucks.

9. Generic metrics (“10x growth”, “boost productivity”) with zero specifics

Unpopular opinion, but I think a lot of people are chasing startups for the wrong reason.

If your goal is to get rich, a tech startup is honestly one of the worst bets you can make. Most fail, the ones that don’t fail take YEARS, and even “successful” founders often end up with less than people imagine after dilution, taxes, and time.

People focus on the like 0.01% rare outliers (huge exits) and ignore the base rate.

Something like 99% of tech startups fail. And the few that make money, usually don't make eye watering amounts of money. Like the founder MAYBE breaks $100K annual income.

People have it in their head that this magical group of successful tech startup founders are pulling in 7 figures annually.

Most rich people pretty much took one of these 2 paths (outside of like inheriting the money):

- High income job + smart investing

- Owning a boring, profitable business. Laundromat, Roofing, Franchises (McDonald's etc), Landscaping, HVAC, etc.

Most rich people are not "doctors" or "lawyers" or the founder of some "AI b2b SaaS". They are like the gas station owner, or the owner of the local roofing repair business. People pay/hire for stuff they don't wanna do themselves.

Curious if people here agree or if I’m missing something.

Unpopular opinion, but I think a lot of people are chasing startups for the wrong reason.

If your goal is to get rich, a tech startup is honestly one of the worst bets you can make. Most fail, the ones that don’t fail take YEARS, and even “successful” founders often end up with less than people imagine after dilution, taxes, and time.

People focus on the like 0.01% rare outliers (huge exits) and ignore the base rate.

Something like 99% of tech startups fail. And the few that make money, usually don't make eye watering amounts of money. Like the founder MAYBE breaks $100K annual income.

People have it in their head that this magical group of successful tech startup founders are pulling in 7 figures annually.

Most rich people pretty much took one of these 2 paths (outside of like inheriting the money):

- High income job + smart investing

- Owning a boring, profitable business. Laundromat, Roofing, Franchises (McDonald's etc), Landscaping, HVAC, etc.

Most rich people are not "doctors" or "lawyers" or the founder of some "AI b2b SaaS". They are like the gas station owner, or the owner of the local roofing repair business. People pay/hire for stuff they don't wanna do themselves.

Curious if people here agree or if I’m missing something.