I was 24, in New York, and by every number on the spreadsheet I had won. Then I watched TV on my phone in bed because I was too tired to walk to the couch I'd been so proud of buying. Both of those sentences are about the same week. The distance between them is the whole story — the climb, the cage, and the walk-away — so here it is in one place, boring version first, corrected downward, because I trust the version of me writing this more than the version of me who makes YouTube titles.
The number, with the asterisks bigger than the headline
You'll hear me say "$400k" in a video somewhere. That number is a base plus stock plus the lucky timing of a couple of payouts, grossed up and rounded off with a thumbnail in mind. The half-million in the title is the same kind of arithmetic — everything summed across the run to 24, counted the way a thumbnail counts. The figure a sane accountant would quote is about $265k in total comp at the peak. Real money. Not a number anyone should anchor their self-worth to, and not the fictional flex the round versions imply. The headline is real; the asterisks are bigger than the headline.
Here's the part that's actually repeatable:
- First job — Agot, a computer-vision startup. They put cameras over the fry station: order a burger with lettuce, the kitchen forgets the lettuce, the camera catches the mismatch and pings the worker before it's bagged. I joined at $100k, got handed the Platform team within a couple of months, and that bumped me to $150k. I watched that company go from two people at a desk to fifty, to a ~$60M valuation.
- Second job — Elise AI, New York. Their CTO, Tony Stoyanov, cold-DM'd me on LinkedIn, flew me out for the interview, and had an offer in my inbox the next day. Nearly double my Agot pay. For about fifteen months I was the only person who owned the entire leasing-conversation engine.
That's the whole climb. Two jobs, a CS degree, and a bias toward taking the unglamorous foundation nobody else wanted. There's no secret handshake. I wrote a separate piece on the first promotion because the how of that one is the closest thing I have to advice.
Just get good at throwing the ball
Under all of it is one line I wrote to myself in a journal, on a cynical day about the job market:
"Just get good at throwing the fucking ball. The teams will find you. There is no undiscovered 100mph pitcher in the world."— a note to myself
I believe that almost completely. The talent market isn't efficient, but it is attentive. I have a receipt: I built a little Excalidraw "zen mode" browser extension — about forty lines of code, written mostly by an AI, by a backend guy who'd basically never touched JavaScript — and posted it in Theo's Twitch chat. He lost it on stream, tweeted it, ~100k views. Forty lines. Raise your value even a hair, expose one edge of it to the world, and the world finds you faster than you're ready for.
The hard part was never getting found. The hard part was noticing what being found was costing me.
The gilded cage
The apartment was $4,500 a month in a luxury tower — a fireplace in the lobby, a sauna, a gym, a rooftop with the whole skyline laid out under it. I furnished every corner with the best of everything, down to a 5.1 surround system I wired myself. I was living a life most people only get to dream about, and I was genuinely grateful for it.
I just never had time to live in it. Between work and clawing back chores on the weekends, the sauna and the rooftop went unused for months. I was socializing maybe once or twice a month — peak money, peak loneliness, in the most crowded city on earth. And here is the journal entry this post grew out of:
"My income was at an all-time peak and my time spent doing what I wanted was at an all-time low."— from the draft this grew out of
I'd burn my few free evenings watching shows on my tiny phone screen, in bed, a wall away from a surround system I'd built and never turned on. Spend enough of yourself making money and you quietly forget what the money was for. You stop valuing your time and start pouring value into things you have no time to use. The bars on the cage are beautiful, and it's a cage all the same.
Walking away
Leaving a job to do nothing felt impossible, so I dressed it up as strategy: I'd pursue research to fast-track an O1 visa and land somewhere higher-paying sooner. Brave-but-logical, still pointed squarely at more money — the kind of plan you can say out loud without flinching. In February 2024 I went to my employer and we agreed on a mutual termination. My choice, made to buy my time back. Deep down I knew it was the start of something much bigger than a visa play.
The day after, an immense weight lifted. I'd dream about work and wake up flooded with relief, remembering I no longer had any of it. Then came the crash and the recharge: the gym for the first time in my life, twelve hours of sleep a day for a week, the backlog of games I'd never had time to play. And all that free time made the loneliness impossible to ignore — so I treated it like a bug instead of a verdict. Cook dinner, invite people I liked, follow up no matter how often they flaked. Painfully slowly, friends started to appear, and people even began inviting me, which was new.
(A separate event, worth being precise about because the internet loves to compress two facts into one wrong one: four months later, in June 2024, I learned my unemployment days were quietly running out, and overstaying them would put a mark on my record that jeopardized every future reentry. To protect that future I chose to leave the US within the week — paid someone $1,000 to throw away a $1,400 bed, locked the couch and the hand-sleeved board games and that sound system into a New York storage unit where they still sit, and flew to India with two suitcases, one stuffed with my gaming PC.)
"I never once felt sad. There was always a plan and a hope."— the line that explains how I survive loss
That's the truest thing about how I'm wired. My antidote to despair has never been to process the grief; it's to have a forward path. As long as there was a plan, there wasn't room for despair.
What the number is actually for
I still think money is a skill worth being good at. I just file it where I file sleep and savings: it's the backbone of a good life, never the point of one. If I could hand you the whole year in four lines, it's these:
- Find a way — a few months, ideally — to live with no obligations, so you can actually figure out what you want from your life.
- You can't discover what you want to do while you spend every hour on what you need to do. The need crowds out the want, every time.
- Ask the unlimited-time-and-money question for real: what would you do with your days that would feel meaningful? That tells you how much money you actually need.
- Then earn just enough to fund that — and reclaim the rest of your time for the things you'd have done anyway.
These days I'm pre-revenue on purpose, building the small honest things I actually want to exist, on a runway I paid for with that New York year. A fraction of the income, several multiples of the life.
If you take one thing from the flex, take this: getting good enough to be found is the part they'll pay you for. Knowing when to stop letting them is the part nobody will. And if you're staring at your own gilded cage — come say hi. The best things in my life started as a conversation.
Keep going How to get good enough to be found · How I learn anything in 30 days