Let me start with the headline number, because that's why you clicked: in my twenty-fourth year I made a little over half a million dollars. Then I quit — by choice — and a few months later, for reasons that became their own story, I was living out of two suitcases and happier than the money ever made me.
Both of those things are true, and the gap between them is the only useful part of this story. So let me tell you the boring version of how the money happened, and then the part that actually mattered.
The honest breakdown
First, the number, corrected downward — because the version of me that makes YouTube titles likes to round up, and the version writing this would rather you trust him.
My base salary topped out "well over a quarter-million" — that's the $250k you'll see me use as shorthand. Add stock, the timing of a couple of payouts, and the full year's gross landed north of half a million. So: not a fictional flex, but not a base salary anyone should anchor on either. The headline is real; the asterisks are bigger than the headline.
Here's the part that's genuinely repeatable:
- First job — Agot, a computer-vision startup. I joined at $100k and got handed the Platform team within a couple of months, which 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, in New York. Their CTO found me on LinkedIn, flew me out for the interview, and had an offer in my inbox the next day — roughly double my Agot pay, about $265k in total comp. I was the only person overseeing the entire leasing-conversation engine for the year I was there.
That's it. That's the whole climb. Two jobs, a CS degree, and a habit of saying yes to the unglamorous thing. No secret. I wrote a whole 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"
If there's one mental model under all of it, it's this, and I wrote it to myself in a journal at my most cynical:
"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, on the job market
I believe that almost completely. The market for talent is not efficient, but it is attentive. If you genuinely raise your value and you have any surface area at all — a GitHub, a shipped thing, a CTO's LinkedIn DMs — it shows up fast. The recruiters who used to flood my inbox weren't a fluke; they were the market doing exactly what it does. The hard part was never getting found. The hard part was deciding the chase was worth it.
It wasn't. And that's the turn.
The number went up; my life went down
By every external metric I had won. I had the New York apartment that was more luxury hotel than apartment — a sauna, a private movie theater, a rooftop with the whole skyline laid out under it. I'd filled it with the best of everything.
And here is what I actually did with all of it:
"My income was at an all-time peak and my time spent doing what I wanted in life was at an all-time low."— from the draft this grew out of
I'd burn my few free evenings watching TV on my phone in bed, too drained to walk to the couch I was so proud of, let alone the city outside the window. When you spend enough time making enough money, you quietly forget what the money was for. You stop valuing your time and start valuing things you have no time to use. The bars on the cage are beautiful, and it's a cage all the same.
So at 24, at the financial peak most people spend a career climbing toward, I went to my employer and we agreed on a mutual termination. I gave up the salary, the stock, the apartment, most of my stuff — and I have never once wanted it back. What I did with the year after is its own story.
What the number is actually for
I still think money is worth being good at. I just think of it the way I think of sleep or savings: it's the backbone of a good life, not the goal of one. Earn enough to fund the things you'd do with unlimited time, then go reclaim the time. That's the whole equation, and the half-million was only ever the easy half.
These days I'm pre-revenue on purpose, building the small, honest things I actually want to exist, on a runway I bought with that NYC year. It's a fraction of the income and several multiples of the life.
If you take one thing from the flex, take this: the climb was the easy part. Knowing when to step off it was the part nobody pays you for.