A reader pointed me toward Pablo, who writes at The FIRE Exit, after I mentioned Monevator somewhere - a blog I read every week and happily pay for the premium version of. If you haven’t come across it, it’s worth your time.
Pablo quit his job in 2011, cycled 47,000km around the world over five years, taught himself photography well enough that National Geographic ran a feature on the trip, and retired at 34 on money made trading prediction markets. It’s a genuinely good story, and worth reading in full.
But I’d be careful holding it up as a model for most of the founders I work with. Pablo’s route to financial independence didn’t run through a mortgage in an expensive part of the UK, a family depending on him, or a business whose value rests partly on other people staying employed and motivated. Most self-funded founders I know are carrying all three at once. Their number has to cover somebody else’s rent as well as their own.
None of that makes Pablo’s story less worth reading. It just means his number and yours are answering different questions. Mine, when I sold, was never really about how little I could live on - it was about how much I could stop worrying about, for people who weren’t just me.