There’s an interesting thread on HN on what to do in the event an exit results in a life changing amount of money. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186002…
My general recommendation would be “Avoid major changes to your life in the short term.”
My general recommendation would be “Avoid major changes to your life in the short term.”
Emotions are a funny thing and the combination of a startup pressure cooker plus being suddenly unemployed plus dealing with sudden frequent adversarial interest may not optimize for your ability to solve fairly straightforward math problems.
“Adversarial interest”: there exist a number of interconnected ecosystems designed to separate people from their money. Some are criminals, some are crooks, and some are simply requests for involvement in projects which should not be on your very very short list of projects.
Observe that while e.g. $8 million is a lot of money for an individual it is a small amount for a venture fund. That venture fund, which is quite serious about this issue, will likely not write a $1 million check for anything.
You do not straight line compare to a venture fund; you do not have the $92 million in more prosaic assets the LPs have to afford an $8 million venture fund.
Get an accountant if you didn’t already have one. Get a lawyer if you didn’t already have one. Skip the investment advisor; there’s a reasonable case for doing literally nothing more interesting than a money market fund for a year while putting your attention on rest of life.
Stay healthy. Make sure your relationships with your immediate family stay healthy. Do good work on interesting projects. Continue the parts of your life pre-money which you enjoy.
Make note of the problems you have which are solvable with money... in the fullness of time.
Make note of the problems you have which are solvable with money... in the fullness of time.
(As a function of having this conversation with a number of people, the amusing commonality among geeks is that they strongly anti-enjoy cleaning and that ~never cleaning again and not sweating the minor cost of that is disproportionately high utility.)
After you’re ready to work on straightforward math problems: read a handful of books, mostly to give you permission to do the prudent thing, which is parking the supermajority of the money in a boring portfolio of low-cost index funds.
You probably do not need a financial advisor, who sell three goods: salesmanship, straightforward math, and therapy.
You can math.
Salesmanship of financial products destroys value.
Therapy is cheaper by the hour than it is paying a percentage of your net worth every year.
You can math.
Salesmanship of financial products destroys value.
Therapy is cheaper by the hour than it is paying a percentage of your net worth every year.
Boring and straightforward problems dealt with, you then get to deal with the messy, rewarding, still quite complicated business of figuring out life.
