Gergely Orosz: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. So anyway, I said, all right, this is a massive lottery ticket. If it goes in, every year I make two years of salary, pretty much. That's how I was thinking. But if not, again, don't forget I'm in Europe where we're used to not seeing any returns on stock. So European software engineers will not value stock as much, because they just haven't seen success stories. So I told myself, if four years later Uber exits and I make a bunch of money, I owe it to myself to take a risk, because then I'll have four years of savings in my bank, which... Back then I had maybe six months of savings or something. So this was the promise to myself. And then I probably would've forgotten about this, but four years later, almost on the dot, COVID starts, and it really hit super hard. We're laying off people, we had to lay off 20% of the engineers. I was already managing a group of about 30 people, I had managers under me, and 20% of the people or 15% had to be let go. And I was thinking to myself, what am I doing here? I looked ahead, Uber was going to have a really bad year, I'm going to have to manage morale. Up to then, I'd helped put together this team, and we had a really good charter, and we had to throw that charter out the window, because it made no sense with the economic reality. So I thought back, and I told myself, if I'll be here, I'll take a risk, and I'll try to do something else. So I was like, all right, let me pull this trigger. And my plan was very simple. Leave Uber and start a startup, raise venture capital, because I haven't done that before but it kind of runs in the family. My brother's on his second startup, and he sold his first one to Skyscanner, and now he's building this startup called Craft Docs. It's a really slick document editing system, they just raised their series B. So through him I know [inaudible 00:16:42] startup life is, and I felt I never did that, I always worked at big companies. So my plan was [inaudible 00:16:47] leave Uber, raise money, and do something on platform engineering. A classic way that Uber alumni start businesses is, Uber has invested silly amounts of money to build everything custom internally. Everything that you can think of. Our [inaudible 00:17:02] system was custom, our experimentation system, our container, the way we automatically set that up, a lot of the engineering stuff. So a lot of Uber alumni just leave, and whatever they saw there, they just build it for the world to use, because no other company really does what Uber does, because it makes no sense, but a lot of them will pay for. That was the plan. But before [inaudible 00:17:22] I wanted to finish a book. I'd been writing this book for, it was coming up to a year, called the Software Engineer's Guidebook, which is just my advice for people to grow professionally in the field. I wanted to finish a book. I'd been writing this book for, it was coming up to a year, called the Software Engineer's Guidebook, which is just my advice for people to grow professionally in the field. And I figured, all right, let me leave the company, in six months I'll write the book, I'll just use my savings to take a break, and then I'll raise the venture capital. And what happened was, I started to write this book, but I got sidetracked, I started to have fun online in terms of... I was writing on Twitter, on my blog. I accidentally published a book called Building Mobile Apps at Scale. I just did it for a few months. And the weird thing was that my plan was that I'm going to just not make any money, and this book, Building Mobile Apps at Scale, and another book that I published about tech resumes, I just wrote these in a few months, they started making money. They made about $100,000 in the first year. And I was like, "That's interesting. People are buying my books." And I self-published it through Gumroad or places where I get to keep I think 90% of the revenue, but still, this was really interesting. And I got to the point where, all right, I should now start a startup. I should do fundraising and do all that. And then I asked myself, why do I really want to do that? And the answer was two reasons. One is, I love working in small teams at Uber. I'll be honest, I didn't really enjoy being a manager of managers. It felt a bit too abstract. I didn't like being in the meetings, not doing the work. What I really liked is when we had a small team, and we had this really big vision, and it was us against the world. We were like ten of us, and we were just getting stuff done, we were putting out fires, it was so much fun. So that was one of the reasons I wanted to do startup. I was hoping to recreate this feeling. And the other thing, honestly, was money. This was in 2021 before the market crashed. Just doing the maths, if you found a company, and I'll be a CEO and the founder, maybe I'll have a co-founder, this becomes a unicorn, by that time we will have raised five rounds of funding or six, I'll be diluted as hell, but I'll still have let's say 5%. 5% of the billion is still $50 million, after you pay taxes [inaudible 00:19:30] I can buy a bunch of stuff that I don't need. And I was asking myself, all right, and then what? And I was like, after I've bought everything that I don't need, I probably want to share what I know with people, do YouTube videos and write books. And I was thinking to myself, so hold on. I would go off and do this for like ten years, because that's how much you need to plan to do it. I need to stop doing what I'm doing right now, because I would owe it to my investors and my team to not spend all day on the internet writing about stuff. And then I want to do it again. So it's reminding me of the story of this fisherman. There's one that goes [inaudible 00:20:08] there's the same thing of, you work really hard to do what you're doing right now. So I decided, let me just try giving this a go. [inaudible 00:20:14] Wait, what's the story of the fisherman? I think I know what you're talking about, but... [inaudible 00:20:18]…

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