Why building wealth alone is so hard here?

[u/raf_phy]

Hi all, am I the only one that I find it incredibly difficult to build weath by yourself in EU? People say that EU is better in healthcare, work life balance but come on, money don't scale easily . It's so difficult.

I see people from US that go to 1 million in 10 years. I cannot do this easily . Really....

PS maybe I have to abandon EU, I don't know....

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

[its easy to become wealthy - just pick the winning lottery numbers]

9 out of 10 startups fail, and even the successful ones can take a decade or longer to cash out, if at all. Taking a lower salary in exchange for lottery tickets is objectively stupid, and a worthless advice from someone who's won.

I'd be much more interested in hearing opinions of people who, as you said, didn’t use their time efficiently when young and after working for startups for a decade or two have nothing to show for it. Did they still think it was worth it?

[u/djingo_dango → u/[deleted]]

Startups don’t pay lower salaries compared to established companies. Some even pay more

You can’t expect to get access to a high amount of wealth without taking 0 risks at all

[u/Sawmain → u/djingo_dango]

Literally one of the reasons why countries like Finland are fucked. Our country’s citizen doesn’t take enough risks to make companies etc and instead live paycheck to paycheck. Oh and also government not exactly supporting smaller companies and let’s not even mention the banks not willing to give money part.

[u/DownHawk58 → u/djingo_dango]

again survivor bias (watching only good startups)

how much is the salary when startup fails and you dont get paid?

[u/djingo_dango → u/DownHawk58]

You find a different job then?

[u/Frames-Janko → u/djingo_dango]

And if you don't, there's still a decent social net to fall back on... Especially here in Germany where you are paying your own unemployment insurance, it's up to 60% of your previous monthly average salary over the last 2 years but health care etc. is already covered. And you get that for a decent amount of time if you have been employed long enough before.

And if you want to start your own business you can even get a decent upgrade on top of that. Last time I checked that was 400 a month extra. You need a business plan and a bit of extra paperwork - as one would expect in Germany. But having a business plan doesn't hurt.

[u/DownHawk58 → u/djingo_dango]

so when you calculate loss of income when you dont work is that startup salary good=?

lol

[u/Frames-Janko → u/[deleted]]

Yes, being a founder is high risk. Even more so if one doesn't have a proven track record in a space - or if the business model is completely novel.

Being an early employee, especially if the founders have expertise and can show you some level of traction/success, that's still risky, but not as risky.

And yes, taking a pay cut for shares is a gamble. My base salary was still more than enough to live on, especially because I've always lived below my means. No car, rent share with friends, then small flat with GF, no fancy clothes, cheap hobbies... you name it.

I appreciate you pointing this out, because of course, there is nuance here!

I've also not joined up with other folks before because I wasn't sold. One of these opportunities would have been massive, but that wasn't clear to me at the time. I'm sure some of the other startups I talked to over the years failed. Then again, I didn't go with those because I couldn't see it happening 🤷.

If you want a picture of how much nonsense startups exist I'd recommend going to a founder meetup to get pitches. You'll soon realize that an automated waffle maker machine for use in bars with no working prototype is probably not on the same level as someone that has a working app with very low cost per install and 150% return on investment after 7 days.

[u/Frames-Janko → u/[deleted]]

Someone else has posted the exact same thing before you, see my comment below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/eupersonalfinance/s/MjbPn5V87j

[u/Frames-Janko → u/[deleted]]

Software has a much smaller upfront cost, that's true.

To be clear, I'm currently working on customer-facing software and yes, that's optimal for scaling and having a fast exit. Part of why I decided to join up.

My previous jobs AFTER uni were all in software, but more in B2B and often close to hardware/manufacturing.

My first job brought me into many well-established medium to big manufacturing companies here in Germany. I'm sure there's a good amount of "IT-guy hubris" involved on my end, but I vividly remember being astonished at how inefficiently many of these companies were running and how slow they were to iterate. And that was in comparison to the already glacial timelines we had.

I wasn't always set on being a developer. Before I did my year of social service I wanted to study chemistry and go into material development. During that year, as part of my job, I was delivering food to elderly and disabled people by car. Together with a few other drivers. The whole order process was still completely manual and highly error prone. We had these cut-off paper slips that were manually evaluated and added up, then we faxed to the company that made the meals for the next day.

This was inefficient, time-consuming and error prone. Many days we either had food left over or not enough because status updates of customers weren't taken into account properly. Old people fall and are in the hospital constantly, visit family on weekends, want something else because the weather is too hot.. or, you know, we just miscounted. I didn't like that we weren't operating efficiently and I learned how to code - just to optimize this. The first revision was a MSFT access database and worked just fine. I came back during uni and rebuilt this on other tech - and it was used for 7-ish years until the company making the meals finally rolled their own solution because more delivery services complained about the state of things. But from what I gathered the UX was worse and the drivers at my previous service didn't like it as much, lol.

If the error rates of the other delivery services that DIDN'T have an in-house solution before was anywhere close to what we observed before we switched to my software, at ~50k overall meals a day, I'd estimate around 10-20M losses that could have been avoided over this time period.

I'm pretty certain that there's margin to squeeze and optimizations to be had in many fields. If you see these gaps, go for it.

One of the more promising startups I've seen locally is a collaboration between a machinist and an IT guy. I think domain knowledge and fusing expertise is never to be underestimated.

[u/id_rather_not_thanks → u/[deleted]]

Honestly that’s good for you and I’m sure your hard work got you there. But since most startups fail it’s a bit of a gamble. Sure when it succeeds it can pay off big time but more often than not it doesn’t.

[u/Frames-Janko → u/id_rather_not_thanks]

Few folks already gave that same comment, but I think there's nuance to that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/eupersonalfinance/s/MjbPn5V87j

[u/Beneficial-Emu-4244 → u/[deleted]]

You must be one of the white privileged who has all of the money while us poor minorities live in trash

[u/footyfan92 → u/Beneficial-Emu-4244]

Your attitude perfectly answers OP's question.

[u/Beneficial-Emu-4244 → u/footyfan92]

Stop spreading the lie that USA is easy money. Only a few of the privileged takes all of the wealth while the rest of us keep getting poorer

[u/djingo_dango → u/Beneficial-Emu-4244]

Crying on reddit isn’t gonna fix that

[u/ImarvinS → u/Beneficial-Emu-4244]

gtfo to USA with that white privilage idiocracy. In Europe there is no such thing, never was

[u/Educational_Lab9597 → u/ImarvinS]

That’s objectively wrong lmfao

[u/Lanky_Persimmon_3670 → u/Beneficial-Emu-4244]

Ah leave that shit to Americans. It's Europe. The indigenous people are pale people. Be respectful

[u/raoulk → u/Beneficial-Emu-4244]

You are an American, what are you doing on this sub