EREPreneuring

[Quadalupe]

So you did it, you are ERE! To paraphrase The Good Book, a net worth you can ERE on *was* trivial to acquire. And thanks to your robust, frictionless Web of Goals (WoG), you can do a lot of meaningful, fun, frugal, healthy (etc) stuff for a long time. And for many that is enough.

But for some, their WoG is not yet at perfect tensegrity. They have certain ideas that they want to develop, but they cannot do that completely on their own. One option is to get a job in that area. A good solution for day trading with big $$$, becoming an astronaut or driving big rigs*. For other ideas, this might boil down to a hapless search to a company without TPS reports, 360 feedback forms, standups, sitdowns and work outings.

If only there was another way.

If only there was a group of people out there, with a proven track record of getting things done. Who are both high on ideation and on execution. I wonder where we could find them...

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In this topic I want to discuss with you the concept of EREpreneurship. ERE people coming together to do/build/perform cool stuff, because frankly, we can't help ourselves. If we happen to save the planet and/or make some money along the way, that is a nice incidental yield^H^H^H bonus. We don't have to work for a paycheck (because there won't be any), but we also don't have to deal with a lot of corporate bullshit. Or startup bullshit. Because: we are already fully vested and funded.

Is this a great/dangerous/terrible idea? Is this just volunteering with extra steps? What EREPreneuring would look like? Do you already have experience with this? Or some ideas that you want to EREpreneure on?

Some initial definitions to kick things off (all up for debate):

• EREpreneurship can be about business, but it does not have to be. As long the balance is more towards producing/creating as opposed to consuming, it's EREpreneurship.
  • Coming together to create zines (maybe to sell them or to give them away): EREpreneurship.
  • Coming together to smoke weed and eat pizza: not EREpreneurship.
  • Organizing EREfest: ???
• EREpreneurship should not be dependent on acquiring large swathes of other people's money/resources. Applying for grants, shilling for Series A, begging for boxes: it shouldn't be necessary (but it can help).
• EREpreneurship does not need to be with just ERE people. It might be more difficult, since by definition (?) the other people do see monetary yield as a necessary outcome. It is interesting to consider if working together with only ERE people will lead to a different approach to entrepreneuring.

What do you think?

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* though it might be interesting to think about how to solve this without a job. Maybe buying 3D Goggles and competing with a Swiss guy can be enough to satisfy this goal?

[AxelHeyst]

This is relevant to my interests. Thanks for the thread.

A few things come to mind:

- It's really nice being ERE (even though not quite FI yet) in a business venture. My non-ERE partners are hustling full time jobs and a need for the venture to throw off significant cashflow quickly, because they have normal expenses. I'm able to focus on long-term strategic moves because I don't need the venture to throw off cash for years.

- I could imagine possessing a WoG that I felt was indeed at perfect technical tensegrity, but nevertheless I felt a sense of lack or missing something.

That 'something missing' being the desire to build/create/explore/etc something outside of the bounds of my own WoG.

Arguably, if you feel like somethings missing, then you don't have a perfect tensegrity because you've got mis- or incompletely-aligned VALUE node in your WoG... but that is getting in the details of whether things like values, potential, capacity are within the WoG itself. The more I think about it the more I think they are...but that might be like an emergent phenomenon.

By that I mean, maybe at WL7 you could have a WoG of perfect technical tensegrity, and that's cool for a bit but then since all your needs are met (to riff on JnG's obsession) you start to wonder/wander about further aims, objectives, capacities, destiny, potential, and that wondering sort of creates out of nothing these new "value/potential" nodes in your WoG that are as-yet-unfulfilled, thus throwing your WoG out of tensegrity. I'm not arguing that this is an inevitable progression, just a potential progression.

- What about things you want to produce that DO require financial capital in excess of your FI stash? If you want to make an app or a social engagement all you need is a laptop and internet. If you want to build some bit of solarpunk infrastructure at a certain scale (coughcough), even after applying all the salvage-procurement / repurpose/upcycling praxis there is, I can think of projects of certain scale that need more seed $. Then the question becomes, OPM (other people's money) or self-fund with stash in surplus of FI? This is a question I'm spending a lot of time with right now.

Different strategies: 1) accumulate-to-FI+Seed Capital. 2) Start smaller and bootstrap, iterate up in scale. 3) OPM (warning!! you give up control when you take OPM!).

[7Wannabe5]

4) Or you could try to ride the venture you generate with your seed capital out to FI, because why are you investing in Elon's shit and not your own? (yeah, yeah, I know, diversification...blah, blah, blah.)

My answer to the OP question would be that I think on some level I've been doing this since I was producing musical theater events in the garage with my sisters at age 8. Most of my adult life I've been engaged in some kind of joint project at least at the level of "completely renovating an old house." Working for the man is what I do to get the roll for my next project. Although sometimes the line between "the man" and "the project" becomes a bit blurred. Which is why my mother feels like she has the right to say things to me like, "Some women ask for jewelry. You ask for acreage."

[jacob]

If only there was a group of people out there, with a proven track record of getting things done. Who are both high on ideation and on execution. I wonder where we could find them...

Where indeed ...

Lets see what we have done over the years:

An online forum/giant repository of knowledge that has been running for ~15 years
Multiple meetups on three different continents.
EREfest
ERE City North, now with 2.5 eremites having moved to the same place
ERE Marching Series
Several different MMGs
Appearances on each others podcasts, etc.
Helping to edit/comment on each others works.

I note two patterns here: Meeting in person tends to be brief (<1 week) + all the things done together are done online ("from home").

Therein, I think, lies the problem with entrepreneuring much beyond what has already been done. This is also why there has been an ongoing interest---but not enough---to create ERE City. It's probably going to take more than 2--3 people moving there to get critical mass for startups. I do think physical proximity is crucial; same reason why most startups happen around Silicon Valley instead of being spread all over the globe with simply having people connected to the internet.

I think a separate problem is that dealing with most eremites is very much like herding cats. First, many are not really interested in startups in the first place. Their dreams are elsewhere, like riding mountain bikes, exotic travel, or shooting down Swiss space ships. Insofar they want to lead, they are fine (and mostly capable of) doing everybody's job on their own (not great delegators). If they don't want to lead, it's hard to find a leader or a driver who wants to delegate. Most importantly, any kind of business/management plan has to be created by someone and most people here tend to be techies rather than managers. In other words, while I think---if I may keep generalizing---eremites are generally high on ideation and personal execution, I don't think collective execution or "managing people" is as high.

Initiative is also a pretty rare thing, not just here but also in the general population. There aren't that many who upon identifying an issue will actually take personal initiative and do something about it. The vast majority stand around waiting for someone else to take the first step and then maybe they'll join after much hemming and hawing ... and insofar they can find the time/get permission from their spouse/blabla. IOW, most people aren't really "on fire". I don't think being retired and mentally on "island time" helps either. In short, FIRE'd people aren't as hungry anymore.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Doing a kickstarter is on my bucket list. However, to support my points above, I spend less than 1% of my time thinking about it

[AxelHeyst]

I agree in principle with what Jacob said, that once you FIRE generally you aren’t going to be that hungry. I’m really hungry in my business venture right now… and I’m not FI yet. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be as hungry for this specific endeavor if I were already FI.

Trying to gather several post-FI probably not super hungry ERE people for an endeavor is going to be hard to execute unless the stoke stars align.

Maybe one method is to gather several *pre*-FI ERE people into an endeavor. Select for those still hungry *and* ERE-minded. It’d have to have a likely or assured yield of money. Different situations / cash flows could appeal to semi or slowERE types, or more risk-tolerant ERE types.

The next venture thing I want to do after current hustle ramps down would have to generate income to be sustainable/operate at the scale I want. I could totally see some preFI ERE people being interested in collaborating if it were a good fit.

[liberty]

I'm FI, but still hungry for more money -- and to "contribute to society" as they say here in Norway. Capital is contribution too, but I would like to contribute more, by working or selling products that people need. I do currently work, but I don't sell much. And I don't like the process of selling...

[sky]

One of the issues I face as a FI retired person is boredom. Currently I work on various projects which are either maintenance around the house or hobby type projects. Often these hobby activities cost money and in the end produce little of real value (although the skills learned are valuable).

In the past my focus has been on how to live comfortably with little money and low maintenance requirements. This has led to a low stress life of comfort, but leaves me with a lot of time to become bored.

The way to overcome boredom is to have some activity that is the focus of fascination. I would like to find a small scale "business" that would do better than break even and would require me to build a process and optimize it. It should not take up much space or require much inventory. Something that allows you to start small and reinvest to grow into something bigger.

It is difficult to find something because as retired FI, my willingness to put up with any BS is extremely low. I don't want to focus on negatives here, but there are a lot of things that I just don't want to be bothered with. I'm sure there are opportunities out there that I have rejected for one reason or another.

Over the past few months I have been playing a game which involves choosing a business and optimizing it for profit. It is an excellent game and I have enjoyed it. It absorbs a lot of my mental energy and makes me feel like I am building something. I would like to find something similar in real life, which creates value in real currency.

[daylen]

For a couple years now I have been in the process of building my own games/simulations. Mostly, this has been almost entirely out of a desire to create deep strategy games concerning large-scale societal patterns that I would actually enjoy playing and could continue to surprise me (as opposed to making money). Much harder said than done because I tend to figure out 95% of the concept and write 5% of the code before moving on to a richer, more emergent structure.. and on and on.. which I find enjoyable anyway to add rigor to contemplation.

I am not opposed to working with others, I wouldn't even mind letting others make almost all of the profit in proportion to how well they can actually complete and maintain projects. Being a strategic visionary coming up with novel game development paradigms is perhaps my "dream job" if I had to describe one. Given I have been a solo operation, I constrain myself by working entirely in 2D with abstract graphics. So, fairly small but not insignificant market given the rise of gaming as a hobby worldwide and nerds looking for a challenge.

[sky]

Do you have any public games?

[daylen]

Not yet. Still in discovery and constraint, ha. The space of possible games is huge as you can just keep embedding elemental game patterns within each other following certain rules of symmetry (balancing), asymmetry (leverage), and generative randomness. You can combine a topology of connectedness (e.g. open/closed space, network, grid, knot), some mechanism of agency that can dynamically alter the connectivity in some "meaningful" way, and an objective (if strategy as opposed to simulation). Explicitly defining the meaning is quite difficult and inherently constrains emergence, and so you are generally left trying to establish a relationship between the topology, agency, and objective such as to have implicit meaning (beauty, challenge, appropriate control/input, complexity that mirrors some aspects of the real world, etc.). I'll likely post on the forum if I manage to constrain the space enough to go beyond prototyping.

For instance, in chess, the board is an 8x8 grid topology, the pieces are agents with rules and starting positions, and the objective is checkmate.