I have known perhaps a hundred people go through this process. When Sun went public it made a bunch of people "rich"[1], when Sun released Java and the stock split 8 times and climbed over $100 it made still more people rich, when NetApp stock crossed a $100/share in the dot com days still more people crossed into that line of not having to work any more. The total number of people is going to be higher than that.
Some stop working, some continue working, and some decide to get together and create a startup incubator :-). Pretty much everyone I know that has gone through that process though are engineers. And engineers got to be engineers because they had a passion for building things or solving problems. Many people who have been engineers for a few years also realize that a group of talented engineers can solve bigger problems as a collective than any single engineer can. So the thing that really gives you satisfaction, solving some huge problem, can be best accomplished on a team.
There are three ways you can do that, you can work on a volunteer basis, you can start a company, or you can join an existing company. I've been playing around with some ideas around an experimental fourth way but so far have not found the right balance for that.
[1] Rich is such a subjective term but we'll use the article definition of having enough savings to never work again.
It tends to be people that enjoy their work. I know a retired TV comedy writer in his 80's that continues to meet with, edit for and make industry introductions for young writers just because he loves storytelling and comedy writing.
I agree with richiea that it is people who enjoy what they do and even though it has provided them the means to choose not to do it any more, they continue because they like it.
I'm the kind of person who writes code for fun. I like solving puzzles and coding is the ultimate puzzle solving game, not only do you get to solve the puzzle you get to make up the pieces you are going to use to solve the puzzle and so can solve it in infinitely many ways. Paid or not I'll spend my "free" time writing code and designing circuits.
Its something along the lines of a collective. Trying to capture the feeling/environment of PARC. At its simplest everyone pitches in to cover facilities costs and shared healthcare under enough legal cover that it can be considered a "business" but entirely employee owned.
Oddly the challenge can be where do excess profits go. (I have to presume that some of the projects the group or subgroups work on would achieve a modicum of income or value) trying to have a plan for that.
This collective style has been particularly popular amongst independent coffee roasters in recent years. See, for example, The Pulley Collective in Brooklyn [1].
At the University, Stanford’s vision of an education to support worker cooperatives never became established. To a large degree, this might be due to Stanford’s death two years after the University opened.
[...]
Leland Stanford’s vision was not only forgone, but over time was entirely forgotten by the Stanford University community. This forgetting appears to have been fairly rapid, occurring within the first decade of the University. Undoubtedly most of the faculty and administrators knew of Stanford’s wishes, but they ceased to speak and write of them, and thus the knowledge was not transmitted.
This is very cool information. It's too bad his vision never came to fruition. On the contrary, Stanford grads seems really bought into the capitalistic system.
Thank you for that link. The idea that I and some other folks have been bouncing around is more along the lines of a shared R&D facility where members have a place to work, common areas to chat, facilities providing (and hosting) resources, with high speed access to the Internet. Badged 24 hour access and reasonable security.
That is in some ways like a maker space where paying your dues not only gave you membership it also gave you an office, shared access to expensive equipment, and medical/dental benefits. The stuff a "real" job gives you but without the (now unnecessary) salary.
The presumption is that the work would yield economic returns and if so, those returns would go back into the organization to offset the cost of membership. Of course if the cost of membership became negative then you'd effectively have an entirely employee owned corporation and that is where things get different. Some of the people I've talked to about this concept have created very valuable things in the past and they expect to again, if they did that in the collective's space how does that work? Does all that value flow to everyone, even people who didn't participate? How about to people who did but were only tangentially influential in the outcome. That is the "success disaster" that one has to create plans for so that what happens at that point has already been agreed to by everyone and we don't start suing each other.
There are other models, places like law offices which share expenses. Things like movie studios which essentially do a vfork(2) to create an entity to "own" a production and the results of that production, groups like the Royal Society (although I've been cautioned against creating something along those lines), and alternate forms of venture incubating[1]. There are interesting examples to look at like Willow Garage to see what worked and what didn't.
[1] One thought was to have this group of seasoned engineers get a project off the ground and proven then hire in a team to be the company, transition it to the team and move on to the next thing.
Some stop working, some continue working, and some decide to get together and create a startup incubator :-). Pretty much everyone I know that has gone through that process though are engineers. And engineers got to be engineers because they had a passion for building things or solving problems. Many people who have been engineers for a few years also realize that a group of talented engineers can solve bigger problems as a collective than any single engineer can. So the thing that really gives you satisfaction, solving some huge problem, can be best accomplished on a team.
There are three ways you can do that, you can work on a volunteer basis, you can start a company, or you can join an existing company. I've been playing around with some ideas around an experimental fourth way but so far have not found the right balance for that.
[1] Rich is such a subjective term but we'll use the article definition of having enough savings to never work again.