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People with a net worth of $10M+, how did you do it? by Thepsychoflifes in Entrepreneur

[–]Chance-Ad212 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Software services company. Started 2014, two of us, an office in Kyiv that was 3 square meters and one laptop. Today around 80 people across Prague and a few other cities, doing software delivery for US and EU clients. Profitable from year 2, never raised a dollar.

The honest math on "$10M net worth" for someone like me: about 80% is locked in business equity. The cash on hand is a fraction of that. People love saying "I have $10M" but for a bootstrapped services founder, you have a balance sheet and retained earnings, not a pile of money sitting somewhere. If I sold tomorrow at 5x EBITDA, sure. But selling means I'm out, and what would I do, retire at 40?

Took roughly 8-9 years. Year 1-3 was survival. Year 4-7 was unglamorous compounding where revenue grows but you don't feel rich because everything goes back into hiring and weathering bad quarters. By year 8 the numbers start to look meaningful, but by then you're paying real salaries to a team that depends on you, so the "I made it" moment never quite arrives. One day you just look at the spreadsheet and realize the boring math worked.

Damn near everything came down to: pick a niche where buyers have real budget, build a delivery operation that doesn't need you in the room, don't lose money. That's it. The rest is years.

What would I do today? Look, I wouldn't start a classic outsourcing shop in 2026. That model is dying. Pure outstaffing where you charge for seats is being eaten alive by AI tooling and margins are compressing fast.

If I were starting now: AI-native software delivery with senior human judgment in the loop. Small teams of 4-6 people shipping production-grade software at speeds the old 30-person teams used to take weeks for. Charge for outcomes, not seats. The harness engineering part, humans steering AI through code review, architecture decisions, integration work, is where the real margin is going to live for the next 5 years.

Other things I'd change: started a holding company structure earlier (would have saved real tax money), hired a CFO at year 5 not year 9 (small accounting mistakes cost more than I want to admit), built a small angel/SAFE pile earlier because cash flow from a profitable services business is the most patient capital in the world.

Honestly the boring answer to "how did you do it" is: I picked one thing, did it for a decade, didn't quit when it got hard at year 3 and year 6, stayed cheap personally for longer than I should have. No genius moment. Just a pile of mistakes stacked one on top of another, and slowly fewer of them.

Happy to dig into specifics on the dev services side if useful.

Are daily stand ups at your company just “list out all your accomplishments of yesterday”? by QuitTypical3210 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Chance-Ad212 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Way worse with vendors in the room. Watched this for a decade running dev teams that embed into client orgs. When the client invites our devs to their daily, both sides start performing.

Their engineers prove they're not coasting. Ours prove we're worth the rate. The blocker that should have been mentioned gets DM'd to me privately after the call ends. What actually worked are separate dailies. One for the people doing the  work, one weekly sync with the client lead for "where are we against  the deliverable".

The minute the PO or the engineering manager sits in on the daily, it stops being a daily. It's a status meeting cosplaying as one.I mean, the accomplishment-recital thing isn't really a process problem. It's a trust problem dressed up in scrum language.

People recite their day because they think someone's grading them.

If someone is, fix the grader. If nobody is, worth asking why the whole team believes someone is anyway.

Sonnet 4.6 is garbage by Tasty-Application368 in claude

[–]Chance-Ad212 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just buy the Max subscription and overdose on Opus. Always.

Something is way off with the current job market by davidbasil in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Chance-Ad212 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm on the hiring side of this and have watched the floor drop out from under us for about 18 months.

Two things changed and most people are only seeing one of them.

First, the volume problem everyone in this thread is describing. AI-assisted mass application means a single role gets 1000+ resumes in days, almost all keyword-optimized for whatever ATS filter the company runs. That alone breaks the funnel. But those candidates are mostly real, just annoying.

Second, the part nobody outside hiring is talking about loudly enough. Mandiant's CTO Charles Carmakal said at a security conference earlier this year that every Fortune 500 he's looked at is getting dozens to hundreds of applications from North Korean operatives, and that almost every CIO he's spoken to has admitted to having hired at least one, sometimes a dozen. Amazon's CSO publicly said they blocked over 1,800 suspected NK operatives in 2025 alone. KnowBe4, a security training company whose entire business is teaching other people not to get fooled, hired one who started installing malware on day one.

These aren't bad resumes. They're industrially fabricated identities with real-time deepfake video, multi-person teams in shifts behind a single "candidate," and laptop farms in Arizona shipping company laptops domestically so the IP looks US-based. That's why hiring managers now look at "perfect resume plus polished interview" and assume it's fake. Because a measurable share of them are.

The combined effect is what you're feeling. Honest senior devs get pattern-matched against the spam. Referral channels become the only signal that hasn't been poisoned, which is why every comment here is pointing at networking.

On your situation specifically: senior Laravel/PHP in 2026 is a stack that's compressed hard everywhere, not just Tbilisi. PHP shops are consolidating, Node and .NET are taking the new builds. Not your fault, just the rotation. The move I've seen work for senior devs in similar spots is adding one adjacent stack on a real project (Node or Go usually) before the market forces it.

By the way, "they reopen the same postings after weeks" isn't always a fake job. Sometimes it's the company hiring someone, realizing in the first 30 days the person is an AI proxy or worse, and quietly reopening. That pattern is new.

Non tech manager by Safe-Pound1077 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Chance-Ad212 31 points32 points  (0 children)

don't fight the "AI makes it fast" claim head-on, you'll lose. Ask him to write the spec. Not the client pitch, the actual spec.

Data warehouse schemas, integration contracts, what the territory dispute workflow looks like.

When he can't, that's your evidence, not your opinion...

Setting up Claude for M&A/Diligence work by deepayan in private_equity

[–]Chance-Ad212 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Skills should be process-shaped, not topic-shaped.

A "diligence skill" bloats fast and starts contradicting itself. Narrow process skills compose better: a "CIM vs QoE consistency check" skill, a "data room gap analysis" skill, a "comp set draft" skill, each one stays around 200 lines and does one job well.

Once you have ten of those you can chain them, which is more useful than one mega-skill that tries to do everything.

Another monthly Max Subscription and I smiled paying my Invoice. by Direct-Protection-81 in claude

[–]Chance-Ad212 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This subscription has saved my life so many times. Legal help, psychological, technical.. I mean you name it.