Read twenty as a precursor.
It's been a decade since my last post on this topic. The last ten years have been focused on making myself financially independent. This decade I've established myself. In my professional life, I've:
- Graduated from college in three years
- Joined the technology industry as a software engineer
- Advanced to become a team lead, having led and hired tens of software engineers
- Had two IPOs: Shift Technologies, Inc. ($SFT) & Amplitude, Inc. ($AMPL)
- And one acquisition (Pandora to SiriusXM)
In my personal life, I've:
- Married my wife
- Purchased our first home
- Had our first child
With all the above, I'm proud to say I could be financially independent today. While I'm not leaving the industry right now, in a few years we'll hit our overall financial goals and be free to work on whatever we'd like. This will conclude the first part of my plan outlined in twenty.
When I was twenty, I believed my path would include founding a larger, likely venture-backed, company. I have not done that in an effort to ensure success toward my financial freedom goal. This is a less risk, but also less reward choice. Because of this, I may choose to continue down the entrepreneurial path, should I need to self-fund my goals around seeding the universe with life, which would be a resource-intensive feat.
I reaffirm my life's goal to protect life by spreading it throughout the universe. I continue to believe this is the greatest good one can do. This is not something I have spent the last ten years directly focused on, instead I've indirectly spent time focused on it building up the funds to allocate my time toward it, but it is something I will begin to spend my time on in the next ten years. Looking forward, if my twenties were about establishing myself, especially professionally, I believe the theme of my thirties might be entrepreneurship after having built up the funds to take full ownership of my time.
As I've become a dad, this goal has expanded to also mean protecting the life of my children and ensuring they have great lives. My children are my legacy and family is everything. I believe I have a sort of dual goal now, where I am to achieve the goal of spreading and protecting life, all while setting my kids up for success. I see this as a form of guardrail against spending too much time working toward this original goal that adds an important balance in my life. Creating this Kriebel family legacy, through our descendents, is important to me and something I intend to build for the rest of my life.
I hope to keep my ambition high. I've achieved great things in the last ten years, but I need truly one of one outcomes to achieve my goals. In order to make achieving my goals more possible, creating more time for myself is prudent. Since I've been twenty-eight, I've been focused on health longevity. I believe I've invested my money wisely, but time is more valuable than money. By focusing on health, I believe you can create more time for yourself (twenty to thirty additional years at time of writing). These extra decades, and hopefully more with advancements, are important since my goals are very long term so this has become another important focus for me.
Here's to a life well lived and the next ten years. I hope when I write forty, I will write about the great things achieved and the impact that has had on the world, rather than just myself.