There’s no shortage of advice on how to create a successful company and become fabulously wealthy, but not much is written about what happens after.
Loom co-founder Vinay Hiremath, who made an estimated Rs. 2,500 crore personally after selling his company to Atlassian for nearly a billion dollars, now says he’s grappling with what to do with his life. The 32-year-old has penned a blogpost titled “I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life”, which offers a fascinating insight into what founders go through after they’ve made life-changing amounts of money.
“Life has been a haze this last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally un-relatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it, and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic about life,” Hiremath says.
Hiremath says that since he’s sold his company, he’s looked at different ways to find meaning in life. For starters, he quit Atlassian and gave up an additional $60 million (Rs. 500 crore) he’d have made had he stayed on with the company. “What is the point of money if it not for freedom? What is your most scarce resource if not time?” he says, describing the thought process which made him come to the decision.
Hiremath then decided he wanted to start a robotics company. “I had been learning about robotics for quite some time and was positive I wanted to throw myself into giving computers arms and legs. I had come up with all the tag lines to delude myself into thinking this was my “life’s calling”,” he says. But he gave up on his plans after just two weeks of meeting investors. “At the end of the 2 weeks, I left feeling deflated and foolish. I didn’t want to start a robotics company…it started to dawn on me that what I actually wanted was to look like Elon, and that is incredibly cringe. It hurts to even type this out,” he writes.
Hiremath then says he felt rudderless and had no sense of direction. He spent the next 6 months traveling with his girlfriend to many beautiful places. But he says his own insecurities caused him to get into regular arguments with his girlfriend, and they ended up breaking up.
Hiremath’s moves became increasingly erratic after that. He says that without any prior training, he tried to climb a 6,800 ft high peak in the Himalayas. “It started to settle in how insane what I was doing was,” he says. “There were some rough patches. I got very hypoxic on one of my summits and had to repel down cliff faces while tripping out of my mind,” he says.
But Hiremath’s process of self discovery didn’t end there. After returning home, Hiremath joined Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast,” he said. But he said that he felt it wasn’t the most important thing he needed to focus on for himself, and left. Hiremath is now in Hawaii and is studying Physics. “The reason I tell myself is to build up my first principles foundation so I can start a company that manufactures real world things. It seems plausible, but I’m learning to just accept that I am happy learning physics. That’s the goal in and of itself. If it leads to nothing, that’s ok,” he says.
Hiremath says this his journey from making Rs. 2,500 crore to studying Physics in Hawaii has left him with some unanswered questions. “Why did I need to do the absolute most to reach this point? Why couldn’t I just leave Loom and say “I don’t know what I want to do next”? Why do I feel the need to only be on a journey if it’s grand? What is wrong with being insignificant? Why is letting people down so hard? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out,” he says.