Escaping the Cube: The Smartest People Are Disappearing from W-2 and How Much $ You Can Get
Level 2 - Value Investor
Welcome Avatar! Things have gotten eerily quiet since demand has slowed post tariffs. Tough for mega corporations to make new headcount commitments when they are seeing a ticking time bomb ahead of them (2.5 months until the 90 days is up).
Meanwhile, the smart people are slowly but surely plodding away even if they are seeing temporary margin compression. It has been fun to see people claim that Internet/E-com is dead and that tariffs are here to say. This is exactly how losers think. Another excuse to never try anything and blame the system.
The smart people know the system will always have leaks and cracks. Best to slowly chip away and if you can make money now, how much would you make when people start spending “for real” again? You know the answer. Millions.
Good Luck Fading This. In the Mid-2000s it Was Only 10% of Time Spent Online.
Part 1: How to Know if Someone is Planning to Disappear
If you’re reading this you’re either going to take action or you’re going to to be stuck working a job/career you hate for 40 years with an unlikely retirement. The days of retiring with $1,000,000 are long gone (source). Plug all your numbers into excel, account for inflation and it is painfully obvious that real wages *post-tax* are not keeping up with the cost of living in the USA.
We’re Sure You’ve All Seen a Variation of This
Guess what. With the internet you can now join the “CEO” trajectory. All you have to do is build equity in your own ventures. While you’ll *Smile and Nod* at work to keep the prison guards happy, in reality you will stop playing the corporate game: LinkedIn gone. Happy Hour meet ups, gone. Never the #1 employee.
What are they actually doing? They are taking all their savings and they are: 1) building a basic online business targeting women, 2) they are taking calculated risks with real estate projects, 3) they are investing in asymmetric assets - crypto, tech stocks, bio tech and 4) they are eventually leaving to tax havens when they are truly “untouchable” rich.
Another good tell-tale sign is that they *don’t* complain about the compensation difference of CEOs. Instead they know that they are slowly becoming the CEO of their own smaller enterprise. Most just see a chart like the above and quit/complain about the system (good luck because AI doesn’t complain).
What are They Doing to Disappear
They are playing in the grey area. Instead of breaking laws like pure criminals, they are breaking rules. Massively different. While you’re not supposed to bring a separate laptop to work, they are smart enough to know that no one will care if their performance is good. Hit your sales quota? Great fire up the laptop.
You get the exact same laptop as the one provided to you and a basic hotspot connection to your phone. Good enough for day one. If you get bigger you just upgrade the wifi.
There is no yelling, no intensity, just a quiet slow fade. The guys are typically known as being the weird ones in the office (revenue generator) or they are ultra well liked and everyone know their performance is mediocre. One of the two.
While the peers are watching CNBC, these guys are: 1) forming a basic LLC, 2) testing demand on META, 3) looking up Real Estate regulations in their city and 4) helping other people sell products via affiliate marketing. Instead of getting a second job, they are double dipping on their time. We all know 99% of people don’t actually work 40+ hours a week. Half that time is wasted.
If you’re not playing the game as listed in this short section, you are cooked. Sorry.
The days of getting multiple promotions and working in one place? Dead. Less than 0.1% will actually pull that off.
AI tools are flattening organization structures and the vast majority of people will make between $150-250K for life.
How to Find the Trends?
We’ve already done the hand holding with how to choose a niche (source) and how to build a basic audience (source). While things do change they stay the same as well.
We’ve highlighted a few trends we expect in the next few years (hint women will always spend money) and other than that the process is repeatable. Once you know how to choose the niche it’s just the same process on repeat (what they don’t teach you in school is that your failure rate on a biz is not 90%.
Perhaps the first failure rate is 90% but once you succeed with *just one* we’d say your failure rate drops to 20% or so.
How Long Does it Take? The average is 3 years. A true obsessive talented genius probably does it in one year. The people with limited skills but great work ethic? 5-years. The majority are typically somewhere in the middle there.
You can get to financial stability (not wealthy) in about 3 years. Once you repeat this process you’ll be financially independent before your old Boss remembers gets his next promotion.
If you don’t try at all? Inflation, taxes, and lifestyle creep will keep you in a golden handcuffs until you’re mid 40s-early 50s. Then you’ll be structurally unemployed the moment the Company has a reduction in force (RIF).
You’re free to give up just know that the answer is already in front of you. The internet won - people will spend way more time online than in the real world. The government is already bloated with no ability to turn back the clock. The schools are broken with no classes on personal finance, taxes, business structures - but classes on “gender ideology”. The currency is a meme.
The new game is this: 1) scale a biz, 2) reinvest into asymmetry or forced appreciation and 3) never quit your free money - career/job - until you’re making 2x your net income from your biz vs. current net income from W-2
Majority of people fade these three basic things and unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work out well for them. We know a large number of unemployed Investment Bankers in their 40s who have net worths below $1M at this point. We also know a ton of career associates/execution VPs who never make more than ~$350-450K (*pre-tax*) and are on the chopping block every year. When they get laid off they typically take a 50% reduction in comp (yes, back down to ~$200K in HCOL areas in some type of corporate role with no chance of going back to Wall Street).
In short, it’s basically the only option now.
Full Escape
Typically, the guy who escapes will be in contact for a short period. Next thing you know they are in full disappear mode: tax haven (Dubai, Singapore, PR - Act 60, Panama etc.), spinning up another biz line and generally changing their entire rolodex.
Usually takes about 3 years (odd that everything comes in threes) and then *poof* never heard from again. The spread between the old working life and the life as an entrepreneur is just too big. Life paths fork when someone quits and they begin running 100mph in the opposite direction. After 3 years of that, no one can relate.
The General Premise: Here, the goal is self reliance to the best of your ability. Everyone starts somewhere. The goal is to build a life that no one can take from you and control your time (time rich = no boss).
Despite the near-term pain caused by politicians today? The future is still the same.
Digital Immersion and the Sovereign Individual.
![The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7055bb93-6ded-4c36-a73c-7cce2a1ce5bc_1650x2513.jpeg "The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age [Book]")
Required Reading on this side of the web
Part 2: How Rich Can You Get?
The real answer is no one knows.
We’re of the belief that quite literally anyone can get into the low-mid 7-figures. This is significantly more than any career will get you (outside the rare exceptions to the rule). AI is taking over and companies are going through flattening/wage compression.
People who say “anyone can get to $10M+” are just full of it. To get to those numbers? Requires luck, insane talent or both. Even Elon Musk was miraculously saved from bankruptcy several times.
Therefore we can outline what you’ll need to do based on quality of life expectations. The vast majority are not going to be flying private or driving lambos. Instead we’d look at it in terms of quality of life benchmarks:
On the Right Path: You are in this category if you have 2 sources of income. A $100,000 E-trade account generating $10,000 a year is not an income stream. An income stream is something where you put in effort to make more money. If someone makes $100,000 in a W-2 and $24,000 online, while another person makes $150,000 with no interest in other income streams… we will bet everything we have on person 1 getting wealthy. The second person is ahead *for now* but is playing a short term game. In 5-10 years person 1 will earn many multiples of person 2. No matter how many 5-star reviews he gets in the corporate world
Entry Level Set: Low 7-figures we’ll just use $2,000,000. At this point you will be stress free if you run the playbook since you will be able to *leave* high cost of living areas. Lets be honest here. Living in manhattan for life in a studio isn’t exciting. At age 22 it is but at age 45 it isn’t. You’re going to “buy” the ability to live in a low tax state, own a basic 1,500-2,000 home and control your time. This is probably what 99.99% of people will be happy with.
We’ll die knowing that practically everyone in the world would take a 20% haircut to whatever they make if they could earn it by themselves with no boss.
No Longer Look at Prices: This is where talent or luck come into play. If you can get to this level you’re either talented or you got a little bit of a luck windfall (daily reminder that lady luck only helps people who don’t need luck).
The quality of life difference jumps tremendously. Unlike entry level set someone with $3-4M and a paid off house is basically doing whatever they like whenever they like. The only time they worry about the cost of something is when it’s in the $10,000+ range
Phantom: Typically has no schedule, lives in a tax haven and generally avoids interactions with new people. “This is my boss’s car” - Jason Applebaum
Here you’re well past 8-figures and if the person is being honest some luck was involved. A huge revenue year from going viral, an extreme euphoria multiple on the sale of an asset etc. In short, the person was right about the future but it exceeds expectations by 10x sending wealth into the stratosphere.
In Short, anyone $2-3M, Some talent or luck $5-6M and Talent + Luck? Sky is the limit.
How Possible Is It?
Well considering we’re driving traffic *for free* for people in the jungle to scale up, we’re going to say yes. There is now a wide range of success from $5-10K a month to multi-million dollar valuations. In fact, one person recently sent us their one day income which was $7,000 (he can quote tweet this if he wants to disclose).
Gator/Fawn Dental
Yukon doing supplements
Biohacker doing all kinds of medical products
Ox doing fitness *and* a bunch of vice products
BowTiedTiger has an ungodly number of business lines from med spas to real estate
BowTiedBroke basically purchased the entire state of Tennessee (joke)
RampHealth was spawned out of a jungle account that got incorrectly banned
Instead of just words on a screen, you can go and check out all of this before giving up. We’re probably going to do a revamp of the smaller accounts soon. Until then, please, go start something today.
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.
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