SF Is Full of 26-Year-Old Deca-Millionaires: A Founder's Guide to Not Chasing the 0.001%
brandon_galang · x · 2026-10-15
Core point: don't benchmark yourself against extreme outliers
- The original post (Ashugarg) notes San Francisco is crawling with 26-year-old deca-millionaires, with an extreme gap between haves and have-nots. Stories of sudden wealth are everywhere and fuel FOMO and anxiety.
- For founders it's worse: you're grinding to land your first 10 customers while hearing a two-year-old company just sold for billions, so it's easy to wonder "what am I doing wrong?"
- The answer is simple: this only happens to the 0.001%. Very few engineers make a quarter-billion dollars and very few startups get bought for $2 billion — but those are the stories we hear, so they become everyone's benchmark.
Quoting author Brandon Galang's personal take
- He roundtripped a fortune during the Web3 era and took years to recover career-wise, mentally and in his relationships, so the post hits close to home.
- His advice: don't compare yourself to the outliers of outliers — it only leads to suffering even when you get the very things you always wanted.
- Get very clear on what you value and why, and hold true to that as you fly closer and closer to the sun.
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