CEO of Bulletproof Coffee shares why he left Silicon Valley and moved to Canada(businessinsider.com) |
CEO of Bulletproof Coffee shares why he left Silicon Valley and moved to Canada(businessinsider.com) |
He was making $250,000 salary + stock/benefits + double income with his physician wife. He owned a home, admitted he lived in "nice neighborhoods", sent both his children to private school, spent weekends at Tahoe, and who knows what else.
With all of this he says he felt "less than middle class".
I agree that it is a bit tone deaf.
Here's a stellar 2 bedroom house relatively near me: https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/01/everyones-shocked-toront...
I felt this way often when I worked in Finance. My and my wife's combined total income was great at >$200k, but it felt like tons of people were way ahead of me despite us being well ahead of the national average, especially for our ages. This felt even worse with the burden of student loans over our heads.
I bet that leaving the Valley was a great decision for them. A lot of these feelings went away when I left NYC as well.
That said, deciding to send their children to private school was 100% on them. My wife has several friends and acquaintances who teach at private schools and charters. They aren't necessarily better, curriculum wise.
by the way, bulletproof coffee tastes awful--synthetic and mealy-mouthed.
The concept, or at least some of them that he sells, are not snake oil. It's the profiting on the concept that is a bit gross.
Yeah, it's not snake oil, but like, it sure feels like it.
I was in SF when my child was young, but as soon as we started digging into the school enrollment processes, I moved to Lafayette and enrolled him there.
Lafayette was more expensive than Union City, but a better place to live and school, but perhaps not a place where a house could be as affordable.
That said, none of it would compare with a 32 acre farm near Vancouver, IMHO...
Edit: So I'm curious why I'd be downvoted for this. This guy is truly hand-wavy crazy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhElaGCZVU - warning: could be considered animal cruelty.
While Vancouver real estate is expensive (largely due to foreign buyers, many of whom do not live in the properties), rental isn't as bad, and Vancouver Island or other areas outside metro Vancouver aren't particularly bad. If you're already willing to accept a Cessna ride to civilization, you can definitely find something cheap.
Las Vegas or Texas would have been cheaper, though.
They sell collagen for $40/lb. Collagen is the cheapest, crappiest animal protein source and is incomplete. I bet their markup is over 1000%.
$23.50 for a 16oz bottle of coconut oil with unsubstantiated claims.
> Brain Octane oil is rapidly absorbed by your body and converted into brain-fueling, fat-burning ketone energy.
Fat isn't converted to ketones unless your body is low on carbs. If you are on a low carb diet the fat source doesn't matter. A ketone is a ketone.
Also he hasn't built a "$100 million empire" as the article claims. On LI he states that Bulletproof has a valuation of $100 million.
That leads me to another point. Why do investors keep putting money into these garbage supplement companies? Stop funding quackery.
Occam's razor says the investment pays off, not all investors have issues with the placebo business.
https://www.point2homes.com/CA/Home-For-Sale/BC/Qualicum-Bea...
It's a bit of a disaster, really.
And that does not cover dental or "other" items like physio.
No highly paid tech employee is paying 10s of thousands of dollars for Healthcare.
The employer is the one who pays that, and the Employee is probably paying close to nothing.
But I wish people would stop spreading the myth that Canadian taxes are necessarily significantly higher than American ones. The highest federal income tax bracket in Canada is taxed at 33% [1], which is very comparable to US rates.
Certainly, provincial taxes do tend to push things a little higher, and by comparison there are US states with very low or non-existent tax rates. But if you live in SF or New York, with their high state and city taxes, your income tax burden would be barely any higher in Vancouver or Toronto.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150401050939/https://www.texas...
But the actual concept of taking in more fats, versus carbohydrates in a keto way, is not. The science is not particularly mixed.
He had 1 good idea, and then marketed it to spread it. Then tried to monetize it, and through that had no more good ideas, so became more and more snake oil in an attempt to duplicate the success of the first good idea.
After 6 years of residency, he can then apply for citizenship.
Logic and school districts don't usually have anything to do with one another.
So, rural land on Vancouver island is more affordable in the sense that there are less economic opportunities that come with that land, so the land costs less to buy. Which might be a good tradeoff for somebody who doesn't need to be near a job, but is not super useful to the majority of people who do.
Healthcare is a disaster in the US.
It also makes sense for richer people if the living conditions are better because people poorer than you have a safety net so you aren't impacted by their social problems, or if, e.g., universal government benefits like healthcare end up being better value than what is privately available elsewhere, perhaps because of economies of scale, or because you are effectively a co-owner of a monopsony purchaser, or because the safety net for the poorer people supplying the service means total labor costs can be less without them living in unacceptable security.
Well, you are impacted in that your taxes are higher.
I'm not saying that is a bad thing, btw, just wanted to point out that the social safety net isn't really a major consideration for wealthy people. Heck, my wife is Canadian and we considered moving to Canada a while ago—and we aren't even wealthy, just middle to upper middle class—but the math just didn't make sense. Much lower salaries, much higher taxes, plus insane real estate market. It was a much better deal to say in the U.S. and buy our own safety net.