You have lived a very sheltered life.

You've also now demonstrated that you'll drop everything - that investor money, staff, customers, etc, because you don't like something. How will potable water investors react knowing this story? Part of being successful is sticking through with something.

"How does a liquidity event really make a big difference?" If he was really going to exit at $200MM, I'm assuming a decent portion would have gone to him. Having a bank of, say, $10MM should be more than enough to start his potable water business without having to go to investors to get things started the next time (assuming, that is, he believes enough in it to invest a chunk of his own money, not just someone else's).

I'm dreaming for a day when I can start a business that installs high powered vacuum suction motors and large hoses into 20 foot utility box trucks so I can help clean the billions of tons of trash that plague our cities.

When I had time I created a hobby of cleaning up small forests and unclaimed land from trash. I'd show up in a green construction vest so people thought I was official and didn't ask questions and would bag all the trash I could find and weighed the bags on a scale. I've got an excel sheet with all my stats. I've picked up over 570 lbs of trash to date. Just in wrappers, McDonalds cups, styrofoam. It's heart breaking to see an area trashy 5 months after I cleaned it up. I stopped doing it because I started wishing death and destruction to the people who littered. It made me angry and bitter towards humanity. I was picking up its trash and it didn't give a damn. I try to ignore it but every time I see trash on the side of the road a part of me keeps saying, "You should invent something that makes it easier to clean that up, think of how clean the whole world could be". The little voice keeps saying "Imagine a giant movable vaccum cleaner mounted on a truck with large hoses sticking out. It could work. Just try.". I can't stop thinking about it.

Your story has actually inspired me to try to go ahead and pursue that dream. If it's one thing tax payers are willing to pay for it's less trash in their neighborhood.

Anyone interested shoot me an email chris at norcophoenix dot com. I know an electrician, a guy who knows where to order the trucks from, and some really cheap office space for startups. I'm in St. Louis Missouri btw.

And then..

>>But my girlfriend challenged this: “How does selling a consumer app company help you disrupt the potable water market?” She was right, and I knew it.

In the same way Bill Gates can solve problems like Polio, Hunger and Poverty by using his fortune. You need money to solve the world's problems, Is this really so hard to understand?

If you have no money you can't solve your own problems. Let alone the world's problems. Without money you will be left working crazy hours to solve your own miniscule problems which aren't relevant beyond house's front door.

You were right there, if you had sold that start up for $200 million. You could take your cut, then spend rest of your life focusing your time, energy and passion on the problems you are interested to solve without worrying about mortgage, debts or anything.

So you decided to shed away your chances of success and the financial capacity to back up the projects you believe in +5 years, +10 years, +15 years from now (etc.) for the time preference of working right now on a project - because there is a water problem in this world.

Tell me, what are you going to do about hunger?

If you really cared about the water problem, couldn't you have donated part of your (steady) income for that?

If you prefer to fix the problem yourself, what are your special skills or experience regarding water?

What are you going to do if your project is deemed "interesting" but not worth investing on - especially now that you won't be able to finance it yourself?

You must certainly place a lot of trust in the goodwill of the future investors, but basically, here you showed that you didn't care about what you were doing, so why should I or anyone else take your word that you won't drop your next project just as quickly as this one?

Unless there is some missing information (ex: you have a 10 years lifespan due to some disease), it doesn't look like refusing the deferred life, but more like taking unneeded risk to get social status (saying you presented at this "Solve for X" conference) under a bleeding heart pretense. Sorry if that's hard - that's just the way I see it.

Anyway, it really seems like a bad decision indeed. If you really hated the job so much, it then begs the question - why did you started it in the first place?

I really hope you can turn around successfully, and find more meaning in your projects.

EDIT: it is good for him, and he will be more happy, but it's not logical. Something sounds out of place in the original post. While he will be more happy, using a charity purpose as the excuse and justification, while it is unlikely to be the best outcome for society, seems phony. Say that you want some fun or social status, that I can believe in. If you really care about solving a problem, who solves it (yourself or someone else) is irrelevant. How it is solved is irrelevant. You just want that fixed. Caring about not getting rich is just as pointless as caring about getting rich. It is a byproduct. You should want to solve the f problem, not want or look for ways to spend your life working on it.

But sometimes, you cannot do it.

I have great life plans, but I am moneyless (in fact, having money to by my own food each month is a small victory already), mostly friendless, and powerless (in the sense I do not have political power, or economic power, or friends to leverage, or any other external power).

So I am very sure, that doing something else other than my goal, as a step to do my goal, is not wrong...

By the way, what I do right now I still love to do anyway :) (I make edu apps for little children... not my life goal, but still a noble thing to do, and I hope, profitable)

dude, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelax.

sounds like you are about to do some cool stuff. excited to see what you come up with.

but, just so you have a different perspective, this is what i heard: you are leaving one company to start another company. the new company does water stuff, and you really like that.

Elon Musk didn't start off founding SpaceX, his first big hit was PayPal right? So I'm sure that "online transactions" was about as boring to an aspiring space entrepreneur as "online shopping" is to you, Weston.

Anyway, decisions other people make often look weird to people observing from the peanut gallery - most of all when you make a decision that feels so right it's almost impossible to "unmake" you usually know that, for whatever reason and with whatever reasoning, you've made the right decision for you, now.

On the topic of solving the world's water problems, I'm reminded of a documentary I saw years ago by a Ghanaian national in Nigeria, the name of which escapes me and which I can't find anywhere. It was around the time of the "make poverty history" campaign. This guy went to Nigeria and tried to do a few basic things like get a house, find a job, etc. and found that at every turn he was faced by rampant corruption. He even setup an NGO and started accepting foreign aid with very little trouble.

The final line in the film is "If you want to solve poverty, you first have to solve corruption" which has always stuck with me.

I'm mentioning this because it may be the case that "solving the water problem" for the majority of people won't be a matter of the (relatively) simple application of technology, but a matter of the much more complex application of political will, diplomacy and grass roots activism. You might already have considered this, but since I remembered the doco I thought I'd mention it, too: sometimes there are problems you have to solve before you solve the problem you really want to solve.

I remember it well, not with fondness, but regret, because decisions like these cost me the better part of 7-10 years of my life.

Perhaps this is a great decision, only time will tell, but there's something to be said for patience and persistance that leads me to believe this could be a dangerous decision. Here's why...

Your chances of a 200m exit are the same as most, and I don't think it's something you could or should have banked on. On the surface, this looks like a lateral move, and my guess is that the occupational differences won't matter in the long run.

What will matter is the behavior you have exhibited in making this choice.

We gain what we grant ourselves, and in this case, you've granted yourself a rush of impulse, which can lead to addiction and a selfish nature that can become toxic. I don't know you and I can't judge you for it, but from the outside, it seems to me like you are used to always getting what you want, and haven't had to struggle for much.

It's OK to want more, and to believe that you should have it. What isn't OK, is being selfish in your path to get there.

It's strange because we live in this society that celebrates impulse and selfishness as if it were our birthright. I'm talking to you, lifestyle gurus. On the other hand, we also celebrate steadfast determination and 'grinding it out.' In my experience, success comes as a result both in concert together, but because 'grinding it out' takes long-term effort, most throw it out the window.

What I'm getting at is that regardless of what you want, and how quickly you believe you should have it, each and every one of your decisions affects other people. In this case, your decision affects friends, family, founders, investors, and customers. Perhaps there was minimal collateral damage, and it sounds like you were mature in the way you handled this decision, but do remember that it's not just 'your life' at stake. It's everyone's.

I'm sure this was a difficult decision, and I applaud you for having the guts to make it and follow through. Just make sure you don't spend the next portion of your life repeating the same behavior because it suits the selfish gene. Now that you've acted on impulse, it's time to stick to it and make that decision count. It's time to do the work.

Were you looking in the mirror when you said it?

I'll admit that comment is kind of facetious, but I've long wondered whether these sort of self-motivational things ever have a meaningful effect on anything.

Anyway, the core truth that this post runs around is that running a startup isn't for everyone. If it was for you, you'd still be doing it. Running a charity might not be either, but it is healthy to re-examine your life at regular intervals and evaluate whether you really are doing the right thing.

ideas are a dime a dozen, but think about the one idea that you'd be willing to lose sleep, money, time, life, over. the fact that you're passionate about it will probably justify all that.

there are always exceptions, but i think it makes sense, life is short.

on the flip side, i think experience gained doesn't hurt one bit.

So probably better selling that $200M startup and then start your dream business with $10M in the pocket?

In reading this, however, I can't help but read into it a belief of the "inevitability of success". Instead of a $200M exit, you might not see $200. (In which case your decision looks even better.) However, your pursuit of clean water might not be successful either: inability to raise money, technologies issues, uncooperative or greedy governments, etc.

Seriously, if he could quit a start up and go into charity over night I don't think his bank account was hurting.

It always amusing to me how people try to pet their egos, oh hey guys I'm loaded so I'm going to quit my job and sell water to poor kids.

Please look how kind I am, everybody else is so selfish and stuck at work because they are not loaded!

Not sure if your idea was the invention or starting a service business to offer street cleaning services.

Your idea definitely has some credence.

"The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small - and for destroying those who destroy the earth." (Revelation 11:18)

This.

There are tons of great organizations (non-profits, etc.) that are already doing wonderful things in a variety of areas. Even the ones with considerable human resources, knowledge, relationships, infrastructure and donor bases usually typically have a need for more support. What these organizations need less of: duplicative efforts that produce fragmentation and are likely to see good ideas die quietly because those trying to do their own thing couldn't obtain the resources to execute.

It's sad that so many well-intentioned, idealistic people apparently fail to recognize or refuse to believe that minute for minute and dollar for dollar, their time and money will almost always produce a far greater ROI when invested in existing efforts.

Good for you, Weston. I look forward to hearing about your dragon-slaying adventures.

Keep on slaying dragons Weston. Even when I'm not passionate about what someone's building, I'm always supportive of people executing. Keep going Weston.

>> If you really cared about the water problem, couldn't you have donated part of your (steady) income for that?

Lets look at this way - Regarding donating (or paying some one to do what you wanted to do) - Just look around and you will see serial entrepreneurs building their next company bootstrapping from their previous savings. They could well have paid some one to do it (coding, managing etc). Still you will see then right in the middle of the action. The simple reason is, most people love it.

Now regarding if you can't solve all the issues, then you should not solve anything (what are you going to do about hunger,,,) . So I want to solve the issues with payment processing and I plan to start a Paypal alternative. Here comes some one asking me "what about all these issues with banking " what about "all the other 1000s of problems with the financial sector" ? Can you solve everything ? If not, you should are you trying to just solve a Paypal issue ?

There's lot of scientists whose life objective is to solve a variety of world's problems and they don't want to become rich.

The point is, this guy did not want to be in a startup, he wanted to work directly on doing something to solve the World's water prblem. That's good for him, and IMO it does not make his decision worse than staying doing something that did not fully satisfied him anymore.