If you could talk to a billionaire face to face

[Aquarians]

That's some banging wine and beer mixing!

Yeah. Woke up in an ambivalent feeling. On one had I wasn't feeling so well, in spite of all my experience on how to manage a drinking session. In my younghood, after drinking so much and waking up the morning, the first thought would have been "I don't feel like living today". But I have my techniques which include drinking a lot of water (choosing beer instead of whiskey / vodka is deliberate since it contains a lot of water by default). Then drink some more water additionally, and never if possible, go for stronger drinks. Last, if a headache sets in, drink some more water before crashing to bed. If headache still on when going to bath for a piss, take a sodium metamizole pill and drink more water.

With these in my arsenal, I woke up feeling almost OK health-wise. And thinking about it feeling really good about the fact that although I prepared myself with 2 sixpacks and a bottle of wine just in case, I never resorted to "just in case". At least from what I remembered.

Then saw the bottle, the wine bottle, laying on the floor empty. Horizontally. For a brief moment I would have preferred it having accidentally spilled on the floor. But no, it didn't accidentally got empty, horizontal and spilled on the floor

 

[Aquarians]

Anywayz, the initial premise about talking to a billionaire is real. Think talking to Larry & Sergey at the time when they were "only" worth $1B. I can to this with my "Larry", while he's still open to these discussions.

And I'm not gonna talk to him about "how's weather". Shit when you get to talk to a $1B guy, every party involved knows you're gonna ask them for something. They hate that, I would too. In fact I only hate being asked shit that makes me poorer. If it makes me richer, I'm fine with it.

I'm not gonna ask for a raise, I'm fine with my salary. I always thought I get a decent salary, and in my particular geographical case - Eastern Europe and senior programmer, that's as valid today as it was 20 years ago when I first got a job paying $250 / month: 4x more than a junior teacher at the time.

So I always thought "The salary I get is enough for decency. For indecency there's never enough, but that's up to me to realize (or not), and not to my employer". Though I do appreciate the stability that comes from a job that lasts in the 10s of years (if you still wanna do it) and the performance that comes from it paying like 4x the average amount you would get in the economy.

Back to the point, obviously I wanna ask for something and that's not money. It's power. To do things my way, including taxes, btw I have a CPA degree in addition to my technical one. Credited for my CPA degree is a former high-school woman colleague to whom I'll be forever grateful and make it up if / when possible. She advised me to take the CPA instead of some stupid "business" degree, along these lines: "You one of the smartest guys in this nation. You already know how to make rockets fly to Mars or so, that's your technical skill level. There's nothing a business degree can teach you which, given your background, can't figure in 2 days on a computer with Excel. But taxes and the way that work, that's different. Different from the way you usually see / think the world goes. An accounting degree will actually teach you something you don't, can't know otherwise". She was right.

At the moment the company I work for is threatened by Google because it directly competes with them in a few domains. One of the companies that do what we do was recently acquired by Microsoft for =~ $20B.

Neither Google nor MSFT do or will or even if they wanted, can do what we can do in the near future if my
meeting with our $1B boss goes well. If it goes wrong, I'll still make 4x the average salary in the local economy in the foreseeable future, here or elsewhere. If OK, I (and my team) have a strong chance to be a 10s-100s millionaires in the very same foreseeable future, while my boss surely won't get poorer.