Ask HN: Entrepreneurs, how long did it take you to succeed?
The entrepreneur shares their journey of building multiple businesses over two decades. After selling Staff Squared in 2022 and Fundipedia in 2025, they are now focusing on angel investing and consulting. They plan to document their experiences on their personal website in the coming months.
- ▪The entrepreneur started their first business in 2000, which was a computer hardware company called Atlas.
- ▪They transitioned Atlas into a custom software shop and later developed Fundipedia and Staff Squared.
- ▪After years of hard work, they sold Fundipedia for an eight-figure sum in 2025.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315206 |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 20:45:28 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T20:54:38.012Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T20:54:38.012Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NACeKlXXYHUH · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
It took me about ten businesses and over 20 years to "succeed". I wanted to retire at 35 for as long as I could remember, missed that by 7 years.Sold Staff Squared in 2022 for a good sum (7 figure), reinvested most of it into Fundipedia.Sold Fundipedia for life changing (8 figure) sum in 2025.All businesses were bootstrapped, reinvesting profits to grow them organically.I'm now angel investing and consulting. I'm posting more about my journey on my personal website over the coming months https://www.simonswords.comRough timeline:2000 - started a computer hardware company called Atlas alongside a speed dating company (that's not a joke, I ran a speed dating company and some other weird businesses).2002 - switched Atlas to designing websites, stopped selling hardware and associated support…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.