Ok, first of all, I wish you the best of luck in your craziness. The time to swing for the fences is when you're young; that's when you can afford to take a couple of risks.
Your description does narrow down the kind of advice you should be looking for somewhat; it's true that most of PG's essays are directed at people who are trying to follow the "standard" route of venture-capital funding to an eventual IPO or buyout. Nonetheless, his advice on how entrepreneurs should act internally, as opposed to their relations with investors, still seems relevant. Try "Relentlessly Resourceful" and "Ramen Profitable" for starters. For myself, I find that I like his writing so much that I treat his essay page a bit like the Sequences: I go back and reread them every so often. So if your taste is like mine, you'll end up reading it all eventually; bwah-hah-hah! That said, the best stuff does tend to be in the middle - the post-YC essays are less interesting.
It seems you are going for financial independence rather than huge wealth; perhaps you are already aware of this resource, but if not, you will likely find the blog of Mr Money Mustache motivating.
And what the heck, while I'm suggesting readings anyway, go have a look at the archives of Joel on Software; as with PG, the best essays are from around 2003-2006, or so, but still very much worth reading. They don't ahve quite the same direct relevance to your project, but Joel seems to have done something similar to what you have in mind - build a company to sufficient-for-my-needs profitability without taking venture capital - so you might find it interesting to have a look at how he thinks. In particular, now I consider it, his Strategy Letter I seems relevant to your situation.
Edit to add: And, of course, beware of insight porn! You don't want to spend more than your lunch break or so reading these authors, excellent as they are. Get some dang work done! :)
The time to swing for the fences is when you're young; that's when you can afford to take a couple of risks.
I know this is the conventional wisdom, but does it really make sense? It seems like older folks would tend to be wealthier and wealthier people ought to be less risk-averse, for instance.
[EDIT: Through conversation with Rolf Andreassen below, it has been brought to my attention that I am simply completely and irretrievably insane.
Sane and well-measured advice is therefore wasted on me, and I just wanted to edit in this notice here so that other well-meaning folks don't get tricked into wasting their time trying to talk sense into a total nutcase like me. :)
(I appreciate all y'all, though. ^^ ) ]
So my dad set up a trust fund for me when I was a kid, and I've got 13k (CAD) now, which I am going to be taking direct control of.
Now, I have no interest in making a deep study of investment. I have a life to live and dealing with money is boring.
The only thing more boring than dealing with money, is dealing with a lack of money, and so I want to optimize the time and thought I spend avoiding that down to a minimum.
Four things occur to me:
1) Taking the naive and sparse knowledge I have of this area, basically just stuff I‘ve randomly osmosis’d up, this is my train of thought:
Markets are essentially random walks with an upward trend?
“Index funds” are magic boxes that you put money in and your money will grow at the same rate of the market that the fund “indexes”?
“Developing world” economies generally grow a lot quicker than those in the “developed world”?
(This makes sense to me. Places like the US, Canada Europe, etc, already have mature transportation and communication infrastructure. You can't get much economic growth out of doing basic stuff like building a new highway here, but in, like, some African region that has previously been served by, I dunno, jungle-donkeys, it makes a proportionally much bigger difference.)
There are a few countries where “developing” is a euphemism for “totally messed up”, but in general it really does mean “growing”?
And there are enough of these places over the world, and they're independent enough, that natural disasters/political trouble/etc in a few of them still leave a consistent and high rate of average growth?
So shouldn't I just put all my money in a fund that “indexes” all these "developing" economies together?
2) My dad set up this trust fund with a bank that has a bunch of big expensive physical buildings for some reason. I recently read a letter from them saying that they will charge a $100 yearly fee for having less than 15k in an account.
Are there better options I should be taking than opening my own account with an institution that thinks it makes sense to charge me a hundred bucks for not being rich?
3) Me and muflax are actually going to go work full time on developing [this totally amazing educational technology that will completely revolutionize human civilization but you have no reason to care about that until you've seen a demo in action so nevermind].
We might spend as much as a year (yeah, that's outside-view calibrated) working on it until we have something we can make a living off of while continuing development.
We think we can get total living costs for a year down into the 5k..10k range… maybe even lower. We're going to be living in the UK, because of reasons.
So… can I leave this measly 13k in an investment account and still draw out of it for monthly costs?
4) Or is this whole “investing” thing something I should even be bothering with at all right now?
Should I just pop out the whole sum into a savings account that I can draw from as I need, and worry about reinvesting whatever is left over then, a year from now, after we have obviously started on our way to becoming rich and famous?