leibler

Pompous and full of myself? Not at all. Having high expectations and expecting people to do things right - absolutely. Even if that means taking 3 times as much time. Which has worked marvelously for me and everyone around me. It took me a lot of fights with the top management but eventually they saw the results and are now more than willing to accept longer deadlines. But since I work in the same office as 200 other developers, most of which are presumably the cream of the crop, I am unable to justify the lack of motivation in either of them to engage with anything. I see tons of people who are more than happy to do a small task and waste away 4 or 5 hours a day on facebook. On a personal level that makes me absolutely furious. But a lot of them are happy with it since they get to do very little and get a few grand at the end of the month for it. And it appears to be common with everyone I've ever met.

Skills - at this point I'm definitely struggling with design and UI/UX. The only man besides me has similar experience as mine. As I said, I'm fine with hiring freelancers but my experience with them has been similar: Clear requirements, deadline and name your price and I've never questioned it. 4 people have taken the challenge so far(a single html page, no animations, or anything flashy-clean and simple), I didn't get a single question or feedback from them, 1 month later I go to the freelancer mediator to get my money back. As much as $3500. It's absolutely hopeless.

I agree with the statement that tech people are generally lazy but in recent years it has become worse. I honestly would take anyone that would put a minimal amount of his/her time at this stage. I'm that desperate.

Money: at this point whatever I can personally invest. Nothing more, nothing less. And while my paycheck is good by most people's standards, it's nowhere nearly enough to hire anyone qualified.

Mission: there is one. Vision-same story. Despite the treacherous possibility of contributing to an "idiocracy" type of dystopia.

VC is definitely a goal but as I stated, it's too much work for a single man to handle. And most importantly the website is where I would definitely fail: I can write a tacotron 2 implementation from scratch in less than two days. Make any website that looks better than 1998 yahoo(due to my lack of design skills) - possibly months.

As for my social circles - they are all too comfortable in their own world to deal with anything other than their daily jobs. As I said, they would all much rather waste their time on Tinder and Facebook rather than work on something that could benefit them. And it was the same story when I looked for people outside, even when I threw cash at them(understand freelancers).