It is almost my 45th birthday, and the math is sobering. My insurance agent's actuarial table says I will live to 87, accounting for the fact that I am a non-smoker with a family history of pancreatic cancer who has already survived to 45. Half my life is behind me. So I figure I should spend as much of the remaining half as possible doing things I love.<\/p>\n
This morning I stopped to meet one of my old mentors and his wife at their regular bagel shop. I arrived early, ordered a coffee and a bagel, and sat alone with my thoughts about family, gratitude, and the quiet luxury of time that belongs entirely to you. It was 6 AM. My day job could wait. I was self-medicating with a warm caffeinated beverage and deep thoughts.<\/p>\n
The whole experience made me think how nice it would be to be a bagel shop blogger.<\/strong><\/p>\n I snapped a picture of the counter, uploaded it to WordPress, and started writing.<\/p>\n Years ago, when my oldest kids were in elementary school, I used to drop them off and grab a coffee at Starbucks on my way to work. By 8 AM I was standing in line checking emails on my phone, feeling guilty about not being early to the office. That Starbucks was in a wealthy part of Dallas, and in Dallas, “wealthy” means real money. Guys in khaki shorts and button-down collar shirts wearing loafers from Neiman Marcus with no socks. In many cases, the loafers cost more than my laptop.<\/p>\n I used to wonder: what do those guys do for a living? They were sitting around in their fancy casual clothes chatting about the weather while I was late for work. How cool would it be to have that kind of freedom and independence?<\/p>\n I wonder how many of them were bagel shop bloggers taking a coffee break.<\/strong><\/p>\n It is a serious question. Internet business models are one of the few ways you can make money that scales mostly independent of hours and employees. Consulting is great, but eventually you run out of hours in the day. My day job is great, but there are real limits to how much money I can make there. I could open a donut shop, but to make real money I would need 10 donut shops, employees, and a bunch of capital.<\/p>\n Internet business is different. It is not easy money — nobody should confuse scalable with simple. But the potential to scale is essentially limitless. Constraints are generally not geographic. Most internet businesses are automation-friendly. And that is what makes the model so compelling for anyone who wants to build something that works while they are sitting in a bagel shop at 6 AM, enjoying a cup of coffee and the quiet luxury of owning their own time.<\/p>\n Mark wrote this in 2013, and the vision of location-independent entrepreneurship he describes has gone from aspirational outlier to mainstream career path.<\/p>\n The creator economy<\/strong> has made the “bagel shop blogger” lifestyle accessible to millions. Platforms like Substack, YouTube, podcast hosting services, and Shopify have dramatically lowered the barriers to building a scalable online business. The guys in the Starbucks that Mark wondered about in the mid-2000s are now joined by a generation of remote workers, content creators, and digital entrepreneurs who genuinely do run their businesses from coffee shops.<\/p>\n Remote work went mainstream<\/strong> after 2020. What used to be an unusual perk is now standard practice across industries. The pandemic compressed a decade of cultural change into two years, normalizing the idea that productive work does not require a commute or an office.<\/p>\n The tools have caught up to the vision.<\/strong> In 2013, building an internet business still required meaningful technical skill. In 2026, no-code platforms, AI writing assistants, automated marketing tools, and drag-and-drop website builders mean that the gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a business” is smaller than ever. The fundamental insight Mark shares here — that internet businesses scale without proportional increases in time, employees, or capital — remains the core economic advantage of building online.<\/p>\nThe Rich Guys at Starbucks<\/h2>\n
Why Internet Business Is Different<\/h2>\n
What's Changed Since This Post<\/h2>\n