There was an equity crowdfunding round for Replit in early 2022. I threw some money in for the hell of it since I liked what they were doing back when I was doing some volunteer teaching many years ago. They have since rode the vibe coding wave and have grown like crazy. Usually I consider crowdfunding to be a donation, but by dumb luck I think it's a 6x so far.
Later I did some consulting with a financial firm to implement the various RAG + vector database + function calling + chat with their workflows. It became pretty clear that whatever I was doing would soon be built-in to OpenAI / Anthropic's products, so it started feeling like a waste of time to keep building this stuff.
