20k ? Can you not just generate that much by consulting on the side? Thats what I am doing. But then I have no choice as I am old , unattractive and have an accent.
"Can't you all just run your startup companies and make 220,000 a year like me?"
Some people are overvalued by the market, working in a good space, being attractive and having "reputation" or a lot of online prsence, fame, etc.
It sounds like you personally have a lot of accomplishments, old = "wisdom", and are attractive as a consultant. You have experience doing a lot ofthe things people pay you to consult on but they aren't willing (or you are not) to come on board full time.
tldr, some people can't just make large salaries, but they would take worse terms to bet on themselves.
Edit: to be clear i am being sincere here. If you are older and really really good at what you do, and have a lot of reputation thats great. There is ageism in tech for sure, they want young hungry devs AND older experienced architects to come in and provide advice.
So it is a doubleedged sword, there may be less opportunity for a 50-60 year old programmer to join the team, but opportunity to consult. There also may be a log of spots for a 20 y/o programmer to join, but no room to come in and provide sftwr engineering advice.
I am 26 and a so so dev. Would I take a shitty deal? Depends how shitty. Id give up 10-15% at poor terms, or I would think about it at least. It may end up being less risky than taking a while to build a prototype and trying to build a funding and legal structure with a SAFE and cryptocurrency and other shit.
So yeah, I am leery of deals like this main post, but there is a part of ne that would love beleive it would ve possible to cap up quick and painlessly and with a quick call and application. Terms would be reasonable and I could start working faster, etc.
Hiwever, it would be hard for me to believe that...
The original, year 1 YC program was targeting people who genuinely would struggle to get $6K (at the time) because it was mostly aimed at students.
When I was a student I couldn't afford text books, so the idea I could get $20k together by consulting was laughable.
Now I'm positively ancient the consulting route isn't too hard to do.
Depending how hard I/you try to find consulting work, you can totally make 20k, of course it depends on the month. The best part, is that you can write off business expenses on your taxes. So, you pay significantly less (if any) tax on that 20k.
I found $20 on the ground once. Doesn't mean I can just go outside and start bending over till I get to 20k.
If you join a bunch of the freelance marketplaces it's really not hard. I literally receive offers for jobs every day or so, most aren't that good, but probably once every month or two it is as described.
The problem is, I have no idea going in if a code review is going to be easy, or if the bugs are easy to fix. That's somewhat just luck.
Hmm I've always heard the exact opposite. I haven't seen a freelance type of marketplace that isn't a huge race to the bottom. Whenever I've done consulting it's always been through contacts that I know; I've never found a way to actually make decent money through other means.
It wasn't supposed to be gloating, it was more - it's not as hard as you think.
I've spent 20+ years helping people designing, build & move entire datacenters. Migration of one or two servers is easy. It's exponentially harder when you have to move hundreds or thousands of servers running many apps with minimal downtime.
Still not sure how I ended up specializing in this but there was a need and still is. Turns out a lot of that experience is still applicable for customers moving to the cloud =)
I think the bigger issue here is that $20k is insignificant. If you've already got a full-time job and you're working on this venture as a side-hustle you don't need the $20k. If you're working on this venture full-time and it's your only gig you'll need more than $20k. So I'm not entirely sure where this model fits.