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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

I apologize if this comes off a bit glib, but sometimes this sort of advice makes me think the steps to founding a startup begin with:

1) Be wealthy

2) Don't be not wealthy

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Being a founder (or co-founder or startup employee) means taking a decade out of your life for low pay and financial instability for the chance of having stake in a successful company. If you're not wealthy you're not in a position to be a founder in the first place.

Someone should really inform the college kids who keep applying to incubators like YC...

There's a big difference in the safety net of someone who went to a high level US college, and someone who had to get a job during high school to help pay the bills.

Most of them know it, but when you are in college or newly out of it, all of your friends are suffering from low pay and financial instability too. IMHO your 20s are a very good time to do a startup because the opportunity cost is low: you're probably not going to be making a whole lot of money anyway, so your choices are guaranteed poverty or likely poverty with the chance of a huge windfall.

It's a different story when you've got nothing to lose. When you've already got a successful career and a life savings it's turning into a gamble that's just not worth it. The unfortunate thing is that the world needs more mature founders, and less college grad types.

I agree. This is one of my biggest problems with the current VC system: it excludes founders that have experience and judgment. I would even posit that founders who have a family to support are more likely to want to keep the company stable than a single 20-something.

You have to wonder if there are any reasons other than lower salaries that VCs prefer to work with young, nothing-to-lose types.

it excludes founders that have experience and judgment.

Those are the ones with money.

Having money to start with makes a number of things much easier. It means fewer worries about what happens if it all goes south. It means being able to hire a lawyer up front. It means having a lot more runway for bootstrapping.

Money doesn't solve every problem, obviously, but it helps with quite a lot.

Most good Valley firms will defer fees for startups given a good referral. As for getting that referral, spend two years working in Silicon Valley and you won't have a problem.

Indeed. I tell would-be founders exactly this. I bootstrapped my company for quite some time before successfully courting investors, and this was only possible because being an engineer pays well enough to build a solid savings in advance. While on one hand I take pride in having had the willpower to make things work, this isn't a satisfying solution for entrepreneurship in general.

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