> [...] took $350,000 of his own money to write a business plan.
That is by far more money than I've seen in my entire life. Of course you don't need money for your startup if you're already rich.
That is by far more money than I've seen in my entire life. Of course you don't need money for your startup if you're already rich.
“I’m much more meticulous and efficient. I might go a little slower, but in the end I believe I win.”
Slow is not how you win.
I think this article fundamentally misunderstands the goal of VC backed companies: Billion dollar exits and paradigm shifting technologies. That's not for every company.
This presumes a lot about entrepreneurial ventures at a vastly generalized level. While this may not be true of the high tech entrepreneurship most at focus on HN, there is a myriad of other entrepreneurial activity (maybe not using the 'startup' marker) where this is a very reasonable statement.
Right. While still generally debated, when talking about "startups", across the board speed, aka high growth, is the common factor [1].
If the discussion is around "entrepreneurship" generally, then high growth and speed isn't even a goal usually.
After 16 years in business, Starbucks had a whopping 17 locations.
After five years in business, Domino's had three locations (12,500 today).
Specifically Dominos was taken over and completely restructured to move really fast.
Fast is absolutely how you win - but it matters when you are fast. That's the whole point of Venture money, to go fast aka "Growth Capital". You don't do that in the beginning, you are patient but if you want to grow, you have to grow quickly, otherwise you get taken out by a larger competitor who can get to market faster. Failed unicorns put growth capital before they have a solid market position.
This only applies if you're in the pre-launch phase and you haven't gotten to market yet. For those organizations that are already on the market, how fast your ramp up does not always mean you will win. The inherent risk of VC-fuelled fast growth is that the excessive funding will overshoot the actual value very quickly - and suddenly what was supposed to be a healthy $1B business becomes a "$30B" (on paper) series-J failure with no hope of getting a reasonable exit. In that case, I feel the slow/patient growth to $1B is far better for everyone involved (except VC).
There is a long list of (ex-)startups that make me scratch my head: in what parallel-universe could they possibly be worth $X - which ever way you slice it - their revenue cannot support the exuberant valuations.
I'm assuming the plan required the input of lawyers or other expensive advisors. Still it seems excessive for a bootstrapping company.
Its tangential, but it is very interesting that even in developer circles devs think they are middle class when they make $130-150k a year even if their cost of living is ~100k which means their total savings even after a decade (and something eating into their rainy day fund, including vehicle / home purchases and such) they still don't have two years living expenses saved up, you are still definitively working class.
Very few people today are actual middle class anymore, by reasonable standards of what to define it as, since cost of living has gotten so absurdly high relative to income compared to what it was decades ago.
350k would easily last you a decade in a smaller, low cost of living town. You'll be driving a 2011 Honda Civic, limiting how often you eat out at nice restaurants, and not buying name brand, but you won't exactly be struggling.
I know developers who have saved up that kind of cash in about 6 or 7 years, working in relatively low cost of living areas.
You simply have to save and invest half your income. ;)