Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

I would love to be in your position.

My deepest, most honest urging to you is to NOT do what you are contemplating.

Just keep doing what you are doing for as long as you can and take the cash out and put it into stable investments for your retirement. By a nice house and car, have holidays, take care of your family. Use this to complete the task of gaining financial independence for the rest of your life. When that is well and truly done then sure, treat your business as something potentially disposable and turn it into a "company" - but even then I would not advise that.

I have done the company thing and always regretted not keeping it one-man-small and just milking all the cash out.

You are sitting on an incredibly valuable thing to you personally. Don't blow it by spending all the good cash on making a company.

The whole point of being in business is to make money for YOU. You have succeeded, you are past the finish line of my ultimate goal. Do not employ even a single person.

The fact that you are inexperienced in running a company emphasizes my point tenfold.

Thanks for your inputs. Nice House. Check. Nice Car. Check. Happily Married. Check.

Just keep doing what you are doing for as long as you can and take the cash out.

I am quite a super ambitious guy and I don't wish to keep all my eggs-in-one basket. Though am doing good for several years but we can never be sure of things when technology changes so abruptly. I feel if I am able to expand, I can multiply my finances and the value that I can give back to society many folds.

I sincerely thank you for putting in your time to answer my question but my original question remains :).

OK well all I urge is that you continue in your current configuration until you never need to work another day in your life. THEN do the company thing.

You will regret it beyond all understanding if you take this incredible position you are in and within five years turn it into a financial disaster back to square one.

Frankly you are undervaluing what you have achieved and underestimating how hard the task is to tenfold that.

In ten years of continuing in your current configuration it sound like you could take home more than $1,000,000 per year AFTER TAX. A "company" can easily run for ten years and not have yielded that much money either through revenue or acquisition.

It's painful how much I agree.

The problem is that if success comes too easily and/or too early then it is undervalued.

I made a big pile of cash very early in my career and thinking that such big piles of cash were easy to make, promptly wasted it on "starting a company". I certainly gained value from that money though. The value I gained is the wisdom that I imparted in the top level suggests to the OP.

Cash never came as easy again.

The OP doesn't realise that he has attained one of the possible levels of startup holy grail nirvana of success - the incrediprofitable one man company.

The problem is that if success comes too easily and/or too early then it is undervalued.

I am sorry if I made that impression. It was never an easy thing. I have had my fair share of all-nighters and even I do those now at times. I had to self-learn, un-learn several things after leaving a comfortable job several years ago. It was (and still) not at all an easy task. As a quote goes It took me 10 years to become an overnight success

Don't think hoodoof disputes your hard work for many years. Your current situation could potentially be a gold mine which sets you up for life. I guess he is arguing not to increase the risk. Despite all the hard work you might not be able to scale it in the same manner.

My point is not about how you got there. My point is that you undervalue what you have.

Perhaps the most important point, and one not made here elsewhere, is that merely the fact of starting to create a company will impact your existing revenue stream. You will instantly become distracted by "working on the company", and whatever your current magic formula is will suffer and revenue will go down. The moment you start to "make a company" your magic formula will get less and less magic until soon you've got 10 employees, a lease on an office, taxes, problems, a sales team, politics, accountants, hiring and recruiting, and then you need to feed that beast with ever increasing numbers, and you'll stop taking all that juicy cash for yourself because you'll be "investing it in the company", which is to say "spending it/getting rid of it". Your magic formula will be gone and you'll be just another ordinary company.

And if it did take ten years to get to this point then why the heck are you in such a damn hurry to change your situation.

I think what you should do is change the way you see your current position.

Currently you are WILDLY SUCCESSFUL. You seem desperate to risk that for what - greater success?

What you propose makes no sense. Just keep doing what you are doing. Keep raking cash off the table and start to think to yourself "wow, I'm one of the most successful people in business".

The problem for you is you are addicted to "entrepreneur porn" - you are reading about all these other people who run REAL companies, who EMPLOY people, have OFFICES, and INVESTORS and IPOs. All that stuff is nowhere near as valuable as it is made out to be. You have done the most incredible thing which is to pull in huge amounts of cash with none of that crap. Wow. But you seem to feel that it's not enough success. Readjust the way you see your achievements to date and readjust what the real value is of "having a company".

This is one of the best comment threads I've ever read on HN, thank you.

> "entrepreneur porn"

Maybe I've got a fetish--what he's doing is the porn to me!

Not to mention he is in education - a universally moral category. This is startup nirvana if I ever saw it. I'm sure there are famous billionaires who would trade places with him if they could

Not to mention he is in education - a universally moral category

I sincerely hope that is not to be taken as sarcasm?

This is startup nirvana if I ever saw it. I'm sure there are famous billionaires who would trade places with him if they could

Can you be more detailed please?

I'm pretty sure majani simply meant that your helping people learn is a Good Thing.

So you are doing well by doing good.

I guess it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Many people start a business because they have a purpose or mission they are trying to accomplish and they can't get there remaining small.

That said, I'm inclined to agree that granting yourself and family financial independence gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility to do anything you want at that point.

Please take this advice

Hoodoofs advice is sound. You are about to find out that every entrepreneur wants to be you: making a lot of money WITHOUT personnel, co-founders and shareholders.

Your financial security should be your first and foremost ambition. Only after you have enough money to never need to work again, think about expanding or restarting.

I couldn't agree more.

There's, I guarantee, MILLIONS of things to figure out for making a "company" which techcorner thought of. Taxes, lawsuits, security, employment laws, facilities: you name it. Yes, true, by bringing in more people, growth _is_ possible, but there's also a lot more risk involved. Usually, you add more people because it is the ONLY way to get to where you need to go.

While there's nothing wrong with teamwork, it _can_ go horribly wrong. The corpses of failed tech startups litter the pages of past TechCrunch articles. Don't become one of them, techcorner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com