Quit your job
37signals.com
37signals.com
Subsistence farming - grow your own crops and eat them.
Banditry - take someone else's crops.
Proprietary trading - take someone else's money they got paid for their crops, legally
So how did you buy your land again? Or is the Soviet Government still encouraging settlement in Siberia ... ?
I think supposing that you need money to stay alive in our society is a fairly air-tight theory.
I think the answer for a lot of businesses might be no.
By now it is common knowledge that a webbased company can be started by a couple of good hackers in a few months - just look at some of the Y-combinator companies. So the next stage after building your product is marketing and growth. Common wisdom tells us that growth requires a lot of money - but I think this is often a fallacy extrapolated from a world ten years ago that was very different than todays. What do you need the money for? If you have a webservice your income goes up as you gain users (if it doesn't you might need to rethink your business model) so hardware costs can be paid for this way. Marketing is often a question of having a good product and being smart in your marketing - having a lot of money doesn't always help you. Look at how well pets.com did with all their marketing and contrast it to google that did no marketing at all but had a great product.
Besides having investors is a timesink, and you will spend time that you could have spent marketing or making your product better on reports and financial statements for your investors.
Chase customers instead of chasing investors, unless you are doing something that truly requires capital.
On the other hand I don't understand why some companies raise as much as they do. What did Xobni need 4 million dollars for?
Personally, I think it's pretty obvious that we haven't been able to practically accomplish this for very long, and there are a lot of factors that influence whether or not someone will be successful.
Hopefully, society will continue to move in this direction, what with information about how to do just about anything at just about everyones fingertips just about all the time.
They don't have to rant daily about this. For every successful Thai restaurant, I can show you 4 that failed [or more].
There are many ways to Rome, 37 signals likes to walk to Rome while others take a lot riskier route. For each his own.
One, this wasn't a rant. It was neither bombastic nor over-emotional. It seemed to me to be wholly uncontroversial. If anything, the relatively conservative steps he advises (starting a business with only moderately successful aims) seem downright boring.
Second, the failure rate for new businesses is not 80 or 90%. Even a little bit of googling would put that to rest. To wit:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/news/coladvice/ask/sa99...
And, as the article points out, the very buyout scenario that many YCers (HNers, really, unless you've been accepted) dream of would be counted among the failures. Fewer than 10% of these failed businesses were the dreaded bankruptcies.
Seriously, nothing to see here. And if any of you really were convinced that you've got a 90% chance of failure, you would stop complaining about 37 signals "rants" and get to work shoring up your (apparently) failing business.
Besides, show me 1 successful business and I will be able to show you 9 that failed (if the 1 in 10 success statistic is correct) - most businesses will fail, not matter which way you do it.
I think all of you need to go back and read wealth.html . In short: If you don't want to create a lot of wealth, chances are, you won't create any.
It comes back to: Will I be any more happy with a billion over a (few) million in the bank? For most people, the answer is no.
Completely depends on what you're trying to do. It's easy to make a small, sustainable business in some areas, especially service businesses. If you get certified and get a union card, you can hang out your shingle as a plumber or electrician, and odds are you'll make plenty of money, but you have no hope of getting super rich.
As a plumber, there really isn't any technology on the horizon that is any obvious threat to make your job redundant, and people in India will never take your job. You are creating wealth, just not a ton of it.
This kind of business may be harder to make sustainable in the internet technology industry, but as 37 Signals has demonstrated, it's certainly not impossible.
"If all you get from your job is a paycheck, you're underpaid."
"Work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means (money) to do the stuff that makes you happy"
If you're trying to build something that needs huge networking effects to succeed (general-purpose social networks have been an obvious example in the recent past), trying to bootstrap it past a certain point is going to be counterproductive. You have to try to shoot for the moon.
Other types of businesses are likely to never have a use for significant financing: the blog includes an example of a pet daycare. Starting a web design consultancy is usually in this same category.
Of course, many tech startups are somewhere in between. The company could blow up huge, but it can also be sustainable with gradual growth and limited capital. Then it's basically a tactical decision when and if to seek capital.
And some will go broke...
Clearly a few will make millions, some will make enough and most will go broke, but that's the way business is.
Now, to some how figure out a product that people want and get the courage to quit my job ... not easy!
Not saying that it is wrong to quit your job, but doing so is no guarantee to become a millionaire. Why did he even write the "some of them making millions" line? It's dishonest, in my opinion (he probably didn't mean it like that, but it draws the wrong picture).
Also, will people be more employable after quitting their jobs? It depends what employers are looking for. Some of them want "stable" employees who won't go leaving soon again, when the next best opportunity shows up.
Yea I guess that is true. It gives you a lot of things to talk about in an interview though, and you will no doubt have polished your dev skills nicely.
Quit telling me how to live.
Love, Sabat