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Comment by webmaven | Hacker News Reader

What does a "year of runway" look like? Do you mean a year of the founders' living expenses?

Is it scaled to the founders' local cost of living? Does it assume a 20-something founder with few family commitments?

Or is some of it also intended to cover operational expenditures (at least at MVP-scale)?

What if the founder has a potentially 100x idea, but still wants to go the bootstrap route because... well, let's just say they find Craig Newmark more worthy of emulation[0] than Mark Zuckerberg or the PayPal mafia, and leave it at that.

[0] Although it's worth noting that only the most recent of the competing VC-funded classified ad startups are still around, but craigslist.org is a unicorn.

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Re the point about the 100x idea - there seems to be no such thing - only common ideas and 100 or 1000 decisions to grow the business 1.1x to 10x. Each of those decisions demand a cost, effort or sacrifice of some form or another - and the difference between a startup and a regular business is that these decisions are made differently.

Ideas are all the same. Social network, payments, search, e-commerce, software, hardware - none of these ideas intrinsic value. Even the iPhone wasn’t a breakthrough - I had full touchscreen phones running modded Linux before that.

Think of every growth curve as a series of choices - YC chooses and teaches founders to make one category of choices, solo / lifestyle founders make a different, often incompatible set of choices. Ideas don’t come into play. Even YC, which invests more than this program, doesn’t care about ideas that much.

> Even YC, which invests more than this program, doesn’t care about ideas that much.

that's incorrect - YC tried a batch for founders without ideas and the results were very bad.

For someone like me, who is overwhelmed with the ideas, I can't even understand how an engineer or a power user can't have any ideas for a large or growing TAM.

EDIT: they're probably have ideas, but think that their ideas are not good enough, or afraid to sound stupid.

Yeah, I think no idea is a negative signal. Too many ideas seems more indicative of a good founder. And YC does still follow the invest in teams, ideas may change motto, I think.

My biggest problem with bootstrapping while still holding a full time job, not to mention a baby, is spreading myself thin on too many ideas, eventually not grinding enough at any of them.

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