Ask HN: Why aren't you starting your own company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why aren't you starting your own company?

35 pointscurious-mind59 comments

Especially curious to hear from people working in big tech or late-stage growth companies.

I don't want to work 24 hours a day. I like the stability and consistency that a salary provides. I like having time to dedicate do my wife and kids. I like having time to just read comics or play video-games before I sleep. I don't want to spend my weekends wondering about customers or paying salaries or stuff like that. It feels that having my own company would be extremely stressful and time consuming, and the tech salaries allow me to have a comfortable-enough life that, at least for now, starting a company doesn't seem like a great idea.

Really good reasons NOT to start your own business. Smart person :).

I love this question. As a tech founder of a bootstrapped SAAS company, let me tell you what a typical day looks like (other than being on HN at times of course :)):

- Sales Calls

- Marketing dicsussions (content/blogs/webinars/podcasts/ads/partnerships/affiliates)

- Team building/hiring and Firing (can you deal with firings ?).

- Team Management

- Customer Support/Talking to customers

- Conflict resolution (with customers or even internal team)

- Fire fight. Something goes wrong. I was on vacation in November 2021 and literally that week, we had a major production incident even though this major incident didn't happen for last 24 months. I was up until 6 AM working with the team to fix it. Then at 9 AM, I went on a call with the customer and had to deal with that. This was major. Minor stuff happens a lot more than you would think.

- Sales (did I say it already)

- Marketing (did I say it already)

- Legal/Paperwork/HR

- Some tech stuff/coding/servers/devops

- When shit hits the fan, your ass is on the line ultimately. Handle that.

- Work crazy hours (to build a real business, you have to work hard and long at least first few years. 4 hour work week stuff is bullshit)

- Be willing to fail. Lot of people cannot get out of their comfort zones. They have fear of failure. That won't work if you want to run a business.

So if you want to start your own company, you better be ready for all of this. In the early days, you will be involved in all of the things listed above. Working a nice six figure tech job in a big tech is easy compared to what you have to do to be your own boss. I bet most people don't want to do majority of the things I listed above.

So the point is that you don't just start a company because you can code. You start a company because well, you want to build a business and nothing else. I did it because I want to build a business. I know it is hell and been there for 7 years now but I wouldn't trade this hell for a comfortable paycheck at a company. Just not wired that way. Most people however are wired to be comfortable and in tech jobs, the money is really really good to do anything else unless you have that "itch".

My wife started her own company with a couple of business partners a few years ago because she identified a relevant market need in an area she was passionate about.

It did not take her long to realize that she hated everything about running a business, because she did everything except the thing she actually cared about. Sales and marketing ranked highest in the areas of dissatisfaction.

I think you missed sales

The right idea / problem hasn't appeared in my life yet. I think part of it is i'm a frugal person, so anything I "need" I try my best to get for free or discounted as much as possible. Because of this frugality, I say "I don't need that" or "I wouldn't pay for that" often, which wouldn't allow me to be open minded to what others would potentially pay for or consider useful.

I'm very much the same way. For a lot of lower-effort SaaS offerings I look at them and think: "I can't believe people pay for this when I can replicate the parts I need with a few Python scripts or a simple Rails app". The things I am willing to pay for are often much more ambitious businesses and would likely require far more effort than I'm willing to devote (i.e. things like Digital Ocean or Fastmail).

I'm going to use what you said to go on a little rant: One of the things that has jaded me the most in my career so far is dealing with people who want to spend company money purely for self-gain / promotion. Spending 50k-60k on software that no one asked for, and forced to integrate with, because it allows some manager to say they achieved X on their resume. Especially when I can just write something inhouse in less then a week that will do the same basic functionality, but wouldn't be as valuable because it wasn't built by a fully dedicated team or has the backing and support of company Y.

I'm scared of the legal stuff. Every time I get an offial-looking letter, my heart pumps and I think I'll need go to jail soon.

I don't like doing sales or marketing, either. I'd be full of doubts all the time because I'd know the code that the product runs on.

I want to continue working for the early-stage startup I'm currently at. But I'd consider starting my own company at some point as long as I have cofounders who take care of legal, sales and marketing.

Starting a company is easy. What's hard is getting one off the ground and reaching escape velocity, which seems to be one of the most challenging things in the world.

I'm usually trying to start something, whether it's a regular ol' side project or something that could conceivably be a business. But my ideas are almost always more ambitious than I initially realize, or than I'm able to actually chew off, and I bet a lot of people fall into that trap.

Yeah, I could make a one page app that sells quality cheat sheets using Stripe, but why bother when I could make something 100x more complicated that I'll never actually finish?

A lot of people avoid making a business because they are smarter than I am and they realize that it's way more work than is appreciated.

I like technical work not marketing, sales, and paperwork

Lack of access to startup capital.

Still bootstrapping but even with having a successful bootstrapped startup under my belt (with the k1s to prove it) in the past I have no idea how to connect to VCs in this post covid landscape.

Friends and family rounds aren't an option for me, access to capital has always been hard for me even though my track record is high roi for every investment dollar.

There are 1000s of VCs out there. Try going after the non a16z ones. If you're numbers are good let them know in the subject line. "Virtual Events for Farmers - 15% MoM growth - Stripe #'s attached"

It's a numbers game. If your numbers are really good and you are reaching out, you shouldn't have a problem at least getting some meetings. From there just get feedback and iterate on your pitch

This is good advice but what's the proxy for friends, family, angel rounds pre-launch?

I've never had issues raising once profitable, but I've also never needed to.

Andrew Chen has something similar here. I think his point #2 is the right way to think about this. You're not the only one who doesn't have access to friends, angels, family, etc. so what did the other people in your situation do? Do some research to see what founders did in your situation and reach out. Maybe they can intro you.

Not saying what you're doing is easy, but important to not reinvent the wheel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/re4xla/comment/ho...

* I want to have good health insurance for my family without paying thousands of dollars.

* Running your own business takes much more time than being a "working stiff" and I don't want to spend 95% of my awake time working.

* If my business fails, I don't want to incur huge debt or losses, I want the security of a steady paycheck.

* Once my business gets larger than just myself, such as if it takes off hugely, I don't want to deal with the politics and other bullshit that will take me away from the day to day building of product.

* I'm worried past a employer would try to use my time there against me to steal my business, since I signed NDAs and stuff, even if my ideas are fresh and unrelated to the specific business of that employer (that employer treated me poorly when I left).

> * If my business fails, I don't want to incur huge debt or losses, I want the security of a steady paycheck.

I am possibly wrong, but I believe starting a company as an LLC is meant to protect against this possibility.

If you’re the sole owner, and the only person who benefits from the business, you still can incur legal issues directly to yourself, I believe.

In the US, that’s not correct.

LLC’s protect you personally from most business debts and liabilities as long as there is no personal guarantee.

I think you’re thinking of sole proprietorships.

That’s good to know, thanks.

I tried once. I'd taken a couple of business courses and was trying to be a micropreneur building apps. It became clear that I didn't know how to reach people, and that going back to a day job was going to be a much better support my family.

I have some projects I'd love to make my primary. I love the idea of starting up good tech, particulalry good tech with an open source benevolent core.

But it feels like it takes so much money to make even a small team. I want a long run way, to get really far on, with good people. I dont see myself as having a fast road to profitability. It's so hard to imagine how to start.

And it feels so much more daunting to create an interesting & engaged environment. I dont mind training & boosting promising folk, but it just feels like even that takes soo much money, & more-so that it's going to be so much harder to bring out genuine geekiness in people. As much as an idea, I crave a good culture- intense & chasing something new & exciting & good for the world- but the pure geekiness of computing feels so diluted, so underwater. It feels so improbable that those around me will have that old obvioushbut-secret geek-club feeling, that getting great at computing is radical & empowering & ennobling.

I want so much to care about & believe in my employees, but it's so vastly probable it'd become just another company of deluded/decoupled spin-based management & another detached workforce. We all deserve better, we all deserve realer, we all should have real things to care about & apply ourselves to, but there's no practical way to ask for that kind of commitment. Unless I can really make the work fully obviously clearly sell itself.

15 years ago, I wrote a program to track which books I have read and automatically synchronize the list it with various library accounts. Then I thought I would start a company selling the program.

But that failed, because every library I talked to said, they cannot support commercial software.

Then I gave up all commercial software development and made it fully open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore. But that backfired, because too many people asked me to add stuff, and now I am forever stuck maintaining it, and cannot start a new project

> because too many people asked me to add stuff, and now I am forever stuck maintaining it, and cannot start a new project

It seems a good time to start again to launch this company, isn't?

> But that backfired, because too many people asked me to add stuff, and now I am forever stuck maintaining it, and cannot start a new project

You can charge money or abandon it? You don’t owe random people free work.

Opportunity costs get higher as your compensation goes up. Usually you don't start a company yourself, so you also need to consider your immediate network's increasing opportunity costs.

I'm lazy and comfortable with my big tech TC

A very good reason NOT to start your own business :). "lazy and comfortable" is not what you would be if you are running a business.

I'm trying, really hard. But I have a disdain for not doing things 100 percent correct, and perfection is the enemy of progress. But especially when it comes to regulations that can get you in legal trouble. I just see all these things I need to get right, I need to learn about filing taxes and company accounts, hiring staff seems like an absolute minefield, and now you're also responsible for someone else's livelyhood! It's scary.

But I'm pretty close to launching "something" in the next few weeks. I'm doing a hardware startup, I already have multiple production-ready prototypes. Now I'm working on documentation, and some basic marketing material... but again all I can see is a hundred different things I still have left to do.

There's also the fact that the business would need to be quite successful to match my current, and rather hefty paycheck. Less money, less safety, but doing something I love... I hope it's worth it.

As a fellow perfectionist who has started a company, one thing that has helped me is realizing that most decisions are a lot more reversible than they appear. Even in the legal and financial domain, most things that you might obsess over are fixable if you make a mistake, and decent lawyers will tell you which ones you really have to avoid. Sometimes it'll cost you money and time, but the biggest cost is avoiding making decisions.

Always remember, no decision is a decision. Usually that's the worst choice because almost any decision, even a wrong one, at least moves the ball in some direction, allowing you to gather more information. The only guarantee in this game is that stasis will kill you, so bias towards action. When in doubt, try to evaluate "most probable bad outcome" which is different from "worst possible outcome".

Good luck!

I feel like this is actually really good advice, thanks for taking the time to respond!

Fear of failure. I tend to find comfort in things I know well. Starting a company has many moving parts, it’s daunting.

Lack of meaning. I haven’t found meaning in the ‘business world’. Much of my time is spent doing hobbies I find meaningful and enjoy. I’ve found a balance in my life now to do interesting things at work, while having good work life balance. Starting a company upsets that balance mostly in a negative way.

Lack of cofounder trust. I live in the Bay Area, and a lot of people who have started companies are not the people I trust or enjoy working with. Someone with values I associate with and respect tend not to start companies.

I do want to start a company one day, only if I can add value to it, and it adds value to the world.

For the same reason I donr want to be a manager. I care too much about people and their development. I mentor all sorts of people. I get annoyed when people don't care as greatly. I'd be a bad boss. People have better things to worry about.

And I don't want to work 24h a day. I want to be able to take vacations. I want to cut myself off from work. I want to be able to stop thinking about work and engineering. It's become so that engineering has become a hobby for me. I want to stop that. There is a lot of other stuff I want to do that doesn't involve tech.

I started starting companies as a result of Silicon Valley age discrimination experiences around when I was 40. It was clearly a situation that could not be effectively overcome or negotiated with. So the obvious answer: "If I'm the boss, I won't age-discriminate against myself nor others: problem solved".

The one advantage I had was working in Sales and Marketing in addition to R&D at Hewlett-Packard so I got the VERY BEST of industry training in all those areas on HP's dime. So those roles include the CEO role were quite easy for me on my own.

I live in the US so health insurance is a big part of it, but lets be honest: the things I want to do aren't going to pay an SF Bay Area mortgage :D

I don't want the initial overhead required. That's pain I don't want. And there are many people making good money working for someone else, but with the oft-touted caveat of: 'You're helping someone else achieve their dream', which is a fair point. But you have to consider the following: If everyone had a company, where would we source employees?

I don't want to work more hours and I don't have the nerves it takes -- or rather, I do -- I could handle anything, but I don't want to.

I still work toward some small product that'll make me an extra hundred or few a month, though.

People like idlewords (Pinboard), kalzumeus (Misc), and jcs (Pushover) are far more inspirational to me than whoever runs Snapchat or some other mega-SaaS.

Lottery tickets and options trading are less effort and easier to unwind for similar statistical windfall outcomes.

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

> For a more serious take that gives approximately the same results, 80000 hours finds that the average value of a YC founder after 5-9 years is $18M. That sounds great! But there are a few things to keep in mind here. First, YC companies are unusually successful compared to the average startup. Second, in their analysis, 80000 hours notes that 80% of the money belongs to 0.5% of companies. Another 22% are worth enough that founder equity beats working for a big company, but that leaves 77.5% where that's not true.

> If you're an employee and not a founder, the numbers look a lot worse. If you're a very early employee you'd be quite lucky to get 1/10th as much equity as a founder. If we guess that 30% of YC startups fail before hiring their first employee, that puts the mean equity offering at $1.8M / .7 = $2.6M. That's low enough that for 5-9 years of work, you really need to be in the 0.5% for the payoff to be substantially better than working at a big company unless the startup is paying a very generous salary.

I've been working with my dad for the last 6 years, trying to grow a company he started as an immigrant in his 40s (wholesale distributor of natural stone).

I'd like to find him a comfortable exit, so he can move to the next stage (which he wants to do) with a cushy paycheck.

Once that's done, I will start something of my own!

I'm not sure what to do. If I had an idea I would run with it but all of my ideas are either pipe-dream "if I had $10,000,000 to get started" or are small scale, "Don't know if I could pay my bills while it gets off the ground" kinds of ideas.

Started one before both as an indie dev and with a few other fellows.

The main reason I switched back to employment for now is to both have a stable income (nest egg is running out) and to gather a great team.

I don't want to work on great ideas, I want to work with great people.

I mean it's pretty much going to come down to people not starting companies because they just don't want to (lack of interest in business tasks) or because the related risks are too high (which generally means lack of working capital).

The vast majority of people won't be able to beat the total compensation packages of big tech by starting their own business. It's a pretty simple decision from a money perspective if you're honest about your chances.

Too many ideas, not enough time. It's fun building products or anything really. I couldn't imagine being on a product team for a single product that gets iterated marginally forever. Same with a company.

I'd need:

- Money and/or investors

- Time

- Enough manpower

- Great marketing

- A stronger understanding of scalability

- Ideally, a product that solves a problem in a niche area

I have bits and pieces of the above (except the investors and marketing), but it's not enough to get something up and running.

I have a family to support.

- I don't have a good idea, or a good problem to solve.

- I don't really think I'm great at what I do, so starting a company to do it feels dangerous.

I'm really bad at networking and finding a suitable business partner would be a total disaster :D

Too many regulations to make it worthwhile.

Legal shit is a nightmare.

No access to capital.

I did. It was awful.

To be a business owner is to skim the excess earnings of your workers.

It's at best amoral.

That implies that employees getting paid are skimming the money off customers because the employees wages are made by inflating the costs of what is being sold. This is especially true for a co-op because the "employees" are literally the owners.

I get the general "CEO making 10000x average employees" being excessive, but it seems dubious to say that the only alternative is no ownership.

Employees wages are not made by "inflating the costs of what's being sold" it is though their labor. A piece of steel does not get sold as a screwdriver unless someone's labor has been applied to it. Labor is inherently what provides use-value to a good. In the service sector this holds equally true.

The only person whose earnings are made through inflating the costs of whats being sold is the owner. Hence the "stolen" marginal value of the underlying good.

Co-ops give all of their earnings to those that labored to improve the use-value of the product.

Should be relatively easy to prove that no ownership is the best and only alternative, if you can provide a argument against no ownership.

You're making a huge assumption that the owner is not also providing labor. In some cases this may be true, but I would imagine that it's the exception rather than the rule.

For instance, I can be a freelancer and have to handle client interactions, billing, taxes, etc. in addition to the technical work that I perform; OR I can go work for somebody else and just focus on the technical work and make approximately the same amount (which is to say that the person for whom I'm performing the technical work is handling the other non-technical work that I don't want to have to care about).

Sure an owner can also work in the business, the skimming of marginal labor is what makes them the owner in contrast to the worker.

Your example is absolutely possible in a co-op too, the only difference is you would be making the full value of your labor less expenses, not the amount of that that your boss thinks you deserve.

Some arguments against "no ownership" :

- Are you willing to get sued on behalf of the company ? owners do.

- Are you willing to share all the downsides of running a company ? Owners do.

- Are you willing to be the person where the bucks stop with ? Owners do.

- Are you willing to do things that a regular employee cannot or will not (e.g. working 80 hour weeks) ? owners do.

- Are you willing to not just quit because things are tough ? As an employee, you can quit and tell the company to f off. As an owner, it is not that simple. You cannot get out that easy even if you want to.

I am not necessarily saying that CEOs who exploit workers are great but this idea that everyone is equal in a company is just not practically possible. People are not equal. That is a fact. Some people just want a paycheck and get the f out. Why should they get the extra upsides that owners risk ?

Some of these arguments don't actually exist in reality, others aren't really problems.

> Are you willing to get sued on behalf of the company ?

LLCs exist for a reason, liability is just as easy to determine for a co-op as a dictatorship.

> Are you willing to share all the downsides of running a company ?

These downsides would be shared equally across more people. If anything, co-ops reduce this problem by not hedging the entire company on the decisions of a single person. Do we argue that kings are superior to democracy because they can be hung when something goes bad?

> Are you willing to be the person where the bucks stop with ?

See above. This is not an argument for ownership just as it isn't an argument for monarchy. "The buck stops here" isn't a legally binding contract, and plenty of owners are happy to pass the buck to someone under them.

> Are you willing to do things that a regular employee cannot or will not (e.g. working 80 hour weeks) ?

Wage theft is the #1 form of theft in America. It seems that even owners are not willing to do things employees do.

> Are you willing to not just quit because things are tough ? As an employee, you can quit and tell the company to f off. As an owner, it is not that simple. You cannot get out that easy even if you want to.

Can an owner not sell their share of the company whenever they choose too? Companies, and fractions thereof, are bought and sold all the time. Regardless, most co-ops are not literally owned by their constituents, but rather are incorporated with the sum value of their earnings being split across the workers in the co-op. No different than most small businesses, except decisions are democratically made, rather than handed down.

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