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Comment by kingofspain | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad I was pushing 30 before I really became aware of this startup scene. The general impression that comes off, to me at least, is work hard, stop moaning, accept pennies and one day you'll be rich - assuming that unlikely outcome happens and we don't use of the thousand ways possible to screw you out of any riches.

To me at least, and as an outsider, I'd say things like this may hold up for founders, but as a non-founder you better be young and have very little in the way of commitments. Get the experience and use what you've learned to found something yourself.

As a caveat, I am obviously not well in on the startup scene, but from what I've seen & heard over the years, there's very little to tempt me as an employee.

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I'm in my early 20s. Startups seem to be the only way out of 40 years of mediocrity in TPS-land for me, so I don't really think I have much of a choice. It's startups or nothing for me.

Or maybe I am being myopic? Are there more options to be had in life than mediocrity/wageslavery vs glory/startups?

"Are there more options to be had in life than mediocrity/wageslavery vs glory/startups?"

Sure ... freelance. But depending on how you structure your work, you may end up with a similar work-load as a startup, or failure dropping you back into TPS-land.

Yeah I've considered freelancing+frugality as a viable alternative. My goal being to minimize the amount of "work" I have to do to survive, so that I can focus on getting interesting stuff done.

I just consider it such a damn waste to sit in an office all day and basically do jack shit. It's not even that I dislike the work all that much, it's just... all those wasted hours. All down the drain.

</whine>

You are believing exactly what investors and VCs want you to believe. You aren't escaping wage slavery, you are just substituting a different slavemaster. Wake up.

There are billions of people on this planet. Do you think that the ones who aren't in Silicon Valley startups are all miserable? Their lives aren't worth living?

Ok, but more specifically. Let's say you want to lead a creative existence, working with technology, and you love the SF scene so much you just have to live here. You don't need to be in a startup for that. As they tell you to be frugal with a startup, be frugal with you life and all sorts of possibilities open up.

I know a number of people living in "hacker homes" where they drift in between working on startups, technology jobs, and then working on projects that just interest them. Sometimes they'll take an entire year off work to do something with no monetary gain, like a Burning Man or an open source project. You might have to live in an less desirable area with a lot of housemates, but once your rent is sub-$1000 and you cook most of your own food, you can live for an entire year once you've pulled off a couple of consulting gigs.

You're young, and I presume you don't have a spouse or kids, so this option is very possible for you.

Thanks, that's some cool ideas right there! Upvoted for truth and justice.

I'm all for exploring unconventional lifestyle design patterns. And I have been nursing certain plans of becoming a techno-hippie :)

Thanks. By the way -- another possibility is to work for technology projects which aren't really in the startup game.

A lot of my friends work for the Wikimedia Foundation, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Tor, and so on. There's no possibility of walking away as a zillionaire, but neither do you have to work with (or for) dickwads who are only in it for the money and who are out to screw you out of your share. And if you're any good, there's a guarantee of doing something significant that you can point to later on your resume, should you want to go the entrepreneurial route. These organizations are global, so you get to do a fair bit of travelling too.

Non-profits have their own special brand of problems, but if you tally up the pros and cons they are definitely an option.

How do I get started?

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html

I don't think you get a job at Tor without being personally known to the developers. Volunteer, I guess.

From several folks I've known who worked at Mozilla, you just trade in money-dickwads for power-dickwads.

Obviously this varies depending on where you are in the organization. But the bottom line is: there are always dicks, and they always try to screw somebody (that's what dicks do), and in startups, there are probably more of them because millions is more interesting than power over a few people.

Agreed. However, I wouldn't say that the situation is entirely neutral, were we to empirically measure dickwads-encountered-per-minute.

I agree with the majority of this but would like to add that founding your own startup and keeping it ultra lightweight can gain you these same freedoms on a higher income.

Don't take on investors: make a product that earns money. Don't hire full or part time employees: find intelligent automated solutions to tricky problems or bring on contractors as necessary. Having control over what you make and when you make it means (for me, at least) more sleep, more money and less wasted time making someone else's dream a reality.

Just because you're starting a company doesn't mean you need to raise millions of dollars, work 80 hours a week, and try to become the next Facebook.

Alternatively, you can raise (or save) a moderate amount of cash, work comfortably at whatever pace you choose, and build something scalable and sellable. If you're making quality software, it's not difficult to generate enough passive income to support the lifestyle you want to live.

Yes, that sounds like a dream come true. Got any pointers for me?

Rob Walling's book is a nice how-to for this kind of entrepreneurship http://www.startupbook.net/

(not affiliated with the author in any way, just enjoyed the book myself)

Seconded. I'm doing a radically different thing from Rob's focus on niche web apps, so a lot of his advice didn't directly apply. But as someone taking the independent/bootstrapper approach to starting a software company, I still got quite a lot out of the book.

I'd strongly recommend the podcast as well: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

Thanks!

And I'll recommend this one then: http://www.mixergy.com (I am quite active over email with the host and have arranged several of the interviews - Morten Lund and John Robb come to mind)

I haven't read the book that some others have been recommending, but it looks good (I respect a lot of the people who gave it favorable reviews on its website). Aside from that, I'd say you should do some research on others who've successfully followed this path. They exist -- they're just less likely to show up in tech news, which is heavily influenced by investors (who only care about big wins) and bloggers (who only care about big news).

Take a look at the early blog posts from Balsamiq's Peldi, anything by Patrick Mackenzie, the Wufoo guys, Gary Vaynerchuck, or anything from the 37Signals guys. This talk by DHH never fails to motivate me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You might find my blog interesting: http://unicornfree.com - I just ran a series on pricing, and will be doing other practical nuts & bolts things soon. (Mixed with, I admit, no small amount of philosophy.)

I'd highly recommend working at a well-regarded, industry-leading company before assuming that startups are the only option.

I thought basically the same thing you did as a teenager, and when I was formulating my career plans after college, it was "startups or bust". It turns out that employees at Google, Facebook, Mckinsey, Goldman Sachs, numerous hedge funds, and probably even some old-economy companies actually have quite a bit of freedom to do their jobs with creativity and excellence. Good managers don't try to control employees - they manage them, so that the employee's natural talents and inclinations are matched up to the needs of the organization. And a manager at a fast-growing company probably got put in that position because somebody else thought he would do well at it, while a manager at a startup got that way because he hated his old job enough to quit.

There're certainly things wrong with big companies - I could probably name half a dozen areas where Google is dysfunctional and probably not fixable because the dysfunction is an emergent property of having 30,000 people work on a suite of products used by billions. But unless you've worked in both big and small companies, you don't have enough information to understand what dysfunction is inherent to being big and what dysfunction is just the result of getting a bad boss.

To be honest, going the startup route is about the worst possible way to get what you want (assuming you mean: working for other people's startups. Your own could be ok depending on how you do it).

A startup will likely have stupid ideas about work ethic and they'll probably want to push your compensation into equity. For any startup you join, be realistic, it will not be the next google/facebook. You'll be doing well if it doesn't end up failing. If it does survive, the equity you got will probably be devaluated somehow.

There may be some lottery-level chance of becoming financially independent, but you'll save yourself effort by just working a TPS-land job and buying actual lottery tickets.

A much more consistent approach would be to contract (or consult if you have the chance) and live frugally. With this, you should be able to save up enough money to take a year off every few years.

"""I'm so glad I was pushing 30 before I really became aware of this startup scene. The general impression that comes off, to me at least, is work hard, stop moaning, accept pennies and one day you'll be rich - assuming that unlikely outcome happens and we don't use of the thousand ways possible to screw you out of any riches."""

Startups are tax for people who are good at math, but don't bother checking their odds.

That's under the terribly flawed assumption that economic outcome is the only thing that matters. There are many other considerations that make a startup appealing (culture, for example).

That's under the terribly flawed assumption that "culture" can only be had at a "startup."

Hardly. I said there are other considerations. There is no statement therein indicating that culture can only be had at a startup. A culture exists at every company, and the culture at a particular startup may simply appeal to someone more than that of a given corporation that offers them a job. This would be one consideration, in addition to compensation, in whether to take a job there or not.

I also merely offered culture as one example, not as the only additional consideration.

Also consider that successful outcomes aren't distributed evenly; if you're exceptionally talented and work at an exceptionally good company, then it's not about odds, it's about execution. It's only gambling in the way a professional poker player gambles.

Tons of "exceptionally talented" programmers got their respective startups nowhere.

And the "exceptionally good company" -> success, borders on tautology, because how else do you measure an exceptionally good company besides success?

"""It's only gambling in the way a professional poker player gambles"""

Yeah, you influence your fate and all. But poker is even less random than startup success --at least randomness there is constrained, will on a startup you have tons of sources of randomness:

The startup founders, the employees, the economy in general, the society in general (fads, etc), investors, the client pool, you name it...

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