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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. The alternative is to chill out at your current job and be able to pay your mortgage, and then start a startup when money is raining from the sky like it was in 2021. It's cyclical. Tech isn't dead forever, and what's a good idea today will still be a good idea in a couple years. You'll also be a couple years wiser, which is never bad.

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or, someone will simply start your idea (assuming it's original and good) and be first to market. lots more nuances around first to market, but PG has a point. there's no right answer and it's all personal, but if you do have an awesome idea, and it makes sense financially for you, then there's no point in waiting X years. you're just throwing those years out. worst case, what, you get rejected from funding because of a grim financial future? it's still extremely valuable spending that time building your project and getting that awesome experience of pitching/getting rejected.

there's always an optimistic take to everything and a pessimistic one. if you're always taking the wait and see approach, chances are you're not going to do anything later, either. be somebody who does things and doesn't just sit around dreaming and waiting (like me)

eh, even original and good ideas aren't that valuable. Sometimes an individual can get lucky with a gimmick but a sustainable business is usually successful when a team of great people are both having and executing on good ideas on a daily basis - and still needs luck.

yep. further proving my point that building such a team equals time. and you need to start asap to do something like that, not just sit around wasting valuable years of your life

> Tech isn't dead forever, and what's a good idea today will still be a good idea in a couple years.

Just as a couple of concrete examples:

A paid-for app was a great idea in 2009, but a bad idea in 2013.

A dedicated handheld PlayStation was a great idea in 2005 but an awful idea in 2012.

Self-driving car companies were a great idea in 2017, but a bad idea in 2020.

I think the point is that technology changes and sometimes you need to strike whole the iron's hot.

Aren't you just seeing your failed business without actually having to fail? You have some idea to change the world, someone copies it, they failed miserably; how do you lose there?

There are so many things that were "before their time" and failed, like garbage-collected programming languages. C beat Lisp, because GC was too slow. Then Java beat C, because manual memory management was too dangerous. Being too early is almost scarier than being too late.

I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic, because if so, you're nailing it. If not, literally every single argument you brought up is against the consensus in the YC community, which doesn't mean you're wrong, but it still stands out as a massively contrarian position on this site.

The current fiscal environment is against the consensus in the YC community. The times they are a-changin'.

I'm not being sarcastic.

I get that people are concerned about their ideas being stolen, but honestly, you can probably come up with another idea. I think what most people who have their ideas stolen find is that it turned out to not be a good business, and someone else invested 2 years of their life on a painful slog to discover that. On to the next idea!

The advice could be for people that were laid off and face months of unemployment. Quitting your job now to start a startup might make less sense. But also, quitting your job now and getting a grant when stocks are undervalued, could be a good move too.

Also can also hack up an proof of concept or MVP during that time as well, a few hours a week at a time. Even if you don't complete it, you'll have that much more progress towards it when you decide to take the plunge later.

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