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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

You can get 500k as a normal employee. Why bother with the startup risk to make that amount?

It's just glorified contracting at this point.

> Why bother with the startup risk to make that amount?

One reason that hasn’t been mentioned yet as of this comment: ownership. Your startup is yours. You have the vision, you run the business, and there’s nobody to blame for anything but yourself.

When I was doing game development I got frustrated with the yearly post-mortem where we’d identify what things didn’t go well and what we could do to improve, only to make the same mistakes the next year. The company was relying on ambitious and hard-working people like me to keep fixing the same mistakes and avoid having to do deep planning and make hard decisions early.

With my own company, I still made mistakes but they were my mistakes to make and fix, and I never had to pull overtime to fix someone else’s mistake. I was far happier making a lot less money. (Up to a point… you can’t live on nothing. :P)

There are other benefits like doing both customer relations and engineering, which can make you better at both, and the slim potential for a large payout of FU money, among other things. Running a business isn’t for everyone, but wanting to and being willing to take all the responsibility is one thing you can’t get as a normal employee.

If you own a business with $500k profit then you can sell it for a multiple of that.

You also have the option to automate yourself out of a job or hire someone to reduce the time you need to spend on the business.

As an employee you trade time for money with no ability to sell or reduce your workload.

You can't leave your desk whenever you want. And when you leave your desk, you've always this social/peer pressure to ensure there aren't any complaints about you being frequently away or for longer, for example.

That's not freedom. What's not freedom isn't richness. The attached price tag doesn't matter.

It is the other way around, as part of a large company you can take 2-4 weeks' vacation without any material impact to your career or companies' performance not so in your own startup. In many cases you can take 1 year sabbatical and join back where you left, with a startup you are tied to weekly and quarterly result.

Really depends on industry.. maybe at FAANG that is normal, elsewhere - no. I've worked almost 20 years now and haven't done a real 2-weeker vacation in 5 years, and probably won't again for a while. 4 week vacation is practically unheard of, as is sabbatical.

Of course being a small business owner is not really compatible with 2-4 week vacations, BUT.. you are empowered to make that decision. Maybe you just drag your laptop with you and stay reachable / keep things moving along, but from whatever sunny location you've decided to holiday.

Not much different than my last 6 day vacation where I had my laptop & work phone, and checked in on any urgent fires every morning & evening back at the hotel...

Im pretty sure the 500k employee at Google is vastly vastly more free to leave his desk than the small business owner making that much.

There's a wide range of workloads for small business owners. Sometimes a strategy finds a market and after significant effort to get to capture customers, doesn't take a lot of work to maintain. Others might be pulling 80 hour weeks for $40k/year

That's 100x more true if you're a business owner. You can't take simply time off whereas as a employee you can

Getting to $500k comp as an employee isn't exactly a walk in the park either.

Not at all actually. That's half a million dollar compensation we're talking about. That's not the norm or average compensation.

This is not that easy outside the FAANG bubble

The "FAANG bubble" itself employs like 100k engineers and many many more startups and Fortune 500 companies pay >90% as much.

Only in the US and mostly there in the tech bubble cities. That compensation is for an equally skilled expert nowhere else seen in the world.

That is not correct; you can have this level of compensation in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia as well.

Sure, high compensation is only available in major cities with a thriving tech scene, but that's pretty much any major city.

Ok, where do you get 500k in europe?

London, Zurich, Amsterdam.

source on the 100k number? pay is heavily tied to geo as well

You are living in a bubble

Or I'm aware of what the market actually pays at the top end.

Of course this is for very senior roles. But if you have what it takes to found and manage a start-up, you should have what it takes to be a leader in an established organization too.

Tax vehicles is one big advantage. Your take home as an employee on $500K is only $250K a year, whereas you can defer income in a business and pay 20% tax.

A business that's not a self-employment scheme would also need to pay founders through salaries.

Of course you can also have shares and dividends but the same applies to being a normal employee in a normal company.

Founders can be paid entirely in dividends. They can also choose what salaries to pay themselves - thus bringing down their taxable income bracket spread out over time.

5 million exit in one year is much different than 500k yearly

less risk of layoffs, diversification

this account is 100% bad takes, I wonder if it's some sort of chatbot?

Someone that's systematically disagreeing with my opinions, that cannot be!

Must be a bot indeed. Or maybe, just maybe, someone with a different experience than yourself.

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