Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?
Everyone's* got ideas they think are great and startup-worthy. What are some interesting reasons you chose NOT to pursue your idea?
*Of course not literally everyone, Jeff.
*Of course not literally everyone, Jeff.
1. 99.9th percentile technical brilliance
2. 99.9th percentile mixture of relentlessness and charm/natural likability due to charisma, attractiveness, etc
3. 99.9th percentile luck and alignment of the stars of marker forces and technological progress in your favor
Imo if you know you're not a special, magical person by the first two metrics, watching how things change/emerge will give you some edge on the third.
I’ve watched them found rock-solid companies and build great teams (I’ve worked on them)… and then for some reason several times in a VC-backed Boards like to bring in their own guys and push out the actual founders.
In short, I’ve watched VC rob my friends of their joy and in some cases cheat them of their blood, sweat, and equity. Good luck exercising those options on a non-IPO firm when you’re scrambling to find a new job to keep the mortgage current.
I’m really soured in the whole “start a startup.” There’s so much chicanery going on in the business world that it’s just sickening to see.
However, I suspect it is a lot simpler (in concept not execution) than most of us think. Success probably is a combination of ability (you must be able to actually do the work), persistence (to push through when it is hard going), insight (to be able to determine where to apply the previous two skills) and a healthy dose of luck (never hurts).
But I think the tech industry trains us to think that that’s the only success. But there are lots of startups that make a product, are cash-flow positive, and have reasonable growth. And I think this version of success does not require the tremendously narrow odds that you’re suggesting.
Yes 3 is always valid. But I don't think you need to be the best individual at anything to 'succeed'
Although your use of 'founder' suggests a go big or go home mentality. There's nothing wrong with finding a niche.
Obviously every alternative has its own (dis) advantages.
If you want other's money you need to convince them. That means a lot of extra work writing plans, and when you receive the money you are inmediately diluted.
For that reason I always pursue ideas I can start developing on my own... And it is then when I find my main weak point: I don't have enough time...
The basics are simple enough, imagine an FPGA without any routing hardware, just a sea of 4 bit in, 4 bit out Look Up Tables (LUTs). To prevent race conditions, I'd latch the outputs of the cells, and clock then in 2 alternative phases.
This makes the thing a horrible FPGA, because latency is the one thing they fight hard to overcome, but on the other hand, it makes it very easy to reason about, and immune to race conditions, timing issues, etc. The gain is that you get almost trivial routing, and essentially all of the transistors devoted to compute.
It's what you get when you answer George Gilder's call to "waste transistors".[3]
I've got a simulator for the chip, I still need to figure out how to program it (i.e. write a compiler, debugger, etc.)
The major question.... can this architecture do an Exaflop on a cheap chip? (<$10 in quantity)
[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid
From everything to career choice to investments, I made/make a statistical and risk minimizing decision.
I ended up a software engineer looking at average outcomes and general failure points for different majors. Don’t get me wrong future employers, I do enjoy the work (as you would see on my resume), but if it had the prospects of a history major, I would not have studied it. There are people who do that they love and expect to figure it out along the way. I am not that person.
I invest in broad based index ETFs as statistically people are proven to underperform with stock picking. I have no reason to believe that I am special there, so I invest in ETFs.
Add in that early career money compounds and is worth 10x at retirement at my age.
So basically my life can be very comfortable as long as I stay the course.
Statistically startups fail. I would be risking a very straightforward and very comfortable for the chance at a yacht. And I don’t dream of the yacht.
Also while I don’t necessarily have an addiction to clothing and I live in a place where I wouldn’t die if I were naked, I would be arrested.
The first “experience” I don’t want is to be homeless, hungry and naked.
I like the experience of waking up, going to my laptop, working eight hours and closing it.
I spend not one hour worrying about the success or failure of the company besides making sure I can contribute my part for 40 hours a week.
Edit: My choice of words was a little confusing. I meant that the scale I'd consider pursuing would be at most a tiny team, but more likely just me with some delegate contractors, or a traditional small business like a coffee shop. The amount of definite cost in seeking possible fortune through higher scale startups is not something I'm set up for or am interested in.
About 3 years ago (entering my 40s), I had a moment of introspection/clarity where it occurred to me that looking back in 20 years time and not having tried would upset me a lot more than any potential failure would have.
So I left my comfortable job and became a solo freelancer/contractor, gave myself a direct pay-cut with a view to building up a couple of years of savings/buffer to subsequently fund myself while building out the idea and the business around it.
What has instead happened is that the freelance/contractor business has become very successful - I get to choose the hours I work, pick and choose projects, I have roughly 12-18 months of pipeline at any point in time, and due to the very niche field I'm currently working in don't have any trouble setting an appropriate rate to the point where I've managed to save about 3 years of buffer in 3 years of operation.
The original idea still bounces around in my head and I've had validation from several of my clients that they would love just such a tool, but: I've already got a comfortable full-time gig, a (slightly less) young family, bills to pay and a healthy fear of the unknown...
For long term businesses to succeed on their own we have to remove intellectual property laws. Allow for actual innovation not barred by vertical integration and oligopoly cronyism. The current system rewards whoever buys all the startups that develop IP. Sometimes the horde of lawyers force them into it.
The other reason is that it takes a team, and few are ready or believe they can work in startup conditions. Or theyre devs that got in early with another corp and truly do not know what it's like to build a foundation. The specific expertise necessary is also difficult to source.
First example: a friend of mine ran restaurants for many years. A black woman claimed she drove past his restaurant and that a man standing across the street from the restaurant gave her a dirty look. She knew that was the restaurant owner, not based on any facts or logic, but based on the Black Way of Knowing. She sued for civil rights violations. He description of the man was nothing like my friend, other than them both being male humans. She misidentified 2 other men in the courthouse as the man who gave her a dirty look and concretely ruled out my friend before the bailiff explained who was who to her. Then she changed her story. She won and took my friend's family business, leaving his family with nothing.
Second example: There is a mexican cafe in my area that we always ate at after church on Sundays. They invented the corn chip that they sold to a chip company that became a well known corn chip today. The chip company did not remember this because corporations change personnel. The chip company sued the family-business that was the mexican cafe. The family running the mexican cafe produced the original contract that said if the chip company ever sued them over something frivolous, they would own the chip company. This document was examined by experts and found to be authentic. Even several Ivy League schools found it to be authentic. The corrupt 5th Circuit Court (5th Circus Cult?) refused to look at the evidence, took bribes from the chip company, destroyed the contract, and somehow many members of the family that owned the mexican cafe died mysteriously.
Third example: I loved my auto mechanic. Cody ran a place called All Pro Transmissions, and was an honest mechanic who never charged more than his estimate and always fixed something extra just to be nice. Then the crooks from another mechanics shop (who charged me for an engine they did not replace) sued him, claiming he was cheating his customers. They won and split the proceeds with the crooked JP (place 1.) Cody has to work for them (court ordered) as their face man. When anyone takes their car there, they get ripped off and as they pick it up the techs brag about how much they got screwed.
I tried to file a patent when I was in college. The patent examiner asked an expert from a major tech company to help him examine the patent. The major tech company stole my patent and sold it to another company.
There is much more. I give up. Screw The System.
If you are an honest and hardworking person, the system is screwed beyond repair. Liars and crooks are the only ones that can succeed, and the system can easily be abused to actively help them commit their crimes.
What's holding me back the most is that I do nog know how to finance my projects without giving up control, shares or create financial liabilities I'd be on the hook for.
Second there are the regulatory and legal hurdles. How do I find out which standards each component has to live up to and how do I properly document and possibly report compliance with them? What documents do I have to submit to which agency, what licenses do I have to obtain and who has to certify my product before I'm allowed to sell it?
Realisticly I'm expecting to drive my first few businesses over the financial and regulatory cliff at full speed and I do not want to be in the car when it goes over the edge.
What matters is execution, and I have neither the expertise nor the money for a good execution. And with execution I mean mainly Marketing and Business, not just the manifestation of the idea. But of course, manifesting the idea in a good product is also a crucial part. Because Ideas are simple, straight forward, but they leave out the boring nasty parts which make the product hard to build and even harder to sell.
Which is why ideas are worthless. Get a good product or service, get some even better response from other people and find your customers; then can you start building a company which has a chance to not end as the same disaster as the majority of startups.
Now we’re working on an another software startup focused on creativity. Once again I think funding is the biggest issue and finding the right idea to grow beyond the idea alone which those two things take time. So hopefully we have an MVE in early new years and we can start getting some alpha testers onboard before we go full out waitlist and start raising funds.
Another reason is my next solo adventure would be bootstrapped. So some types of SaaS are out of the picture.
Most new technologies that blossom out to startups should be done in a university-like environment. I mean having knowledge on hand, similar staff members to mull ideas over, stable income and away from 'wfh'.
Doing all that from random locations, with the added stress of market-fit, marketing, taxes, ect is a headache.
Simply navigating the minefield of public tech and business knowledge without stupifying yourself and falling for inauthentic lies, is a danger.
It's going well though, wanted to point out those dangers for those playing along.
So now I’m stuck in a comfortable job. With 2 young kids and expenses.
But I have finally found an idea that is worth pursuing but I am doing that on my spare time so development is slow.Not really what you were asking but several of my projects died because I didnt have time enough for them. Im fine with that though since the competition is pretty much none, sucks and is expensive as hell. Seems like the perfect market, but we'll see.
edit: wait, you said "interesting". sorry.