Obviously it doesn't always end badly. But we get a massively skewed view from survivor bias.
My life turned out pretty damn well once I got a plain ordinary job working for someone else. But I don't kid myself: when it comes to starting a startup, I did fail. The main lesson I learned was that I was always going to.
I hear this a lot and I think it is good advice because the only person who should actually start a startup is the one who sees this but still does it.
It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions.
If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.
That is what's taught in many start up schools, for good reason. A startup can't ignore money without great luck.
However, it's not actually true. Lots of people start companies to make things better in some way, rather than to make bank. Some of them make bank regardless. Many businesses just tick along, but don't care about 'success' as determined by yacht size/botox per square inch/'status'.
> if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
The idea that motivating people by money is the only or even best option is a major propaganda point in the class war (and quite silly if you think about it).
> Always baffled me how little commercial sense HNers had when I was growing up and reading this forum.
How long have you been reading HN? How have you felt the "HNers" w.r.t. nose-for-commerciality (and along whatever other dimension you think is relevant) change over time?
It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever.
Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.
Junior engineers didn't cost more than any other recent graduate, and as you could get away with a few rough edges in production for quite a while, you could put together an adequately balanced team for not much money.
The tooling was much worse, but the compliance burden was much less.
Did your friends in the .com era talk about "doing a startup" or "starting a business"? I feel like that's changed a bit, people are more calculated and cynical about how the game is to be played with respect to rounds, exit strategies and so on. The "startup" model specifically means something a bit different to "starting a business", around ambition, scale, investment model etc. All businesses need to be started, but not all businesses are startups.
Total scalability & strong network effect points toward a "get the monopoly, now" business model. Which, IDK, might suit some things but definitely isn't the right fit for all things tech.
I think this is the biggest factor that actually affects the fundamentals of selling tech. To my eye, every other aspect is some form of Gordon Gecko business insanity and/or VC people looking to stoke egos by making people with good ideas feel like big shot executives while figuring out how soon they can throw it all in a juicer and extract a bunch of cash.
This, but also it's a bit like gambling, this is the high risk / high reward way to do startups. The slower way is more stable, but you don't get to have fun with other people's money while you're building the business.
they eat ramen for 10 years, often even believing in someone else's dream without substantional equity to match the risk/reward profile. meanwhile, the plumber next door who started his own plumbing business is driving a ferrari on weekends.
Worse than failing is not trying.
You will live your life always wondering “what if”.
When you fail, you will have an answer to the above question and can live in peace.
Otherwise you're not missing much. Work for something that pays well, solve interesting problems, spend time at home with your family and friends. The problem is when you're wanting to start something because someone else did it and don't have the implementation or execution perseverance (or just don't believe in it strongly).
When you fail, it can be due to many things. Not everything in the world is controllable. This is one of the reasons why expecting zero ”What ifs” at the end of your post-mortem is unreasonable.
I guess being aware of what you need and can afford is key.
There's no proof that this personal feeling should be listened to or given behavioral authority, especially when it suspiciously conforms to the aesthetic that is widely shared by many who end up having only achieved a mundane life, despite “noble” projects launched because of arrogant egos. This social phenomenon which sponsors the freedom and agency of people fit only to be busy drones is wasting global resources on bourgeois affairs. Elon Musk and his eventual epic failure at super-industrialism is a great example of this harmful sinful pride.
The “what if” has only served to help overvalue ordinary potential, when that capability should have been limited to simple tasks, industries, and affairs. It's a mind virus riding on the waves of language and the beastly body of rationality, a false reality having been successfully disguised as a legitimate object to perceive within the cognitive sphere of humanity. It is deviation that surely has contributed to the collapse of the great liberal humanism project, the real goal of democracy and its encompassing civilization having been the quiet and stable enslavement of a massive surplus of dull brains and basic bodies. A mass of uninteresting genetic carriers who would do well to never worry about what is outside the scope of their common destinies.
The dialectic that there can be morbid peace if you would just test out the hypothesis that you can become a great man is an incomprehensibly devised thinking trap that can filter out men who don't know what the fuck is going on in the grand universe.
But God (or simply nature) works in mysterious ways and I'm glad that hubris was created to serve as an instrument for learning what not to ever do. And to materially benefit from, salvaging from the failures of future past technologies being a huge possibility to leverage. Your supposed tragedy is my informed opportunity, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos.
EDIT: If you ever invent warp drive or faster than light travel or functional nuclear fusion, I'll be looking forward to the blueprints of such treasures and strategic advantages ;)
Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family .
I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas .
And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.
In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses.
The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed.
> And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch.
There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity.
The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories.
There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can.
I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat.
But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
Then the network would take a small percentage of equity in the companies of all the members.
As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.
I find it easier to just consider Steve Jobs to be exceptional here. He's the definition of not letting the circumstances of your birth dictate anything.
Jobs has said himself on multiple occasions that he was lucky with timing and proximity to the industry and people, not that it lessens the immense grit that was still needed.
I haven't created any billion dollar companies yet, have you?
I also don’t claim to make such effort. I just want to clarify that networking is a conscious skill and not always a result of family connections.
Nothing you can do today with a typical HN skill set will come even close to that. There are thousands (at least) of people with those skills. They can build it too, whatever it is. You’re not Woz and you don’t know a Woz. Likely there is no Woz today; everything computing is so much more specialized and complicated and layered and just plain big. You may be able to find success in this world, but it won’t be replicating the Jobs story.
But if you're young, got the time ... I think it's worth a shot, or two, or more.
I worked for a startup whose founder was a super young guy who had never had a job before being CEO. He was missing experiences like "what do I hate when my boss does" and so needed to repeat all the same mistakes. This resulted in things like... postmortem reviews with action items like "we should dock people's pay if installs are done incorrectly" instead of "we should ensure that the install crews have the tools they need to do the install correctly". (That action item was one of the few battles there that I won. We gave every installer a toolbox containing the tools to do the job. This improved the success of installs greatly. But who needs a meeting to come up with an "idea" like this?)
But I hear you starting at zero life experience, that is bad. I would find it pretty painful to work at a start up and have to talk to the founder "bro let's talk about the basics of picking your battles" and do it ... well.
“The time value of money (TVM) is a financial principle that states that money in the present is worth more than the same amount in the future.”
Money is worth more NOW so you can spend it to acquire skills, resources, and goods. If you wait then you are living life without those things. And delaying early strategic wins.
Passive investing is renting out that optionality to other people, like starting a 401k early.
This is circular. Why would money magically get more valuable in the future?
Money is valuable for its uses, not intrinsically.
The reason why you can get interest on money is because people and businesses need it NOW to do productive things, more badly than in the future.
This is the entire principle behind discounting cash flows.
Yes, I need some of my money now to pay my expenses. But if you had 200K extra to invest in 2010 and chose to invest it and instead chose to work somewhere paying $200K less than you could have thinking I can make $200K more in 14 years. You would have lost out on 605% returns.
> Money is valuable for its uses, not intrinsically.
Investing in it’s truest form is consuming money to make entirely new goods and services.
To put it one more way. If the treasury was paying zero percent forever. Would there still be time value of money? Absolutely.
What do you think you are doing when you “invest” in the stock market?
Yes I know when you buy stocks aside from the IPO or secondary offering you’re buying from other people and the company doesn’t get the money directly.
They spend it to accomplish a goal. The ability to accomplish that goal now is more valuable than the cash.
The value of the money to you or the business is worth more now than 10 years from now. Meaning just like I said, it makes more sense for you as an individual to have made $300K and live off $100K and invest it in 2010 than to wallow in obscurity at failing startups and then start saving at 35.
This is the textbook definition of the time value of money - as quoted from Investopedia.
- money is more valuable now because you can start earning interest - but why are others willing to pay interest? - because the money is more valuable to them now
The culture of HN is certainly still alive
Also a note, it seems wikipedia agrees with investopedia here —- and the equations of TVM include interest rates and compounding.
You have a point on the WHY, but I think TVM may just take that as an assumption.
The time value of money (TVM) surmises that money is worth more now than at a future date based on its earning potential. Because money can grow when invested, any delay is a lost opportunity for growth. The time value of money is a core financial principle known as the present discounted value.
I think this is a good description which represents my view. Notice that these are true regardless of the existence of central banking:
Opportunity Costs of Waiting: Money available now can be used to address immediate needs or desires—buying goods, accessing services, or achieving goals. If that money is delayed, those opportunities may be lost, diminished, or deferred, reducing its practical utility.
Uncertainty Over Time: The future is uncertain, and there is a risk that the purchasing power or usefulness of money might change due to factors like inflation, changes in circumstances, or unforeseen events. Money available now provides a guarantee of utility that might not exist in the future.
Personal Preference for Timing: People often value immediate access to money because it aligns with their current priorities. For example, having money now could allow someone to travel, invest in education, or address urgent health needs—opportunities that may not hold the same relevance or availability later.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678ee649-6e30-8010-b16b-d152ac228d...
You’re talking about prioritizing a different lifestyle.
On that note: Warren Buffett made a 1 million dollar bet with some hedge fund managers that he could beat their returns just by putting money in an index fund over 10 years - he won the bet.
It's not for everyone though. Bar is super high, risk is high, long work weeks with little balance are the entry ticket.
Rare, wise words. (in a world, where 'follow thy dreams' philosophy is venerated).
There are many opportunities online available. Start with acquisition and build from there.
I did it myself a few times, and have friends who made way more. The biggest secret, sticking to it.
Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job that is learning how to extract value from civilization's economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and head back home on the plane that can depart from the place where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup founder is much, much more intense than some special forces soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S. Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine at a target 900 meters away.
Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology does says yes.
After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A terrible role model to look up to.