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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who wants to know the answer to this question: what now? You quit a great job, tried building a startup and failed - you have a family and mortgage to factor in to the equation, where to from here? I am guessing that the author has some savings to live off, but I want to know how it all ends. What does your wife think of all of this? So many unanswered questions that have my head buzzing with nervousness and curisotity here.

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His wife is most probably furious. Women are in general much more averse to risk-taking than men (especially after having kids). At least that is the case with my wife. Every crazy idea I have, I run it first through my wife. She shreds 99% of them ;). "Think of the children", "How will we pay mortgage", "In fall we have to renovate older child's bedroom". Etc.

This comment comes across as pretty sexist, by the way. Taking experiences with a small set of people and generalizing them to all people based on their gender is basically the definition of sexism.

I am sorry you feel that way.

I don't agree with you, by the way. And there's loads of research suggesting that males are much more prone to risk-taking than females. And not only in humans.

She's a lot more risk adverse than me, but I ran the numbers, we had about two year's runway, and as I said when I started out "at least if I fail it'll be quick!" :-)

Ah awesome, glad to hear man. I guess it's silly of me to assume that you wouldn't have thought well-ahead, but wanted to be sure. I've got ambitions of launching my own startup ideas but I'm doing it whilst employed full-time, so hard to balance free time between family, freelance work and my partner.

I get the impression that he is using the occasion of his failure to announce his availability for employment.

And jolly good luck to him.

HNers: do people think that someone who has got the startup thing out of their system themselves will make a better employee?

Truly? I don't know yet.

I have the luxury of a reasonably large nest egg from my previous job, so I'm not desperate for work. I'm considering whether any of these ideas are licensable (I've never done licensing before, but it doesn't seem too unfathomable.) I'm also networking/advertising myself, partly through posts like this, and seeing what opportunities turn up as a result. If you'd seen my inbox since posting this you'd become a believer in this strategy...

I mean, look at the guy. Even if all the things he was trying for failed, he could still get a great job as his last choice.

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