Stop Pretending you can Start a Company while Avoiding Sacrifice and Risk

But we don't have to reason this one through - we just look out into the world and check.

All in all, it does look grim. Most of the successful software companies do seem to have taken a big plunge at some point. Consulting companies don't count, but consulting companies that have morphed into product companies might.

Can anyone think of a few successful companies that have started this way? Or, if not successful companies, personal applications that someone managed to sell for a lot of dough?

Joelonsoftware's fogbugz might be a good candidate, as well as the 37signals apps. I think that delicious was started as a personal project by an employee with a full-time job. None of these are the giant, smash successes you read about in the business section of the mainstream press, but they can be still be remarkably profitable quiet successes.

I used the job example as the most common issue that people tried to circumvent, but I think you can moonlight in some cases just fine.

There is risk and sacrifice in moonlighting, too. I think people have unrealistic expectations as to what starting a company means though.

It's so easy to fool yourself into thinking you can have your cake and eat it too. How many people get into the upper-middle class lifestyle of a programmer and then are willing to go back to living like a poor college student? Very few. So moonlighting becomes a way of trying without taking the plunge.

Someone might say about quitting to do a startup: "Yeah..maybe you can't diet without getting your stomach stapled, but I can."

Eating a healthy diet and exercising might be similar. It's something that tons of people want, but so few are able to actually sustain over the long-term. I think a lot more people would successfully exercise and eat healthy if they didn't have day jobs. If they had plenty of extra time to go to the gym and cook meals. I think the same thing is true for doing successful startups, but to a much greater extent since they require so much more effort and time.