Ask HN: Go all in on startup idea, or stay W2

The market has quite a bit of competition which isn't a bad thing, in fact it is good validation of the idea.

The issue is that you are quite late to the party and I don't see a differentiator in your product.

Regardless, I would focus on getting a few paying customers first to validate the idea while still working a job so you can eat.

I agree and good advice. Being so new to this and not having a network to bounce ideas off of or even try the app makes that part difficult to go from 0 to 1 for me personally.

While I agree that competition exists and it is validating that the labs and others are working on solving this problem. I am trying to focus on a broader solution. Competitors will focus only on memory - but not so much on the other infrastructure requirements to create an AI app (chat history, etc).

I am also trying to create a moat around the difference in how we validate and create memories. Most will have a single pipeline, I want to have multiple and compare - this does increase my COGS however.

Appreciate the message -

> not having a network to bounce ideas off of or even try the app makes that part difficult to go from 0 to 1

This wouldn't change if you quit your job.

Keep your job, stop building, and start talking to potential customers.

Agree and fairly practical advice and one that comes up frequently when watching videos on yc founders etc.

I think another thing I'd like to point out is that it isn't necessarily 'quit your job' as it can also be 'do i take on more responsibility at work' or new role vs keep same role and split time between project and work.

Almost everyone comes up with an idea during their career, where they think 'this could be really big'.

The idea of abandoning the 9 to 5 job to strike out on your own can be strong. There are many stories where a solo entrepreneur or small startup team did just that, and are now well off, if not insanely rich.

But the other 90% you never hear about. They work hard to try and get their idea to market, but it never pans out. A myriad of reasons can cause a project to fail, long before it replaces your salary today.

Your personal circumstances along with talent and drive, should play a pivotal role in deciding to make the jump. Unless you have a comfortable amount to savings, I would recommend keeping your day job and working on the side project in your spare time. Don't quit your W2 until you get some real traction on it.

I am naturally extremely conservative. Part of the dilemma is maybe seek promotions at work or stay at same level and build side project.

I think doing something like this is very much high risk/high reward. Part of the challenge (albeit a good one) is the salaries are fairly good - so this approaching that is not an overnight thing. From a personal circumstance side of things there is also that opportunity cost.

"Don't quit your W2 until you get some real traction on it." I think this is probably the best path.

Not enough information. Are you making 400k in big tech or 300k at a stable job in a hot location?

Are you making peanuts in a remote location, and you'd be happier making slightly more if you were in charge of your destiny?

If you spend five years on your project to get acquihired by some mid level public company- is that success or would you be devestated?

Do you have the chops to build a business, raise money, find customers, recruit employees? Yes, do you think you'd enjoy it?

Not in big tech, but comfortable 250k in mid-teir expense remote suburb. The opportunity cost is real and something to truly be factored in. Something I can probably replace after this endeavor but it would require a lifestyle change (moving etc).

I think i'd be happy with the challenge of building a business if there was constant progress and the end of the tunnel was possible (not necessarily guaranteed, but not 0% either).

I think being acquihired by mid-level would be a success. If my path is posting clueless HN to being acquihired in 3-5 - i'd personally love that outcome and it would validate a lot of things (my ability to acheive this, idea validation etc).

Chops question is difficult to answer - with constant progress I have tons of internal motivation, but one "no" and I tend to feel like shit (a character flaw for this line of work imo).

So just a couple anecdotes of friends of mine who have been in the industry a while:

1 Friend, started a consulting company, worked his absolute ass off, made many millions, but also maybe not a lot more than if he had worked his ass off in big tech and climbed the ranks.

Another friend started a product company, raised a seed round, worked on it for many many years paying himself peanuts, eventually had to take a job at a big tech company for a few years and his side business was part time, then quit big tech to focus on it again, acquihired after 8 years. Now he gets to work on his project and get paid a decent amount by some mid tier tech company, so he's happy.

Financially, not the optimal move, but he loves working on his own ideas, and I think he's happy about that.

Very relevant, I think a lot of stuff in tech is romanticized, even things like doing a start up or getting into YC. We hear about the massive successes that the normal/median kind of disappears and is ignored.

I think from an odds perspective, one of the above is probably the highest likely hood if I leave w2.

Let me give more detail. Friend #1 is top tier engineering brain (including all the people I've worked with at Google) and extroverted. He probably made 10M+ selling his company (He never told me the number but he has a huge house in a gated community and drives fancy cars, he's rich).

But it took him 10 years and he probably had the chops to get to director/VP level at big tech if he would have grinded on that path.

He's not hurting for money - he lives quite a bit nicer lifestyle than an average FAANG engineer but his ceiling was high on either W2 or starting his own thing. He could definitely retire but now he's just back at it after some time off for the love of the game. He's a grinder by nature.

The other friend is a solid engineer but not top tier, doesn't love the business side of things. So getting acqui-hired into a decent paying job (probably 300k) working remote on his project that got open sourced is probably his dream.

I mean, i'm sure he would have loved to make many millions instead of a tiny acquihire, but he is much happier not having to deal with business stuff. This is a much more realistic view of 'success' than the outlier success storeis you hear on hacker news.

*My advice*

I would find a business partner if you don't love that side of things. Work on this part time, get some seed money, and if you can get a couple PAYING customers part time, then go for it - if you're ok with the more likely outcome of not becoming uber rich.

There for sure is something to be said about higher performers being high performers wherever/whatever role they're into. There is a large degree of luck but an even bigger degree of execution involved.

Part of the dilemma is would I be as successful financially if I went all in on W2 as well.

For me, I'd aim to be buddy#1 but I probably fall more inline with buddy#2.

I think the business partner advice makes sense and something I am considering. It is better to own 10% of 10M then 100% of 100K, but also just complimenting skill sets as well.

appreciate it

The "stay W2 and build on the side" path gets a bad rap, but it's actually the more rational choice for most people.

I went the part-time route. What I learned:

1. Constraints breed creativity. Having only 10-15 hours/week forces you to ruthlessly prioritize what actually moves the needle vs. what feels productive.

2. Revenue validation before quitting is underrated. If you can get even $500/mo while working full-time, you've proven something real. Most people who quit to "go all in" spend months building before discovering nobody wants what they're making.

3. The emotional rollercoaster is easier to handle when your rent isn't tied to your MRR. Bad months don't become existential crises.

The one caveat: if your startup requires intense sales cycles, enterprise deals, or you're in a winner-take-all market with funded competitors, then speed matters more than sustainability. But for most B2B SaaS or tools businesses, the tortoise approach works fine.

Appreciate the message. I think this is the most practical advice to follow until there is an event/time to fully disconnect from the W2.

I'd love to hear/learn more about your journey. From a 0-1 build mindset but also going from 1 or 0.75-to-first customer and beyond.

I think we see a lot Zucks and AirBnB guys, and with AI 100M ARR in 2 months type stories, but not so much tortoise approach stories.

I haven't even looked at your idea because it doesn't impact my answer. Starting something is harder than having a good product. You also need marketing, growth, etc which I have no idea if you're capable of doing.

Zooming out a bit. How do you feel about the possibility of quitting your job, spending 1-2 years working on this, failing, and looking for another job? You'd lose income but also have a very interesting life experience. I'm doing something similar and I legitimately don't mind failing because I'm glad I get to have the experience regardless of whether the startup works or not.

(briefly looked at the website). If you find traction for this idea, that's great. I use claude, and its feedback memory mechanism is already too much for me -- it crams a lot of 'project related' but unimportant cruft, and it keeps growing, and purging it is a chore (its own lexicon, lack of why it is relevant etc). My preference is to front end lot of disciplined design work, so it's memory tends to be quite useless really. The difficulty of getting paid $20 per month is another challenge. Either way, I wish you the best!

Appreciate the post and thank you!

I think for me and the idea I saw a fundamental shift in the experience chatGPT provided once it was able to remember cross/post chat things. The APIs do not have this offering and are pretty bare, so being able to put this on top of any LLM API I think is a value add.

I am curious how you are using Claude in your case? Web-ui? Co-Work? Does not seem like API, but would help me.

it is mainly claude code, some web-ui; sorry for the late reply.

> I don't really have the network to vet my idea

Then do not do it. Without a network to vet the idea, you don't have the network to get your initial sales either. You are coding blind, hoping you land in a place the market actually would pay for.

I agree - not having a network to vet the idea is possibly the easiest part to have. It means I dont have the network for sales like you said, the network to raise funding, the network to build upon what I already have.

Not wrong there.

If you are already building it and would actually use it yourself thats a strong signal. I did focus on getting real users first before making a full leap.

I agree that users (hell even 1 real user) would be motivating and validating from an idea perspective.

May I ask how long it took you to find your first user? and the path you took to find said user(s)?

For me it took a few weeks I mostly started by sharing in relevant online communities and just talking about the problem before pushing the product itself.

Good advice - appreciate it

No problem. Hope it works out for you.

Honestly, getting VC cash does not look like the challenge it used to be.

Look attractive, be confident, and talk about reselling AI... boom cash.

The real question is: what do you want to be doing in 5 years? Do you want to be explaining to people why you are cleaning up some pitch deck mess that still doesn't make money or would you rather be slaving away for your current employer with next to no equity?

Look, I am sure your idea absolutely brilliant and fantastic, but weigh this decision on more practical terms. If you already have a family you will need either a war chest of cash (at least $35k ready to spend over the next year but $150k would be better) or the unlimited and unquestioning support of people who really should be doubting your ideas just a bit harder.

After all, some of the most successful startups started with singular boring ideas. If you are amazing at sales and execution then you can afford to go all in on your boring idea.

> Honestly, getting VC cash does not look like the challenge it used to be. Having never jumped in this pool, don't know if I would sink or swim here - but it does seem to be the case that a good story will get funding. I do like to approach things from a practical angle, I don't necessarily need/want millions up front and a more conservative approach to find product-market-fit would be beneficial.

> 5 years - Cleaning pitch-deck vs slaving away? both sound pretty shitty to me :) I think there are pros/cons. Pitch deck route assume I can sustain myself for 5 years but it does come with an opportunity cost. It is ~1m earned w2 income. W2-slave route feels like a boring way to contribute to society/tech and maybe not reach full potential?

Appreciate the post - I do agree with your sentiment.

You can build this along with your w2 and once it hits a critical mass then you can quit W2.

I mean a lot depends on your life circumstances. Do you have a family to support? Do you have any money saved up? How old you are? It's tempting for me to quit and work on something I've wanted to work on for years but... The risk feels too high cause I feel like if I fail, it will be impossible to find a new job where either I made as much as I had before, or a job at all.

I have been conservative forever from a financial perspective. I feel comfortable enough to be out of W2 for a year or two.

but there is a real opportunity cost to leaving a w2 and jumping into an idea like this. Plus the fears that you stated as well are things I think about also.

I don't really have the network to vet my idea

Then the most important thing, from a business perspective, is building that network.

Customers are the best network, again from a business perspective.

Although network building in general is often hard, building a network of customers is usually really, really, really hard. Not only do you have to overcome fear of rejection by asking for money, but also you have to actually get money from someone before they actually are a customer.

And because writing an "Ask HN" is easy, it is probably not on the road to building a general network and certainly not on the road to building a network of customers because you aren't asking for money.

So my advice, start learning how to ask people for money (it is a skill developed through experience (and rejection). Talking to people is what selling is. Good luck.

I agree and appreciate it.

I am starting to figure out having a network and going into an idea would move things 10x or 100x faster, both from a success or failure route. You'd want to get to both as quickly as possible. I think what posting on HN gets me is some kind of signal toward something that I don't already have. A lot of generic but valuable advice here. Still validating in its own way.

I do agree with you - asking people for time is especially difficult "can you give me some advice" ... and then asking people for money is 100x more difficult. Even if they get something for said money.

Another concern is how to weather the AI bubble. Right now, everyone going all in on "AI" reminds me of the 90s when companies like Exodus Communications, Level 3 Communications and others built out heavily only to see it all evaporate. Yes, eventually what these companies were doing became the cloud but none of them are active participants. I would argue that before jumping into reliance on current AI trends that one evaluate where on the Technology Adoption Curve that the industry is. I suspect we're still at the Early Adopter phase and the build out is based on a bit of irrational exuberance. Couple that with the growing backlash against new AI data centers and depending on current trends seems exceedingly risky. Everyone argued in the 90s that "it was different this time" as they are arguing today. It's not. It rarely is. Go back and read the history of the PC starting with Apple and moving into the 80s Compare that to today's market. Same with the emergence of the Internet. Where are companies like Prodigy, Compuserve, or the incubators such as CMGI. Sometimes people have ideas and can ride technology waves and make huge money. But at the end of the day, that's far rarer than "having a good idea".

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2026/05/11503360/2...

Insanely difficult and borderline idiotic to ignore what you've stated. Difficult to know where we are on the curve and what will happen next.

I think there are a lot of similarities and parallels to those times happening now, maybe even more with more money and investment depending on it and expanding.

There are a lot of arguments to made on both sides. I guess the one i'd lean on is "Do we not build Amazon, Google and FB b/c dot com happened?" and the companies that I'm trying to build inspired by those guys.

I'm not trying to discourage innovation. Your idea seemed to be based on an infrastructure solution to current technology. Perhaps I misinterpreted. And as a starting point, it may be a good venture. However, I would be looking for the next wave of opportunities to capitalize on. Obviously, Google succeeded Yahoo. Facebook succeeded the various bulletin board systems like Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy (though I still preferred the Usenet days). Amazon set out to be the Walmart of the web. While I doubt any of these companies will go away, they will become less significant over time. The high flyers today will eventually face significant competition or government action/regulation, though Palantir may get an pass. I had the privilege of working on two major industry changing projects, and though they weren't my ideas, they were still a rush. And code I wrote 30+ years ago that is still in operation. That's something many people never get to experience. I wish you luck. Just keep your eyes on the industry as much as the technology and be prepared to pivot. I hope you wind up with mountains of cash.

Appreciate and grateful for your kind words :) Happy to hear of your success as an example of what makes this industry motivating.

You are correct my idea is infrastructure atop of current LLM technologies. Competitors exist and it may be that the LLM providers provide their own solution(s) as they have unlimited resources. I will be the first to admit that it is not "ground breaking" but rather boring but useful. I think personally if I have one success I can look at broader trends, but there is a real fear of the unknown.

I am curious on your opinion coming for government regulation just because it does not seem to be happening. I'd love to invest in the cloud companies (AWS, Azure, GCP etc) without being exposed to the broader business.

The one thing about government regulation is that it is slow moving, both in initiation and resolution. In my career, there were the ATT, IBM, and Microsoft antitrust cases, all of which took years. In many cases, the market resolves the issue before the government does. The FTC as well as several states are going after Amazon currently, though it's not getting a lot of media coverage. Amazon will likely take a hit comparable to ATT in the 80s, e.g., the divestiture of the Bell system and Bell Labs. I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook go out of business. The social media addiction lawsuits are proliferating and they've already lost in New Mexico at the state level. The AI companies are just beginning to draw attention, mostly at the state level. The federal government thus far has been slow and inconsistent. Throw in the use of copyrighted material for AI training data and the likelihood of politicians jumping on the bandwagon is high. Already, entertainment figures, authors, publishing houses, etc. are suing. I doubt companies continue to survive these lawsuits under fair use doctrine. And it's hard to see how Google, Microsoft, and others ultimately win any lawsuits that involve using private data to train AIs (despite their denials), e.g., GMail, GitHub, etc. This doesn't even touch the use of images and voices, which AI companies are routinely using as training data. All of this is chum in the water for politicians, regulators, and lawyers who can't resist grandstanding for media attention, regardless of the facts or outcome. As for the cloud itself? I suspect we'll see more pullback by companies using the cloud in the coming years as cyber attacks, outages, costs, etc begin to pile up, and risk premiums exceed cost savings for select industries, e.g., medical and insurance firms. Already you see a few companies popping up to support a move from the cloud. Will it happen? I have no idea. The bottom line, by all means, push your idea to the limit. Just don't lose sight of the fact that it's less a technical issue and more an environment/trends issue. Best of luck.

I do see glimpses of lawsuits here and there on these guys. They all seem to just be flybys on the news to never appear again. Maybe something is happening and the resolution doesn't make the headline.

I think Facebook has been a shell of a useful company for a long time. Maybe some value in Instagram but I don't quite see it. It does seem like the AI companies are beginning to become unfavorable, with that being said, unsure how much of this is geopolitics where this is less of an issue with China and competing with China. I dont think I see the current administration/government doing anything.

Appreciate the message - I'd like to take the necessary steps to push my idea forward. In the ocean of everything AI, this idea is a single celled organism.