How concerned was the first founder that while he was getting money together, another startup would develop a competing product and spend the year working full-time while he was working part-time on his own? If such a competitor appeared in the year's time, what would the first founder have done?
I ask because there seems to be some division amongst the comments and essays I've read about how severe of a risk this is, and whether it is a greater risk than jumping in without building up a sufficiently comfortable cushion beforehand. The other half of this, that either hasn't be discussed as much, or maybe I just haven't noticed discussions of, is what happens when a risk of competition appears while the people involved are working at mitigating the risk of inadequate savings/funding.
It seems that some would argue that going the route of the part-time job to fund the project is reasonable path to follow and that things will work out; others that would claim that it puts the startup at an acute risk of failing or just never getting off the ground, and that never having enough money goes with the territory.
As concrete examples of both viewpoints, the 37Signals guys would argue that splitting one's time at first is fine, and is in a lot of ways more desirable than diving straight in. On the other hand, pg has argued in his essays that moonlighting is incredibly risky to a startup's success, due to both the time commitment required by other obligation(s) and the placating effect of an near-assured soft landing should things go bad.
It seems like this situation is precisely where discussions of risk trade-offs come in. Hearing the thoughts behind how these trade-offs are balanced is interesting and useful, both for the sake of curiosity and helping me and others develop an intuition for where our own balance should lie.