Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but this whole article is based on a completely unfounded premise - that being the premise that you're not "committed" to your startup unless you've quit your dayjob and are working on the startup fulltime. But there's no basis for asserting that, and it is - quite simply - not true.

It's not "shooting yourself in the foot" to work on a startup while working a dayjob, it's called "funding your startup with your dayjob salary". And if you don't have a pile of capital just lying around waiting to be spent, or aren't (interested in|willing to|able to) raise outside capital, it's essentially your only choice.

And why exactly should I care about "stringing along my present employer"? I show up, do the work I'm asked to do, and they pay me some amount in return. What I do on my time is my business.. If my performance drops, they are welcome to fire me. If anything, this should be seen as a call for employers to recognize their entrepreneurial minded employees and find a way to leverage their talent to do something entrepreneurial within that firm. Better yet, invest in the employees startup and tell them to get out and work on it fulltime. Now that's a win-win for everybody.

But don't think you get to call who is or isn't a "real entrepreneur" based on who has or hasn't quit their dayjob. If anything, the folks doing it "the hard way" deserve more respect and recognition than the people running around acting like raising a round was an end unto itself, and who seem to think that the point of a startup is to raise money (as opposed to making money).

You are missing the point, I am not saying you should raise money. I bootstrapped my company and am very proud of it.

It is hard to argue that spending 40+ hours in a week on something other than you startup shows you are committed to your startup. You are committed to making money and then working on your startup.

I have personally invested in many employee's startups but that does not change the fact that trying to do both is a distraction that does not serve you or your job.

I don't think "commitment" means what you think it does. I could not possibly be more committed to the startup I'm working on now... it's basically my life. If I were married, I'd be less committed to my wife than to this startup (which may be a reason I'm not married, now that I think about it).

But, realistically, I don't have the capital reserves to just quit, and work on it full-time, so that simply is not an option. No amount of philosophizing, or Monday morning quarterbacking or commentary from the peanut gallery can change that. But if anybody thinks I'm not committed to this, I have two words for them...

I am not saying you should raise money. I bootstrapped my company and am very proud of it.

And if you aren't sitting on a big pile of capital already, you have two choices: Go out and raise a round, or fund via your salary. And going out and raising money has a lot of disadvantages, not the least of which is that every minute you spend chasing investors is a minute you're not working on the product, talking to customers, doing market research, writing marketing content, looking for partners and affiliates, or any of a zillion other things you could be doing to advance your cause.

It is hard to argue that spending 40+ hours in a week on something other than you startup shows you are committed to your startup. You are committed to making money and then working on your startup.

First of all, I don't need to "show" anybody that I'm committed to my startup. All this back and forth banter is amusing, but in the end, the only opinions that matter are those of myself and my cofounder, and the people we are selling to.

And who are you to tell somebody else what they are committed to? Fuck that... I'm committed to paying my rent, and putting food on the table, just because those are prerequisites to everything else. Beyond that, my dayjob salary is just seed funding for the startup.

How many hours per week need a startup take?

I do not see my side project as a distraction from my day job (it only distracts me from my other, non-commercial side projects).

Stuff I learn at work is often applicable in my side project as well - and vice versa. I can re-use the code (as most of the work-code is open source) and use the project as a testing / learning opportunity for things I may use at work.

The things which do reduce my motivation is the projects legal side (having signed a disadvantageous contract...) and not knowing if there really is a market for the kind of application I write ("$megaCorp can do this probably sooo much better.").

"spending 40+ hours in a week on something other than you startup"

What does this mean, exactly? Yes I know in context it means your capital raising strategy primarily involves going to work on a regular basis, which possibly is a local maxima for at least some unusual situations, but it reads just as well for "sleep", "personal grooming", "recreation and relaxation", "social relationships", "raising children", "elder care", "athletic / exercise activities".

I'm just saying if you want to guilt trip people for raising capital by having a job, you need to do that very specifically, a extremely generic guilt trip about spending time being modern civilized humans in a generic sense with having a job being a tiny subset of the possibilities of being a modern civilized human, is likely to be relatively ineffective.

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