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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

The one big disadvantage I see is that you can quit pretty easily. Being poor gets tiring pretty quickly, especially if someone waves a nice fat salary and benefits in front of you.

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This is one of the reasons the young and the nerdy tend to have an advantage in starting startups. They have inexpensive tastes. So they feel prosperous on an income that would make someone older and more conventional feel poor.

We're talking about smart people and inevitably they're going to look at friends who've opted for the corporate world and do the math. Certainly as long as the promise of a big payoff is there, then the math might weigh in favor of doing a startup. But it also might not. That whole time value of money thing says that sacrificing income in your twenties is going to hurt you a lot more in the long run than sacrificing income later on.

edit: Of course, right now the "whole time value of money" is basically negative. ;-)

Coming from a "poor" entrepreneur who has previously held six-figure software engineer salaries, I can say there's more to entrepreneurship than salary. When I busted my ass working overtime to add cool new features, nobody cared. The company doesn't care, the boss doesn't care, your coworkers don't care either. If I have to spend 1/3 of my life at work, I might as well be doing something I love, even if it puts my retirement at risk.

I mostly agree. But there's something to be said for retirement.

You can retire well even if you only make $10 an hour for 40 years. It just requires you to be very frugal with your expenses and investing wisely. Let interest do the heavy lifting for your retirement :)

The interest rates here are pretty much zero ...

The expected value of doing a startup is high -- I think a little higher than being able to guarantee myself $80K/year. If I work on a startup with 1 cofounder for 5 years and it's got a 10% chance of exiting for $10M, my expectation is roughly $100K/year. So if I can afford to take the (rather high) risk of getting nothing, then I should do the startup.

If I value my time differently depending on what I'm working on -- if the startup is lots more fun -- then it's an easy choice.

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