Why you need your own company | Hacker News Reader

Why you need your own company

sivers.org

161 pointssivers38 comments

This is far and away the best description of the attraction to starting up for me.

I don't want to retire young; I want to keep making things. I just want to do them on my terms.

Ditto, though the article didn't offer much, it helped me articulate the feeling I've been having when and if I get to that point.

More accurately, what you need is F You money so you can tinker with projects. He started out describing his company as a nightmare, but now that he's loaded he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to.

As a founder who makes a modest living from his site, I can say that you don't need to be rich or have "F You" money to enjoy the experience that Derek writes about. You just need to have enough of a reputation that people will be interested in giving your new projects a chance.

It's such a great experience to come up with an idea, integrate it into your site a few days later, and instantly have thousands of people using it, giving feedback about how great it is or how much it sucks. Watching your ideas instantly take off or dud.

When you work for a company, you may have a very large potential audience, but you may not be allowed to try out some of your best ideas (and even if you are permitted to work on them, they may never launch to the public). Likewise, if you are an individual working on ideas in your spare time and not giving them your full attention, you may never gain enough of an audience to know if your ideas are good.

Really, "your own company is one of the best playgrounds of all" sums it up perfectly.

Sure, but he did start a company that he sold to get F You money so he does have a point.

It's just not the one he made in this post.

The only thing this article made me want to do is visit that hot spring in Japan.

i visited there for a day and it is just as glorious as it sounds.

He gained his "Freedom to create" via his own company and that made him happy, but the "Freedom to create" isn't tied to having your own company. It can come as an employee or intern of a fortune 500 company. Really all depends on the cult around you.

This is just watering down the idea to the point where it's meaningless.

The degree of freedom is what's important. Not even the CEO of a fortune 500 company has the freedom that the owner of a company has.

If you must ask permission, or answer to someone else, then you don't have the kind of freedom I want.

"If you have to ask permission, or answer to anyone, to make decisions about what you do then you don't have freedom."

Completely disagree. Freedom isn't binary. Everyone has to answer to someone.

- If you own your own company you are responsible for your employees and thus limits what you can do. Probably why he was glad to sell it and get rid of the company.

- Create your own open source project, as soon as it is used by other they will want additional feature and fixes.

- Working with others to create something means that there will be trade-offs on what everyone does.

"If you have to ask permission or answer to anyone then you don't have the kind of freedom I want."

Not sure what kind of freedom you want, but unless you are living on an island by yourself creating software that no one uses it seems your lying to yourself if you think you have achieved.

"Completely disagree. Freedom isn't binary. Everyone has to answer to someone."

i have thousands of customers, if one of them misbehave, i just ignoore him. i have couple of rude email/SMS that i don't bother replying.

but if you have only one boss(es) or a handful of customers, then that's very risky.

so freedom also include not having to answer to someone and it's not as binary as you want to make it sound theoritical

"Freedom isn't binary. Everyone has to answer to someone."

The second sentence seems to suggest that freedom IS binary. Or that there is no such thing as freedom?

Okay, my experience is limited to one big company, but I found I rarely need to ask permission to do anything but launch. And that's only because launching instantly means more people will be using my product than most startups get in their lifetime. I'm perfectly free to build stuff, show it to friends (as long as the friends work within the company), improve it, make my own design calls, etc.

In fact, I'm encouraged to do so. When I joined, my boss said "If you see something that's broken, just go fix it and mail off a codereview". He's since told me "If you have an idea, just go ahead and implement it, don't even ask my permission." And when I've done so, the reaction has generally been quite positive - I got a free phone out of it, after all.

Sounds awesome, but also like an outlier.

You have a good boss, and you probably joined earlier than others. However, I do have to admit that it's as good as it gets, in the big corporate world.

Actually I just joined less than 5 months ago, later than everyone else in my department save one person. But you're right; I do have a good boss, and my department has preserved more of the original company culture than many other departments.

I suspect that my experience is different from others more in the degree that it's officially sanctioned, not in what actually goes on though. I've heard - from several friends across several other big companies - that it's really common to have everyone spend about two hours a day working on their "real" job, and then the rest of the time either reading SlashDot or working on side businesses. After all, what's the worst they can do, fire you? Then you're in the same boat as someone who quits to do a startup, except that you can possibly collect unemployment. Most big companies are large enough that nobody knows what anyone else is really doing, anyways.

> After all, what's the worst they can do, fire you?

Fire you, and keep the stuff you made on company time.

Right, but you keep the knowledge you gained in making that stuff. Any useful product has to be rewritten many times before it's useful enough for people to pay for. So they keep the first draft - startups throw out their code and start fresh routinely, so again, you're not much worse off than someone who quits their job to found a startup.

> Any useful product has to be rewritten many times before it's useful enough for people to pay for.

On the other hand, people have been talking about launching early and often. Even your first version of something could well be good enough to launch and iterate upon.

All in all, I'd rather not give my employer any of my own stuff.

I completely agree with this statement. Further, what scares me about this article is that he's basically reasserting every programmer's mindset in a different context: "Writing new code is awesome! Maintaining this giant mass of code sucks (regardless of if it's good or bad code)!" I don't have anything against the article or its ideas, but yeah, that maintaining a company of 86 of even the most self-sufficient employees is less fun than creating a web application you have complete control over is unsurprising.

Why you need a project would be a more accurate title.

Agree, a friend of mine does a million hardware projects, many of which could probably end up as profitable companies. He doesn't care about money though, he just wants to do fun stuff with hardware and avoid people wearing ties and entanglement with authorities.

If you're in a nerdy mood here's his project page: http://dzl.dk/projects/index.html

Unless you are just playing for your own entertainment (not that there is anything wrong with that), having it as a business both provides a measure of success (users and profits) and to the extent that it is successful (that is, profitable) provides resources for its own continuation.

Agreed, experimentation does not a business make.

When the business is your own, experimentation is not only easier, but also much more meaningful.

Yes, when it's experimentation on your core idea. But when experimentation is "playing w/ crowdsourcing", "a fully multilingual site" or "an experiment in transparency" then -- until one of them gains traction -- they're more projects than businesses.

Nice article.

One of the benefits of this economic downturn is that all the get-rich-quick folks who were starting web2.0 companies are now gone.

So now it's just us: people who fit the article's description for passion.

Spot on and beautifully put.

On a related note, it never made sense to me that some first time entrepreneurs give it all up and become VC's.

"I hated having 85 employees. It had become a little hell. I needed to get away and clear my mind."

My Advice: Start a business where you need no more than 2-3 people period (outside of your other partners legal, and financial advisors).

85 employees shivers NFW, you couldn't pay me enough. Classic ball and chain.

is the favicon of this site lifted from that of http://smashingmagazine.com/ ?

Nope: different colour, font, and font-size -- and he didn't use a gradient.

EDIT: And even if it was, big deal. It's just an "S".

It looks like self-exhibition or self-promotion, like the famous writings of mr. Spolsky.

Yeah, he is a successful man. So what?

Not to mention that chicks dig it. The other way around, it's very sexy if a girl runs her own business.

A teacher recently told us during a lecture:

How many of you know the definition of the word "engineer"? An engineer is a person who has found something more interesting than sex!

In my opinion, the original quote by Aldous Huxley is more accurate:

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley]

Thanks, Aldous Huxley is amazing.. I should read more from this author. I've read "Brave New World", so I guess "Island" is next.

Yes! "Island" changed my life! That's the book that made me quit my job in 1992. Haven't had a job since. Read slowly and ponder.

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