All the stress, risk and sleepless nights which come with running a startup, isn't worth the (potential) 10-10000x pay-off for me, when I already enjoy enough freedoms (autonomy + income + free time) to do what I love outside of my career. So I greatly prefer to piggy back a startups salary and compensation package instead, and hop to the next one a few years later. Having seen the inside of quite a few, I don't feel like I am missing out on starting one myself.
I’ll add on to this - I’ve worked closely with a few folks I consider to be in that brilliant mix of charisma, business sense, and technical competency.
I’ve watched them found rock-solid companies and build great teams (I’ve worked on them)… and then for some reason several times in a VC-backed Boards like to bring in their own guys and push out the actual founders.
In short, I’ve watched VC rob my friends of their joy and in some cases cheat them of their blood, sweat, and equity. Good luck exercising those options on a non-IPO firm when you’re scrambling to find a new job to keep the mortgage current.
I’m really soured in the whole “start a startup.” There’s so much chicanery going on in the business world that it’s just sickening to see.
There's a solution to that: don't take venture capital. Start a micro-SaaS that'll cashflow 10k a month consistently, then you can quit your job and grow that. Grow it to maybe a million a year, sell for a 3 to 5x multiple, then retire (or start something new).
I don't think the empirical evidence supports this assertion. I don't think successful founders are necessarily that much of an outlier in terms of technical or emotional capabilities. Sure, those help and I am sure there are tons of examples of founders that rank crazy high on these scales.
However, I suspect it is a lot simpler (in concept not execution) than most of us think. Success probably is a combination of ability (you must be able to actually do the work), persistence (to push through when it is hard going), insight (to be able to determine where to apply the previous two skills) and a healthy dose of luck (never hurts).
I’m of the opinion that these things are true if you’re going to be the next breakout success story - the unicorn of a given field.
But I think the tech industry trains us to think that that’s the only success. But there are lots of startups that make a product, are cash-flow positive, and have reasonable growth. And I think this version of success does not require the tremendously narrow odds that you’re suggesting.
If your definition of success is founding the next OpenAi and making a trillion dollars overnight then sure. If youre just looking to start a modest company that supports you and a few others reasonably comfortably then you definitely dont need any of that.
I'm not sure this reason is "interesting", but it is the truth: Because startups are high-risk/high-reward choices, and I'm just fine with a low-risk/medium-reward life.
That’s true for a lot of people. Which I used to hate then now I’m like it’s fine because not everyone wants to do all the work to make something happen or it fails.
When I realised I would be "poor" all my life working for others, and reckoned I should try to pursue my business ideas.... It turned up I already have two kids and my daily costs are too high to leave my current job.
It feels to me like you're describing bootstrapping, but creating a startup and getting investment and paying yourself a (moderate) salary could still be an option?
Obviously every alternative has its own (dis) advantages.
If you want other's money you need to convince them. That means a lot of extra work writing plans, and when you receive the money you are inmediately diluted.
For that reason I always pursue ideas I can start developing on my own... And it is then when I find my main weak point: I don't have enough time...
I'm not sure if the idea[1,2] is stupid, or brilliant... and I'm not arrogant enough to assume its brilliant. I've been nerd sniped by it though, since the 1980s.
The basics are simple enough, imagine an FPGA without any routing hardware, just a sea of 4 bit in, 4 bit out Look Up Tables (LUTs). To prevent race conditions, I'd latch the outputs of the cells, and clock then in 2 alternative phases.
This makes the thing a horrible FPGA, because latency is the one thing they fight hard to overcome, but on the other hand, it makes it very easy to reason about, and immune to race conditions, timing issues, etc. The gain is that you get almost trivial routing, and essentially all of the transistors devoted to compute.
It's what you get when you answer George Gilder's call to "waste transistors".[3]
I've got a simulator for the chip, I still need to figure out how to program it (i.e. write a compiler, debugger, etc.)
The major question.... can this architecture do an Exaflop on a cheap chip? (<$10 in quantity)
Risk aversion, which makes the bar for “great” near impossible to meet.
From everything to career choice to investments, I made/make a statistical and risk minimizing decision.
I ended up a software engineer looking at average outcomes and general failure points for different majors. Don’t get me wrong future employers, I do enjoy the work (as you would see on my resume), but if it had the prospects of a history major, I would not have studied it. There are people who do that they love and expect to figure it out along the way. I am not that person.
I invest in broad based index ETFs as statistically people are proven to underperform with stock picking. I have no reason to believe that I am special there, so I invest in ETFs.
Add in that early career money compounds and is worth 10x at retirement at my age.
So basically my life can be very comfortable as long as I stay the course.
Statistically startups fail. I would be risking a very straightforward and very comfortable for the chance at a yacht. And I don’t dream of the yacht.
I have ideas that are interesting and am pursuing them to some extent, but I don't see any personal value in operating anything beyond a small business, either as an individual or small team doing something else. There's a massive personal cost in running any business, and unless you have the secret actual privilege of connections, cash, and business influence out the gate or early on, it seems like a massive burden.
Edit: My choice of words was a little confusing. I meant that the scale I'd consider pursuing would be at most a tiny team, but more likely just me with some delegate contractors, or a traditional small business like a coffee shop. The amount of definite cost in seeking possible fortune through higher scale startups is not something I'm set up for or am interested in.
I've had an idea bouncing around in my head for the best part of 15 years which I wanted to turn into a business. Like many people in this thread: I had a comfortable full-time gig, a young family, bills to pay and a healthy fear of the unknown.
About 3 years ago (entering my 40s), I had a moment of introspection/clarity where it occurred to me that looking back in 20 years time and not having tried would upset me a lot more than any potential failure would have.
So I left my comfortable job and became a solo freelancer/contractor, gave myself a direct pay-cut with a view to building up a couple of years of savings/buffer to subsequently fund myself while building out the idea and the business around it.
What has instead happened is that the freelance/contractor business has become very successful - I get to choose the hours I work, pick and choose projects, I have roughly 12-18 months of pipeline at any point in time, and due to the very niche field I'm currently working in don't have any trouble setting an appropriate rate to the point where I've managed to save about 3 years of buffer in 3 years of operation.
The original idea still bounces around in my head and I've had validation from several of my clients that they would love just such a tool, but: I've already got a comfortable full-time gig, a (slightly less) young family, bills to pay and a healthy fear of the unknown...
Zillions of ideas. Triage is daunting. Hoping to partner up with someone who may need mutual motivation. Full stack end to end person here. Dropped out of corporate world back on 2019 due to stress. Worked at FAANG+M and miss the camaraderie and sounding board of insightful people. My toddler now goes to school so got me few hours a day but end up in analysis paralysis. Did meetups but not fruitful.
At the end of the day startups are not there to be successfull on their own. You birth a baby, raise it, then sell it and watch as your metaphorical child becomes everything it shouldn't have been. You might have money, but the corp you sold it to owns that intellectual property.
For long term businesses to succeed on their own we have to remove intellectual property laws. Allow for actual innovation not barred by vertical integration and oligopoly cronyism. The current system rewards whoever buys all the startups that develop IP. Sometimes the horde of lawyers force them into it.
The other reason is that it takes a team, and few are ready or believe they can work in startup conditions. Or theyre devs that got in early with another corp and truly do not know what it's like to build a foundation. The specific expertise necessary is also difficult to source.
Any successfully business will be sued in frivolous lawsuits, which have a finite chance of winning.
First example: a friend of mine ran restaurants for many years. A black woman claimed she drove past his restaurant and that a man standing across the street from the restaurant gave her a dirty look. She knew that was the restaurant owner, not based on any facts or logic, but based on the Black Way of Knowing. She sued for civil rights violations. He description of the man was nothing like my friend, other than them both being male humans. She misidentified 2 other men in the courthouse as the man who gave her a dirty look and concretely ruled out my friend before the bailiff explained who was who to her. Then she changed her story. She won and took my friend's family business, leaving his family with nothing.
Second example: There is a mexican cafe in my area that we always ate at after church on Sundays. They invented the corn chip that they sold to a chip company that became a well known corn chip today. The chip company did not remember this because corporations change personnel. The chip company sued the family-business that was the mexican cafe. The family running the mexican cafe produced the original contract that said if the chip company ever sued them over something frivolous, they would own the chip company. This document was examined by experts and found to be authentic. Even several Ivy League schools found it to be authentic. The corrupt 5th Circuit Court (5th Circus Cult?) refused to look at the evidence, took bribes from the chip company, destroyed the contract, and somehow many members of the family that owned the mexican cafe died mysteriously.
Third example: I loved my auto mechanic. Cody ran a place called All Pro Transmissions, and was an honest mechanic who never charged more than his estimate and always fixed something extra just to be nice. Then the crooks from another mechanics shop (who charged me for an engine they did not replace) sued him, claiming he was cheating his customers. They won and split the proceeds with the crooked JP (place 1.) Cody has to work for them (court ordered) as their face man. When anyone takes their car there, they get ripped off and as they pick it up the techs brag about how much they got screwed.
I tried to file a patent when I was in college. The patent examiner asked an expert from a major tech company to help him examine the patent. The major tech company stole my patent and sold it to another company.
This. So much this. I lost my entire life savings due to lies told in court. I never got the chance to defend myself against a mountain of fabricated “evidence” and testimony. The legal system is worthless beyond words.
If you are an honest and hardworking person, the system is screwed beyond repair. Liars and crooks are the only ones that can succeed, and the system can easily be abused to actively help them commit their crimes.
Throwing up your hands in the air and giving up is easy. I’m not going to say there aren’t any crooks out there, but generally speaking The System is in favor of justice. Most people aren’t crooks. When going about your life you can’t expect things to be fair and rely solely on your moral high ground or goodwill when things aren’t fair, you need to fight back. Game The System as hard as you can and be prepared when things go south.
There is so much going on in the world. In almost every idea, I find that someone else is doing something very similar, but with (so-far) limited success. It’s usually hard to tell why the aren’t having more success. So I never come up with confidence that a concept will work better for me than it did for these other people.
I'm coming more from the hardware side and have only recently started to learn programming.
What's holding me back the most is that I do nog know how to finance my projects without giving up control, shares or create financial liabilities I'd be on the hook for.
Second there are the regulatory and legal hurdles. How do I find out which standards each component has to live up to and how do I properly document and possibly report compliance with them? What documents do I have to submit to which agency, what licenses do I have to obtain and who has to certify my product before I'm allowed to sell it?
Realisticly I'm expecting to drive my first few businesses over the financial and regulatory cliff at full speed and I do not want to be in the car when it goes over the edge.
Ideas are worthless, everyone has them, most suck.
What matters is execution, and I have neither the expertise nor the money for a good execution. And with execution I mean mainly Marketing and Business, not just the manifestation of the idea. But of course, manifesting the idea in a good product is also a crucial part. Because Ideas are simple, straight forward, but they leave out the boring nasty parts which make the product hard to build and even harder to sell.
Which is why ideas are worthless. Get a good product or service, get some even better response from other people and find your customers; then can you start building a company which has a chance to not end as the same disaster as the majority of startups.
For me initially for the last 2 years was working on hardware as software people and we struggled to really find what we’re building and how to build it until recently when we realised that what we’re creating was evolutionary not revolutionary and it would cost way too much for us to even build a prototype. So we ditched it. Learnt a lot.
Now we’re working on an another software startup focused on creativity. Once again I think funding is the biggest issue and finding the right idea to grow beyond the idea alone which those two things take time. So hopefully we have an MVE in early new years and we can start getting some alpha testers onboard before we go full out waitlist and start raising funds.
After reading "The Mom Test" I took a step back and tried to first figure out if the thing I was building was really needed. Now I don't start off immediately writing code for an idea (which I have a bunch) and instead try to focus more on researching if the problem is a real one in the first place. Turns out some of mine are not.
Another reason is my next solo adventure would be bootstrapped. So some types of SaaS are out of the picture.
Most new technologies that blossom out to startups should be done in a university-like environment. I mean having knowledge on hand, similar staff members to mull ideas over, stable income and away from 'wfh'.
Doing all that from random locations, with the added stress of market-fit, marketing, taxes, ect is a headache.
Simply navigating the minefield of public tech and business knowledge without stupifying yourself and falling for inauthentic lies, is a danger.
It's going well though, wanted to point out those dangers for those playing along.
Most projects I decide not to pursue is that is blatently obvious that making a profit ffom them will be near to impossible.
But I have finally found an idea that is worth pursuing but I am doing that on my spare time so development is slow.Not really what you were asking but several of my projects died because I didnt have time enough for them. Im fine with that though since the competition is pretty much none, sucks and is expensive as hell. Seems like the perfect market, but we'll see.
This is explicitly a startup focused forum run by a startup incubator. But I do agree with you, I wish there were more discussion of "boring" businesses here as much as there was railing about using "boring" tech.
Too many risks in too many areas. Marketing, competition, is this a painkiller vs vitamin, is it differentiating enuff? 1 or 2 risks is fine but my ideas have a LOT of risks in almost all areas
