This was just addressed today by Josh Coates of Mozy.com who talked to a small class of CS students. He said, "if your idea is good then there are six other guys out there working on it full time. If it's not good then don't work on it."
On the other side I just finished the Chapter in Founders at Work on 37 Signals. David Heinemeier Hansson created BaseCamp and he only spent 10 hours a week on it. He was the only programmer working on it too. Designers did help out but they only gave a third of their time too. But he said this lack of time was the greatest gift to the development of Basecamp. It helped focus his view on what they needed, and it forced them to make tough decisions about making less software all the time. When you have a lot of time you just get tempted to try to do it all, or at least do too much. So maybe if you don't try to do everything and just the essential then it might be a gift too.
37 Signals embraced the constraints that were forced upon them.
So the short answer to your question is . . . it depends. But it's still a question that needs to be asked.
Also, if the market for your idea is very very good, and the company is offering a service, then this might work. You are already selling the service by now, within your limited time, and the competition doesn't care much as there is such a huge market for your idea. But these are not the conditions in all the cases...
I like the notion of how constraints help. I think that's pretty key, prevents feature creep and the rest, which could easily overwork a full time team that gets to ambitious.
It really does not matter much if you are doing it part-time or full-time except for the time it takes to get the first release out.
I have been working on http://www.onista.com for almost a year now and I am doing it mostly in evenings and weekends. Bear in mind that I have one and half year old kid who takes lot of time away from me (Off course I enjoy it a lot).
Recently two more friends joined me and we are pretty confident on launching in November.
Based on my experience I can say that, persistence is what matters. If you work full-time and are not persistent or loose focus then you are not going anywhere. If you work part-time and are persistent and focussed then you will win. May be it will take more time than usual but you will get there with better results.
So I would say, yes go ahead and work part-time on your idea, but be very persistent to spend whatever extra time you find on the idea.
It would be good idea to find group of friends who can work part-time with you. (I did that it does help a lot)
Yeah, that would probably work as long as I don't have tough competition that can work full time. So when I release, I have to release pretty complete and bug free, and it'd help if the product was very hard to reproduce without knowing the internals. I can probably do those, since I currently have a year and a half of comp sci research ahead of me (getting a masters).
Any recommendations on especially pertinent fields? I'm planning to look at SOA type stuff - intelligent agents, evolutionary algorithms, systems architecture, etc. I'd like to throw some Godel in there too, but can't really see the applicability yet.
I'm not sure that the "pertinence" of the field is what's important for a start-up. I'd be more concerned about the need for something (unless that's what you meant by "pertinent".)
If you have to look for something to do or ask for recommendations, you'll probably never have the passion needed to see it through.
OTOH, you probably already have what you need. What really bugs you? And others you know? When's the last time you said, "You know, someone really ought to make <some thing>." THAT'S what you should be pursuing.
A deep solution is better in my situation than scratching some random itch, since anyone can do the latter. So, to rephrase my question more exactly: what are the deep underlying problems of the web that need the type of strong theory I can learn at university?
In answer to your last set of questions, something that really needs to be made is an aggregation service for all the web 2.0 stuff out there. People want an integrated, secure, and trust based work/socializing platform, and my current research interests are geared towards solving this kind of problem. Facebook is trying to do this, but I don't think they have a good mechanism yet for integrating apps.
It depends how much effort your startup requires. It also depend on the intellectual effort required by the other part job. If it's a manual job, you will be able to plan what you do the next time you work on your startup. You'll make better decision and you might even become more efficient than some working full time for its startup.
If the other part job his intellectual, then it will be much harder, especially if you can't well split activities.
Finally what is really important is how much perseverance, motivation and will you have. The other factor will just influence the amount of difficulty you have to overcome.
I believe it is possible to do the startup part time. In fact, if you spend a good deal of your time planning the right actions to make while you're actually working on your startup, you may see better progress than if you're working on it full time. This would simply be because you would be acting in a more intelligent way.
Your odds are small, indeed. You will never be as fast as the other guys and if you have an amazing idea and something worthwhile, you'll be overtaken by your competitors very quickly. You have to jump in fully and mind the business from the start.
On the other side I just finished the Chapter in Founders at Work on 37 Signals. David Heinemeier Hansson created BaseCamp and he only spent 10 hours a week on it. He was the only programmer working on it too. Designers did help out but they only gave a third of their time too. But he said this lack of time was the greatest gift to the development of Basecamp. It helped focus his view on what they needed, and it forced them to make tough decisions about making less software all the time. When you have a lot of time you just get tempted to try to do it all, or at least do too much. So maybe if you don't try to do everything and just the essential then it might be a gift too.
37 Signals embraced the constraints that were forced upon them.
So the short answer to your question is . . . it depends. But it's still a question that needs to be asked.