> There always is the possibility that startups are the only place that would accept a homeless guy with little experience.
From reading HN I get the impression he'd have very little chance because of his age. This guy has white hair, and posters here seem to think that over 26 is past it.
> On the other side, many young people end up having to help their parents make rent. They don't have the position to take on any of their own risk.
Yup. Dreaming about startups was all fun until I realized that I'm essentially providing for 5 people beyond myself, at which point I got super insecure about keeping my well-paying job.
>It is much harder to sit in a motel room, drink all day and type so you might get published someday and make money. His lifestyle and approach really wouldn't (doesn't) work today.
color me surprised; that kind of dedicated labor and isolationism sounds a lot like the startup world, to me.
pick the right specimen and they probably imbibe as much booze doing it, too.
> I have a family to support, so I can't take a super small salary and eat Top Ramen. This may be a subtle way that older founders are discriminated against.
This is not (harmful) discrimination. Ceteris paribus, people with financial obligations are less fit to found a startup.
> I can't help but think that encouraging young people to throw away the best time of their lives being startup founders has been a massive mistake
The best time of any person's life is not necessarily on their twenties. If that were the case, most people should just call it quits never having achieved anything. Maybe I'm just telling myself this since I'm about to turn 30, but in the other hand, I just don't think being young is particularly good for anything interesting to me.
Don't, I'm 37 and I never had a successful startup, when I was 25 I didn't even know what I want in life. It seems to me people more and more seem to put milestones in their lives "if I don't get to be X by age Y then I have failed"
You are putting yourself to failure. compare yourself to yourself, don't compare yourself to black swans like the Zuckerbergs of this world, they are one in a billion. There are more talented and smart people who are great that didn't create a successful startup than there are people on facebook.
I would say you are in a crisis mode now, and for now your startup is done for, but this doesn't mean that once you get back on your feet financially you can't go back and revisit that idea.
If you post your contact details and tech stack I'm sure you could find some temporary gigs to keep you floating.
I never went into startups because I lacked that financial backbone when I was younger, and had a family later. But I'm happily employed and like my side projects. Going into a startup is a long term game, you are taking lower salaries so you can pay top talent more than you are paid yourself, and you don't want to burn all that seed money (if you are lucky to have any, or using your own savings).
It sounds to me like you need some real remote, US dollar rate work ASAP. If you have been living on a $200 a month, I'm sure that there are people here that would hire you in an hourly rate that would make you earn that in a day or so at last...
I would personally take a break from the startup, use this stage to get some freelance pipeline, get my pockets full of money (or get a remote fulltime job in a startup), save 6 salaries, and only then go back and trying a startup.
Startups have very low success rates, it's all about trying many things, MOST startups fail as you know. this is why you need some savings first.
If you don't have a place to sleep, and food to eat, then you CAN'T RUN A STARTUP
>In 10 years I'll likely have enough saved up to seriously consider my own business, and enough contacts/professional clout to go back to regular work if it fails. I'll also have 10 more years of business experience to draw on, likely from at least 2 more companies. Why do a startup now, or God forbid right when I graduated, when I have/had the fewest resources and the fewest advantages?
You'll also be a decade older, probably with children, a mortgage, and a bad back. Business opportunities prime for the taking now will be saturated. There's a trade off to everything. Young, single people willing to accept risk have a lot of intangible advantages.
>Nobody wants to invest in somebody with a bunch of failed entrepreneurial ventures. But if you sit back, take a check, work on cool shit and build an impressive body of work, well then perhaps people will be more willing to invest in you.
Exactly. If your ideas aren't working right now, why not work on some other guy's?
I can see that you're willing to let someone else handle all the business side. So why not not join some start up that you believe in, and provide your tech skills to help realize their dream. In the mean time you can learn how they did the business side. This will also alleviate you from your financial troubles (though do you really have them? considering your $5000...)
And then some time in the future, someone will provide their business skills to help realize your dream.
Either way, it's time to get a job.
> go bang your girlfriend and give her a massage.
Yep, she deserves that for sticking with you through all this.
> Are all startups at my age generally side hustles that become profitable enough to quit my day job?
Kinda, successes will generally be:
1) Ascended side-hustle (soooooo much luck involved on this one),
2) You basically already have minimal FIRE money or better (for whatever reason—saved well while earning high, family is rich, whatever) and can afford to take a couple years without an employer with negligible risk to your financial stability, or
3) You have a high-earning spouse to cover the bills while you give your dream a try
1 is easily the hardest and least-likely to succeed—so much less time to put into it, and you're having to steal free and family time to do it rather than working during... work hours.
(see also: getting started with a career in the arts, especially 2 and 3)
>In fact, I had job offers from a YC startup and a non-YC startup and am looking at the non-YC startup, just because of HN.
From the tone of this article, it sounds like YC startup would end up coming out ahead in this deal. This guy sounds pretty immature and emotionally unstable. I wouldn't want to work with someone like that.
> Have you tried being born to a different family?
Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one...
But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales.
Luckily I met my cofounders through a mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.
> Most entrepreneurs have similar beginnings: They do well in grade school, go to a great college in which they do well, get a great job, quit that job, and try to start something on their own. When they start something, it’s the first time in their lives that they stray from the beaten path.
Really? I'm kind of surprised to find this in an article supposedly about bootstrapping. I mean, if you live in SV and you worked at Google and saved up for a few years and now you're "bootstrapping" a start-up, you actually already have an angel investor: yourself.
I did horribly in grade school (spent all my time on the internet instead of studying), went to a crappy college, dropped out (spent all my time dicking around with coding projects instead of studying), got a string of horrible jobs (the majority of which were minimum-wage and didn't even marginally involve technology -- O, to live in the US, let alone SV), and now I'm trying to start a start-up because it's the only thing I feel any sense of engagement toward.
I'm "bootstrapping" in the sense that I highly doubt anyone would ever invest in me. No cofounders, no "workspace", just me, my laptop, an EC2 micro instance, and some combination of {Erlang, HTML5, Objective-C, Stripe}. Wish me luck.
> Things haven't changed much as we've grown up. If you come from a wealthy background, you can keep on trying seed ideas until you find traction. With a more middle-class background, you can put in a small number of attempts, spread between long stretches of saving more money. If you're poor, you'll never have the ability to even try.
This is pretty much correct (though I don't think lower than middle class = poor, but I digress). Some people have better opportunities growing up. Some people can stay in mummy and daddys comfortable house for free while they try and make it big with a startup.
Are you implying that the rest of us shouldn't even bother trying? I really don't want to use "not growing up as rich as mark zuckerburg" as an excuse.
> As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships.
I'm glad not everybody had such a callous experience as mine.
> The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry
I don't buy either tech nor housing as the root cause, but at the end of the day I didn't really care who to blame, I just wanted to be able to walk down the street without feeling like I was going to get ebola. But nobody felt safe even acknowledging the problem ("How dare you admit that a half-dressed drug-addict screaming sexual profanities at the woman in front of you makes you uncomfortable! Privilege much?"). People just wanted to blame someone or not even open that can of worms.
> As hackers, do you feel like you can hack life and get more years out of it then the average joe?
I dunno what this is supposed to mean. I have known tons of older guys who really know their shit and have been programmers their entire career. I'll be 37 next month and feel like I'm not only more knowledgeable and on top of things than I've ever been, but also far more professional in how I conduct myself than I was when I was younger.
And based on the 20-somethings I"ve interviewed, I have zero fear that young people are going to make me obsolete.
> Or do you feel lost in a culture that hails 20 year olds that are dreaming up the next big thing?
No because being an entrepreneur has never been my goal in life. My dad had a computer company in the 80s, and our family suffered greatly when it went under. I have always prioritized stable income over a shot at becoming a millionaire/billionaire. The company I work for now was actually started by a friend of mine over 10 years ago, and has made him rich and made me comfortable.
If I were going to quit my job to do a start up, yeah I might get passed up in favor of young people by investors, but if they truly only passed me up for another company just because they were younger a) I could sue them and b) they wouldn't be the right partners anyway.
I think if you want to stay in this industry in later years, you should set yourself up to be in a comfortable position for you, whatever that means. If that means you do your start up when you're young and make a solid business out of it, or if that means you get yourself the skills needed to be highly in demand and well paid when you're older, you should plan for where you want to be.
> Investing $10,000 and 6 months of your life in a startup is not ruin-inducing
Can I just point out that it's not ruin inducing if you have a 100+k job and parents who live in a 1mm+ dollar house.
Losing 10k and quitting my job for 6 months in the process would be pretty much ruin inducing for me right now. I don't have the option to go back and live with my parents for a while, and of course, it depends on your definition of ruin, but that would likely leave mein the situation of sleeping on some friends couches with not a penny to my name and living on £58/week from the government.
> I recently quit my cozy six-figure job in ad-tech to try and bring some of my ideas to fruition
While you may not have the opportunities of a manhattan trust fund kid, you do have an incredible advantage over lots of other people; your job after paying 4k/month in rent in SF, and after paying taxes was more than my gross pay. Not everyone earns 6 figures and can save up 10k to gamble on a venture, and to assume that everyone can is incredibly entitled.
> "I feel so old to be trying something completely new."
Dude. You're 30. I'm not going to post the cliche list of people who've done amazing, impactful things after age 30, but please understand that that list easily runs to the hundreds of millions. You have a lot of time to do whatever you want. Take a break. If you still want to get out of tech, then jump into another field. If not, just take a normal tech job and be one of us drones for a bit. It won't kill you, and it might reenergize your desire to make your own thing.
You're been working on your own thing for six years, which means you started it before you had even reached the age where you could rent a car. You have never experienced a normal life. Give it a shot. It's not as terrible as it's sometimes made out to be. I'm not making a billion dollars, but I get paid well and I go home to a nice place; I live with a beautiful girlfriend and I exercise at a nice gym and take fun vacations and eat at nice restaurants and drink fancy scotches. It's not jetting to Malta on the weekends, but it's better than what the vast majority of people on this earth who are around our age can hope for.
And doing that doesn't mean you've given up and sold out or whatever. You can work on side projects when they make you happy. The cult of the entrepreneur hasn't done right by you. Try another path, and see if it works better. It might fit you better, or it might reenergize you to get back into the startup space, or it might make you realize you need to live in a hippie commune. (If that's the case, I know a place.)
> Now, with my 20 years' experience, am I thinking of branching out and doing my own thing? Sure. Would I have recommended that to my 18 year old self? Hell no.
Working at a startup you can also do very well for yourself.
From reading HN I get the impression he'd have very little chance because of his age. This guy has white hair, and posters here seem to think that over 26 is past it.
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