Why aren't you starting your own company?

I don't want to work 24 hours a day. I like the stability and consistency that a salary provides. I like having time to dedicate do my wife and kids. I like having time to just read comics or play video-games before I sleep. I don't want to spend my weekends wondering about customers or paying salaries or stuff like that. It feels that having my own company would be extremely stressful and time consuming, and the tech salaries allow me to have a comfortable-enough life that, at least for now, starting a company doesn't seem like a great idea.

I love this question. As a tech founder of a bootstrapped SAAS company, let me tell you what a typical day looks like (other than being on HN at times of course :)):

- Sales Calls

- Marketing dicsussions (content/blogs/webinars/podcasts/ads/partnerships/affiliates)

- Team building/hiring and Firing (can you deal with firings ?).

- Team Management

- Customer Support/Talking to customers

- Conflict resolution (with customers or even internal team)

- Fire fight. Something goes wrong. I was on vacation in November 2021 and literally that week, we had a major production incident even though this major incident didn't happen for last 24 months. I was up until 6 AM working with the team to fix it. Then at 9 AM, I went on a call with the customer and had to deal with that. This was major. Minor stuff happens a lot more than you would think.

- Sales (did I say it already)

- Marketing (did I say it already)

- Legal/Paperwork/HR

- Some tech stuff/coding/servers/devops

- When shit hits the fan, your ass is on the line ultimately. Handle that.

- Work crazy hours (to build a real business, you have to work hard and long at least first few years. 4 hour work week stuff is bullshit)

- Be willing to fail. Lot of people cannot get out of their comfort zones. They have fear of failure. That won't work if you want to run a business.

So if you want to start your own company, you better be ready for all of this. In the early days, you will be involved in all of the things listed above. Working a nice six figure tech job in a big tech is easy compared to what you have to do to be your own boss. I bet most people don't want to do majority of the things I listed above.

So the point is that you don't just start a company because you can code. You start a company because well, you want to build a business and nothing else. I did it because I want to build a business. I know it is hell and been there for 7 years now but I wouldn't trade this hell for a comfortable paycheck at a company. Just not wired that way. Most people however are wired to be comfortable and in tech jobs, the money is really really good to do anything else unless you have that "itch".

The right idea / problem hasn't appeared in my life yet. I think part of it is i'm a frugal person, so anything I "need" I try my best to get for free or discounted as much as possible. Because of this frugality, I say "I don't need that" or "I wouldn't pay for that" often, which wouldn't allow me to be open minded to what others would potentially pay for or consider useful.

I'm scared of the legal stuff. Every time I get an offial-looking letter, my heart pumps and I think I'll need go to jail soon.

I don't like doing sales or marketing, either. I'd be full of doubts all the time because I'd know the code that the product runs on.

I want to continue working for the early-stage startup I'm currently at. But I'd consider starting my own company at some point as long as I have cofounders who take care of legal, sales and marketing.

Starting a company is easy. What's hard is getting one off the ground and reaching escape velocity, which seems to be one of the most challenging things in the world.

I'm usually trying to start something, whether it's a regular ol' side project or something that could conceivably be a business. But my ideas are almost always more ambitious than I initially realize, or than I'm able to actually chew off, and I bet a lot of people fall into that trap.

Yeah, I could make a one page app that sells quality cheat sheets using Stripe, but why bother when I could make something 100x more complicated that I'll never actually finish?

A lot of people avoid making a business because they are smarter than I am and they realize that it's way more work than is appreciated.

I like technical work not marketing, sales, and paperwork

Lack of access to startup capital.

Still bootstrapping but even with having a successful bootstrapped startup under my belt (with the k1s to prove it) in the past I have no idea how to connect to VCs in this post covid landscape.

Friends and family rounds aren't an option for me, access to capital has always been hard for me even though my track record is high roi for every investment dollar.

* I want to have good health insurance for my family without paying thousands of dollars.

* Running your own business takes much more time than being a "working stiff" and I don't want to spend 95% of my awake time working.

* If my business fails, I don't want to incur huge debt or losses, I want the security of a steady paycheck.

* Once my business gets larger than just myself, such as if it takes off hugely, I don't want to deal with the politics and other bullshit that will take me away from the day to day building of product.

* I'm worried past a employer would try to use my time there against me to steal my business, since I signed NDAs and stuff, even if my ideas are fresh and unrelated to the specific business of that employer (that employer treated me poorly when I left).

I tried once. I'd taken a couple of business courses and was trying to be a micropreneur building apps. It became clear that I didn't know how to reach people, and that going back to a day job was going to be a much better support my family.

I have some projects I'd love to make my primary. I love the idea of starting up good tech, particulalry good tech with an open source benevolent core.

But it feels like it takes so much money to make even a small team. I want a long run way, to get really far on, with good people. I dont see myself as having a fast road to profitability. It's so hard to imagine how to start.

And it feels so much more daunting to create an interesting & engaged environment. I dont mind training & boosting promising folk, but it just feels like even that takes soo much money, & more-so that it's going to be so much harder to bring out genuine geekiness in people. As much as an idea, I crave a good culture- intense & chasing something new & exciting & good for the world- but the pure geekiness of computing feels so diluted, so underwater. It feels so improbable that those around me will have that old obvioushbut-secret geek-club feeling, that getting great at computing is radical & empowering & ennobling.

I want so much to care about & believe in my employees, but it's so vastly probable it'd become just another company of deluded/decoupled spin-based management & another detached workforce. We all deserve better, we all deserve realer, we all should have real things to care about & apply ourselves to, but there's no practical way to ask for that kind of commitment. Unless I can really make the work fully obviously clearly sell itself.

15 years ago, I wrote a program to track which books I have read and automatically synchronize the list it with various library accounts. Then I thought I would start a company selling the program.

But that failed, because every library I talked to said, they cannot support commercial software.

Then I gave up all commercial software development and made it fully open-source, so I do not have to deal with it anymore. But that backfired, because too many people asked me to add stuff, and now I am forever stuck maintaining it, and cannot start a new project

Opportunity costs get higher as your compensation goes up. Usually you don't start a company yourself, so you also need to consider your immediate network's increasing opportunity costs.

I'm lazy and comfortable with my big tech TC

I'm trying, really hard. But I have a disdain for not doing things 100 percent correct, and perfection is the enemy of progress. But especially when it comes to regulations that can get you in legal trouble. I just see all these things I need to get right, I need to learn about filing taxes and company accounts, hiring staff seems like an absolute minefield, and now you're also responsible for someone else's livelyhood! It's scary.

But I'm pretty close to launching "something" in the next few weeks. I'm doing a hardware startup, I already have multiple production-ready prototypes. Now I'm working on documentation, and some basic marketing material... but again all I can see is a hundred different things I still have left to do.

There's also the fact that the business would need to be quite successful to match my current, and rather hefty paycheck. Less money, less safety, but doing something I love... I hope it's worth it.

Fear of failure. I tend to find comfort in things I know well. Starting a company has many moving parts, it’s daunting.

Lack of meaning. I haven’t found meaning in the ‘business world’. Much of my time is spent doing hobbies I find meaningful and enjoy. I’ve found a balance in my life now to do interesting things at work, while having good work life balance. Starting a company upsets that balance mostly in a negative way.

Lack of cofounder trust. I live in the Bay Area, and a lot of people who have started companies are not the people I trust or enjoy working with. Someone with values I associate with and respect tend not to start companies.

I do want to start a company one day, only if I can add value to it, and it adds value to the world.

For the same reason I donr want to be a manager. I care too much about people and their development. I mentor all sorts of people. I get annoyed when people don't care as greatly. I'd be a bad boss. People have better things to worry about.

And I don't want to work 24h a day. I want to be able to take vacations. I want to cut myself off from work. I want to be able to stop thinking about work and engineering. It's become so that engineering has become a hobby for me. I want to stop that. There is a lot of other stuff I want to do that doesn't involve tech.

I started starting companies as a result of Silicon Valley age discrimination experiences around when I was 40. It was clearly a situation that could not be effectively overcome or negotiated with. So the obvious answer: "If I'm the boss, I won't age-discriminate against myself nor others: problem solved".

The one advantage I had was working in Sales and Marketing in addition to R&D at Hewlett-Packard so I got the VERY BEST of industry training in all those areas on HP's dime. So those roles include the CEO role were quite easy for me on my own.

I live in the US so health insurance is a big part of it, but lets be honest: the things I want to do aren't going to pay an SF Bay Area mortgage :D

I don't want the initial overhead required. That's pain I don't want. And there are many people making good money working for someone else, but with the oft-touted caveat of: 'You're helping someone else achieve their dream', which is a fair point. But you have to consider the following: If everyone had a company, where would we source employees?

I don't want to work more hours and I don't have the nerves it takes -- or rather, I do -- I could handle anything, but I don't want to.

I still work toward some small product that'll make me an extra hundred or few a month, though.

People like idlewords (Pinboard), kalzumeus (Misc), and jcs (Pushover) are far more inspirational to me than whoever runs Snapchat or some other mega-SaaS.

Lottery tickets and options trading are less effort and easier to unwind for similar statistical windfall outcomes.

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

> For a more serious take that gives approximately the same results, 80000 hours finds that the average value of a YC founder after 5-9 years is $18M. That sounds great! But there are a few things to keep in mind here. First, YC companies are unusually successful compared to the average startup. Second, in their analysis, 80000 hours notes that 80% of the money belongs to 0.5% of companies. Another 22% are worth enough that founder equity beats working for a big company, but that leaves 77.5% where that's not true.

> If you're an employee and not a founder, the numbers look a lot worse. If you're a very early employee you'd be quite lucky to get 1/10th as much equity as a founder. If we guess that 30% of YC startups fail before hiring their first employee, that puts the mean equity offering at $1.8M / .7 = $2.6M. That's low enough that for 5-9 years of work, you really need to be in the 0.5% for the payoff to be substantially better than working at a big company unless the startup is paying a very generous salary.

I've been working with my dad for the last 6 years, trying to grow a company he started as an immigrant in his 40s (wholesale distributor of natural stone).

I'd like to find him a comfortable exit, so he can move to the next stage (which he wants to do) with a cushy paycheck.

Once that's done, I will start something of my own!

I'm not sure what to do. If I had an idea I would run with it but all of my ideas are either pipe-dream "if I had $10,000,000 to get started" or are small scale, "Don't know if I could pay my bills while it gets off the ground" kinds of ideas.

Started one before both as an indie dev and with a few other fellows.

The main reason I switched back to employment for now is to both have a stable income (nest egg is running out) and to gather a great team.

I don't want to work on great ideas, I want to work with great people.

I mean it's pretty much going to come down to people not starting companies because they just don't want to (lack of interest in business tasks) or because the related risks are too high (which generally means lack of working capital).

The vast majority of people won't be able to beat the total compensation packages of big tech by starting their own business. It's a pretty simple decision from a money perspective if you're honest about your chances.

Too many ideas, not enough time. It's fun building products or anything really. I couldn't imagine being on a product team for a single product that gets iterated marginally forever. Same with a company.

I'd need:

- Money and/or investors

- Time

- Enough manpower

- Great marketing

- A stronger understanding of scalability

- Ideally, a product that solves a problem in a niche area

I have bits and pieces of the above (except the investors and marketing), but it's not enough to get something up and running.

I have a family to support.

- I don't have a good idea, or a good problem to solve.

- I don't really think I'm great at what I do, so starting a company to do it feels dangerous.

I'm really bad at networking and finding a suitable business partner would be a total disaster :D

Too many regulations to make it worthwhile.

Legal shit is a nightmare.

No access to capital.

I did. It was awful.

To be a business owner is to skim the excess earnings of your workers.

It's at best amoral.