
Tell HN: I quit my job Starting full-time on my startup on Monday. - vyrotek
I put in my notice a couple of weeks ago. Today is my last day! I will be working with RyanElkins (a fellow hacker) on IActionable.com full-time starting next week. We received some initial funding through a local program called BoomStartup.com.<p>One thought I wanted to share was on my experience letting my coworkers know that I am leaving. I was definitely not prepared for the responses I received. When people first heard I was leaving almost everyone jokingly responded with "Traitor! Who are you leaving us for? Is it more money?!". But once I explained that I'm doing my own thing the attitude change was amazing. I wasn't told "You're crazy!" but instead I was congratulated and applauded as if I had broken free from some captor and were cheering me to run as fast and as far as I can. I was also reminded over and over again to remember them as if I was supposed to return and free them. Perhaps one day :)<p>Of course, from my perspective I feel more like I'm late to a marathon that I have been jealously watching others run for years. The feedback we received from our 'Review our Site' posts as well as everyone's experiences that were shared here have definitely helped us get to where we are today.<p>Thank you Hacker News - Here we go!
======
edw519
_from my perspective I feel more like I'm late to a marathon that I have been
jealously watching others run for years_

Naaa. Those were other marathons. Your marathon starts Monday.

The marathon analogy seems especially appropriate. No need to be jealous or
worry about the competition. Just participate and finish. Best wishes!

~~~
enjo
It starts today at 5:00 to be more precise. Startups tend to be a 7-day a week
sort of obsession from my experience:)

------
ryanelkins
Tell me about it. I have 6.5 more hours of people here slowly becoming more
and more terrified as they begin to realize they have no idea how to maintain
the software they asked me to build.

I can't wait to be free.

(In case anyone didn't notice, I'm OP's co-founder)

~~~
jaekwon
sounds like you're just being greedy?? did you choose to leave your coworkers
behind with a heap of your code, or did they ask you to leave?

nothing wrong with leaving a company, but developers should at least leave
their work maintainable.

~~~
DaveChild
It's the responsibility of the company to ensure they are capable of coping
with a coder leaving. I've worked for companies where they've just not given
any time or thought to what happens if the coder leaves.

~~~
jaekwon
I agree, that companies should be prepared for developers to leave.

I maintain that developers and engineers should leave their work maintainable.

I know I'm going to get downvoted, but this needs to be said. With great
programming power comes great programming responsibilities. And you and I know
this power doesn't come from silicon or management.

We all bitch about crappy products, and fail to see the developers on the
other leave their turd piles for management to "manage".

Or we bitch about crappy code left behind by the prior owners -- spitting at
the sky playing musical chairs.

If you need to leave your job, at least offer to maintain your shit. Don't
leave them trembling in fear. Save us greedy monkeys.

~~~
ryanelkins
I totally agree. I perhaps should have clarified. It's not unmaintainable due
to the code, its unmaintainable due to the lack of people capable of
maintaining it. This is largely due to hiring me as the sole .NET developer
(where their other devs who are primarily PHP devs felt somewhat comfortable
with C#) and then deciding that I should be the sole Java developer instead
(yeah, I was REAL happy about that), in case they ever want to put these apps
on Linux machines or something else.

Now, C# and Java are pretty close syntactically so hopefully they'll be OK.
There is a huge difference in libraries and core API structure as well as
deployment though, so it's not just an easy step to take. Having marginal .NET
skills does not translate to marginal Java skills though. We do have a brand
new Java dev, but it's really asking alot to put all of this on their
shoulders with just a few months out of college.

~~~
puredemo
Also a pretty big opportunity for him if he can pull it off.

------
zavulon
Congratulations!!!

That's exactly the feedback I got from my former coworkers as well - 95% were
very happy, and had the "well, at least someone is getting out of here for the
better things" attitude.

Keep in mind though - you'll have to be working much harder than you ever did
at your day job ;))

Good luck!

~~~
luckystrike
I got the exact same response when I left my job a few weeks earlier. I was
pleasantly surprised with the overwhelming positive response and support
almost from everyone (friends, acquaintances, (ex)co-workers etc). I am based
near Delhi, India and entrepreneurship is not exactly a very hot thing here
(compared to US).

All the best to the OP and you as well!

------
jacquesm
Super, congratulations and all the best of luck and energy to you.

If you can spare the time, keep a notebook of what you experience, online or
offline doesn't matter much. Later when you look back you'll be surprised how
much use that can have.

------
mynameishere
Maybe I have a bad habit of criticizing company names, but you should be aware
of the word's definition if you aren't,

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/actionable>

    
    
      1. furnishing ground for a lawsuit.

~~~
vyrotek
Heh, we're aware of that. Although the other definition works for us.
_"Relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action
to be taken."_

I'm also not sure how many people noticed but the name is IActionable not
iActionable. It comes from the concept of Interfaces types which many object-
oriented languages have.

------
djb_hackernews
Congrats on taking the plunge.

Monday eh? 9am sharp? Does your startup already have a defined work week and
business hours? :)

~~~
vyrotek
Heh, not quite. We do have to show up on Monday at 10am for the official
kickoff of the program. We have some office space assigned to us as well as
some mentorship classes scheduled throughout the 3 months.

Of course, we'll most likely work way more hours for our own company. I
already have a hard time stopping myself from coding every night.

~~~
jasonlotito
Some tips from someone who did this many years ago.

1\. Start every day at the same time. Be reasonable. 10 AM is acceptable. But
be consistent.

2\. Make sure you give yourself time away from your company. Yes, you'll love
it and want to work late nights. However, giving yourself a 2 hour break to go
out, have a nice dinner with your co-founder, and maybe have a beer or two
will do wonders. Even if you end up talking about business.

3\. Dress smart. Keep yourself groomed properly. It sounds silly, but really,
you are your company. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care
of your company.

4\. Stay focused. You know what drives you. At least at the start, build stuff
you want to build. Don't let other people deter you. You'll have a lot of "If
it only did this..." comments. That's rubbish. Don't get me wrong. If the idea
is good and you want to take it on, do so! But don't feel obligated. The good
deals always came because of the work I wanted to do, not from some "If you
build this, I'll buy" comment.

~~~
vyrotek
Thanks for the tips! Ryan and I are both married with young kids so we will
definitely have to learn to budget our time wisely to make sure we keep the
wives happy :)

------
makeee
Was just planning an achievements system for my website and was thinking that
there really should be a service that makes this easy. Looks like that's
exactly what you're working on.

------
crescendo
First of all, congratulations! There will be a lot of ups and downs, so just
remember to enjoy the good times and hang in there and be persistent through
the bad.

I have a couple suggestions for your landing page:

* The current overall payload is 382.1K. You could significantly reduce this and speed up the load time if you enable gzip compression on your web server. Seems like you're running this on IIS 6.0--there is a configuration option for HTTP compression buried somewhere in the submenus, I believe.

* The rounded corners have a white background, whereas the page background at the top is gray. This causes the top corners to have a very visible rectangular edge. The IE-6 friendly way to fix this is to change the background color for the top corners to match the background color of the top of the page. If you don't care about IE 6, you can simply give them transparent backgrounds.

Good luck!

~~~
drp
Also, the <title> is "Home Page" You should instead include the name of your
company and a short description of what exactly you do.

------
minalecs
good luck, and let us know of the progress of your project. I did the
samething as you and so far so good.

------
megamark16
Good luck! I'll be especially interested to see what BoomStartup is like as
you go through their program.

~~~
vyrotek
We definitely took a chance being one of the first companies in the program.
But after meeting many of the mentors and investors we were confident that
their intentions were good and they will do all that they can to help us
succeed. Its also exciting to work along-side other startups at the same time.

------
spencerfry
Congrats! Welcome to the other side.

------
wglb
I once left a technology company to start my own business. Mostly, i got
(almost whispered) "are you hiring?"

------
braindead_in
Congratulations! Don't give up. Just keep trying.

------
lazyant
Good luck. I got the same reaction btw.

