

Ask HN: Why don't more web developers found startups? - matt1

I have a friend who is a talented web developer. His resume is filled with the latest and greatest: Django, Prototype, Rails, Ajax yada yada. He makes decent money developing websites for small businesses, but nothing spectacular. I asked him why he didn't try founding a startup, even if just in his spare time. "No ideas, I guess." "Ever heard of Paul Graham?" I asked. "Nope" ;)<p>As someone who is trying to learn the skills on his resume, his 'no ideas' response frustrates me. That got me thinking: What other qualities do successful startup founders have that web developers don't?<p>Ideas? Ambition? Family? Why don't more people make the leap?
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Shooter
Only some people are wired for it.

My wife is smart, hard-working, and has skills that would translate into much
higher paychecks if she worked for herself. Even her hobbies could make her
lots of money. I've tried numerous times to get her to start her own business,
because I find entrepreneurship so fulfilling and I love the freedom and the
challenges. I want to share the feeling with her and, frankly, I also want her
to better understand me. Her complete lack of interest in starting her own
business is so alien to me that we have really struggled to even communicate
about it. I've bought her books and cut out articles of people that have
started successful businesses in her field of interest in an attempt to entice
her to the startup fold. She is completely not interested, and she gets tense
and testy when I even suggest she start her own business.

One of her best explanations was that her very traditional, 'ladder-oriented'
upbringing (father was a military officer, then a corporate man, and her
mother was in academia) has made her most comfortable with a traditional job.
She wants the safety and structure of working for someone else. Even if a
startup would be more lucrative, fun, and flexible than her current job, her
fear of the unknown outweighs those benefits. She doesn't want to have to
always "figure out what to do next", and she doesn't want her income to be
inconsistent.* She also needs quite a bit of external positive reinforcement
for her emotional well-being (that is, she needs people telling her "Thatta
girl!" when she does a great job in order to feel good and keep going.) She
thinks a startup would be lonely and she thinks her self-confidence and
motivation would falter without frequent external reinforcement from co-
workers and supervisors. All of which is probably true.

Both of her parents are very educated (PhDs) and have always worked for
someone else. They are also relatively wealthy. My parents didn't attend
college, and are "rural middle-class," but they have both owned their own
businesses. My parents also have some very wealthy entrepreneurial friends
that I was around quite a bit as a child.

* I went from making $40K/yr working for someone else, to making more than that A MONTH working for myself. Even though I was making EXPONENTIALLY more money by working for myself, the income was sporadic, so my wife asked that I get a 'second job' making about $10 an hour as a 'backup'! She is completely emotional and irrational about money, and it drives me crazy.

~~~
lacker
I find it hard to believe you were making over $480,000 a year and your wife
insisted you get a second job making $10 an hour. Perhaps your calculations
are off.

~~~
Shooter
No, my calculations are not off. But thanks for the math check :-P

I understand the ridiculousness of what I'm saying. That is my f0Rking point.
My wife is emotional and irrational about money, and especially so about
having a CONSISTENT paycheck. [This is the same woman that actually thought
briefly about declaring bankruptcy when she was younger, despite the fact that
she had a large number of shares in a major bank at the time. It never entered
her mind to sell the shares, because her grandfather had been president of the
bank some time during the '70s, so the shares were "sentimental" and part of
her "family heritage." Never mind the fact that she really needed the money,
and the bank stock was starting to tank anyway.]

My wife is a wonderful, compassionate woman...so I try to overlook her big
weird money issues.

She didn't specifically ask me to get a job making just $10/hr...that's just
the way it worked out. She asked me to get a "low-stress" job that I could
work after having worked 60-70 hours a week on my own business. It had to be a
job that I was qualified to do, and that offered (backup) health insurance.
Since we lived in a somewhat rural area at the time, the only option was a
nightshift job at a local hotel...and I started at $7.48/hr. I ended up making
ALMOST $10/hr. And it was NOT "low-stress" (I was slapped, spit on, robbed,
etc. during my employment there.) The big perk while I worked there was that I
could stay at almost any Hilton property in the world for just $29 a night,
which helped me immensely when I was traveling for my own company. I worked
that second job for exactly 4 years and 11 months. Even after I was making
millions a year. And I never actually made it to a FULL $10 an hour there. I
think I topped out at $9.95/hr.

The only reason I STILL don't have a second job is that I had a serious
illness and could barely even work at my own company. My wife also had cancer,
and she started to re-evaluate her irrational fears.

------
rob
None of you guys are making money because you keep over-analyzing things. This
thread is a brilliant example. Stop thinking you need to move to CA, have some
brilliant, big idea, and a truckload of cash from YCombinator or investors.

There are thousands of people making thousands every month, and they range
from teenagers to mom and pops who know nothing about design or programming.
Everyone here already has a one-up on them. Instead of trying to create a new
'web 2.0' service, pick a content site and do it good! It doesn't matter if
it's been done before. I created a site that offered MySpace layouts and
graphics, despite there already being like 300 of them, and it was making
close to $1k three months later. I sold it six months later for $12k on
SitePoint. No investors, no big expenses.

I now leave you with a quote from Nas:

    
    
        No idea's original, there's nothin' new under the sun
        It's never what you do, but how it's done

------
cschneid
The reason I haven't made the leap is pretty simple: money and location.

I currently work for a large corporation, making money, and slowly saving, but
it's not very fast. I can't support myself for more than a few months before
being forced to work again.

So, if I want to do a startup, I need an angel investor to fund me. That
brings me to the second problem, I'm tied down into middle america. I love the
city I'm in, but it doesn't have the kind of abundance of cash that the coasts
have.

So, my plan moving forward is to contribute to open source and personal
projects. I'll try to make a few bucks off them, but probably nothing serious.
If I hit on an idea that I am really passionate about, I'll work on it more
exclusively on the side or whatever day job I have, until it is able to
provide decent income by itself.

As far as your ideas question, I have no shortage of ideas, but I have a
shortage of ideas that would be good businesses. They are either too small,
too hard to monetize, or they are simply that I don't have the passion for
them to take them far enough to make them viable.

~~~
tstegart
But isn't the core Web 2.0 mentality really that monetary costs have been
drastically lowered and location doesn't matter? There are successful
companies all over the world founded in spare time on barebones budgets.
Middle America can't be that bad, can it?

~~~
cschneid
You're right, the business costs are much cheaper than other business options.
But of course, I still want to eat, and have a roof, and basically not suffer.
That still costs money.

I'm certainly not just sitting back and doing nothing, instead I'm searching
for that idea that really grabs me, and will keep me going in my free time.
The idea for a part time business needs to be more engaging and interesting
than a full time idea (at least for me), because I've already spent most of my
mental stamina grinding through a day job by the time I can get started on the
personal idea.

Either way, I have developed and launched <http://www.irclogger.com> in the
last few weeks, just because I wanted this service and couldn't find it.
(logging freenode's irc channels). But I have no plans to commercialize it,
and wouldn't feel bad if it disappeared.

~~~
tstegart
You're right about everything costing money, and the guy who said he didn't
have enough reserve money saved up is spot on. I got ideas, but even I can't
just quit my job and go. Seriously, YC should open a dorm room, where they get
6% of anything worked on while they provide room and board. :) An entrepreneur
hostel.

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vaksel
Lack of good examples. Most people here probably read techcrunch, so day in
and day out they get to read nothing but success stories. So they think
success is the norm. So they have no problem developing something extremely
simple, because they know that simplicity has paid off for some people.

An older guy who is in a corporate job, has no clue about techcrunch, and
knows that whatever idea he comes up with has been done by Google etc. And if
it hasn't they'll just steal his idea before he can make money.

So in the end he doesn't want to give up his corporate job, his income, and 2
years of his life, to develop an application has little probability of
success.

I mean look at your average startup founder, its a younger guy who has no
other commitments. And they can survive with a burn rate of $500 a month(live
with parents + cost of dedicated server + other minor bills), while an older
guy has a $2500 mortgage, $500 food bill, college tuition payments etc. And he
thinks he needs $100,000 in servers, since that's what he is used with working
at his corporate gig.

------
bookhuddle
Everyone has their own reasons, I'm sure. Here are some that come to mind: \-
They don't have an idea for a startup \- They've never thought about
entrepreneurship \- They don't know how to go about doing it \- They might be
afraid to try \- They just don't feel like it; the commitment involved is not
appealing to them \- They have other interests in life that are more important
to them \- Their life situation prevents them from pursuing a startup idea

I don't quite agree that "web developers" don't have the qualities of "startup
founders". Many probably do, but might not show them for whatever reason.

Chance plays a huge role is success, so the qualities of "successful" startup
founders might not be that different from the "unsuccessful" ones.

Ambition, passion, persistence, motivation, good communication skills, a
certain level of intelligence, ability to work with and motivate people are
some qualities (certainly not all) that you'll probably find in founders.

~~~
jackchristopher
Because it's scary to try _anything_ new. And finding a problem you're
passionate about is hard.

Practical matters are much easier.

------
ALee
Ambition and Perseverance.

The way that one of the RescueTime founders described his YC class was:

"I’ve been damn impressed with the other YC founders, but they aren’t that
much better than many of the great coders I’ve worked with. They’re just
bolder."

<http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/>

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mechanical_fish
_"Ever heard of Paul Graham?" I asked. "Nope"_

There's your answer.

Although it's easy to forget it after hanging around here for a while, doing a
startup is not intuitively obvious. If you don't have a role model you're not
going to get far.

Hand the guy a copy of _Founders at Work_ and see if something clicks. If not,
perhaps it was never meant to be.

The other factor, of course, is that technical skill is only a part of what
you need as a startup founder. You need some Jobs to go with your Woz. If this
guy doesn't have the marketing spark, and he realizes that ("No ideas, I
guess"), he's acting quite rationally. Maybe he'll choose a different path if
and when he meets the right business person.

------
auston
I am not making the leap because I don't have enough reserve money saved up.

~~~
j2d2
<http://news.ycombinator.com/apply>

~~~
phoenixy
Do you think it's really enough money to do 3 month full time commitment? (I
have family, not enough saving)

~~~
staunch
No, it's definitely not. So where's the YC clone that does $80k per founder?
I'd bet they will achieve a significantly higher success rate than YC does.
More experienced, hungrier, stable founders who are highly motivated not to
return to their cubes because they already know how much it sucks.

~~~
mwerty
> More experienced, hungrier, stable founders who are highly motivated not to
> return to their cubes because they already know how much it sucks.

I conjecture that these kinds of people will tend to be more risk averse and
that the group will have a better median result (and higher success rate).

But startup successes can be massive and a better strategy _might_ be to chase
the blockbusters with younger people.

------
felideon
A lot of people don't make the leap because they're afraid of the risks
associated with not having a stable income. A lot of developers working day
jobs would at least like to match their current salary if not more to account
for the risk.

This becomes a bigger problem along the years, since you're more likely to
have a higher salary that would be a lot harder to match with just seed
funding.

------
gm
Not everyone's built to be an entrepreneur... Nothing wrong with that, all of
us that are, we need employees ;-)

Just cuz you are capable of doing it does not mean you should.

------
JohnReel
I was that guy, except I had loads of ideas. I even created them, includidng
the first content management system ever, which I designed and was in use by
our web development clients in 1994, for a company I owned.

Sadly, I had no freaking idea how to market, run a business, get funding, get
mass customers, or anything else of use. Eventually I figured enough of it out
to launch a profitable startup, but it took 15 years. lol.

I think the most important thing to success you need is a successful mentor,
who is doing something similar to what you want to achieve. The more the
better. That was the major turning point for me.

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webwright
Passion and tolerance for risk (both emotional and financial). Ideas, too, I
guess. Lots of people truly don't have any ideas and just don't think that
way.

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bullseye
The ability to sling code by itself is not good criteria for building a
company. Just like being a good cook doesn't make you well equipped to own a
restaurant. If your friend is happy with his current situation, makes a decent
living doing it, why would he change it?

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cypress-hill
lets remember you have to do quite well to match the pay, benefits, and
lifestyle of joe corp coder

i won't toot my horn but i leave at 5pm SHARP, go to the gym everyday, great
benefits and 401k, and i get about $150k, lots of vacation time too

you think about how hard you would have to work on a startup to get that.

