

Ask HN: Finding a financial benefactor? - buzzzlight

Everyone always asks "where can I find a technical cofounder?" and it surprises me because I'm surrounded by technical people and I've known many teenagers with more technical know-how than some of the bosses I've worked for.  For me, the real question is "where are all of the benefactors/angel investors/people who made it during the dot com and housing bubbles who fund entrepreneurs?"<p>Then I read this link last night:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714304<p>And it got me thinking that I've been looking at it all wrong.  I haven't earned a benefactor yet.<p>tl;dr:<p>I frankly don't know anyone in angle investing circles.  The richest people I know are probably my dad's business landlord and my old workout buddy who worked for the IRS of all places.  I live in Boise, ID, about as far away as possible from any tech scene.<p>But where there's a problem, there's often an opportunity, once the issue is understood.  Here is how I see it, as a programmer with 20 years of experience whose only claim to fame was helping make a Macintosh game of some obscurity, working a year as a contractor at hp and working for a Macintosh sales and service outfit for 3 years:<p>1. Hackers know that location is irrelevant, since most of what we do is virtual, but people with money seem to want face time.<p>2. Hackers instinctively recognize other hackers (sort of like how men spot women's potentially dangerous boyfriends when the women don't see it) but financial types don't seem to really get it, although they can recognize each other instinctively as well.<p>3. There is little to no overlap between the social circles of hackers and benefactors.<p>4. Money is valued over talent.  It's extremely difficult to get a meeting with someone like Mark Cuban, but Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds would probably hear you out.  I have forgotten more math and programming techniques than most people will probably ever learn, but it's not something I can really prove, and nobody really cares.  It's often just a hobby to them, or they see me as someone who could help them fix their computer.<p>The simple answer to most of this is that our society values money over talent, so wealthy people have the luxury of stepping back and waiting for opportunities to come to them.<p>So a possible solution to this might be, maybe hackers need to raise their prices and become less expendable.  Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to do this.  Right now most hackers work for pennies on the dollar, trying to scrape together money to become ramen profitable.  The remainder who make it quickly become unaffordable; they won't work for anyone for any price (I'm thinking the Zuckerbergs of the world).<p>Without a solution to this problem, I think hackers will forever be relegated to the same boat as starving artists.  We only hear about the Picassos and Warhols of the world, who frankly don't represent the entire spectrum of the art domain, or even the majority of it.<p>I'm concerned about this because I graduated from college in 1999 and only had maybe a year before the dot bomb hit, and graduates today are stepping into a darwinistic society with a wider separation than ever between the haves and have-nots.  The amount of wasted talent is just staggering.  I look at most of the problems in the world like alternative energy or affordable housing and to me they are non-issues, so easy that a child could solve them.  They pale in comparison to concurrency or microprocessor design, for example.  Yet the people who could solve many of these problems are probably working at their uncle's appliance shop because they value their freedom more than the soul-sucking existence that a major corporation provides.<p>Unfortunately I ran up $50,000 in debt hanging onto my floundering internet business so I would need at least that just to start over.  A $10,000 kudos from Y Combinator wouldn't cut it.  In fact I'm not sure if $100,000 would buy me enough time bring a product to fruition, especially if the extra $50,000 was split with a cofounder.  Bankruptcy and working for the man is probably the smart thing to do, but I've been doing a rough approximation of that for 12 years.  Folding and mind renting would be an endgame scenario.  Believe it or not, I actually quit my job and started a small eBay business fixing broken computers 6 months ago, because I realized too late that bootstrapping/consulting is really the only way that any notable business ever started, bills be damned.  It's actually going well and for the first time in my life, I have hope for the future.<p>So the irony is that after all of this, maybe I am too stubborn to take someone's help.  I was a better hacker when I was idealistic, fresh out of college, than I am today.  The trials changed me.  I spent 10 years learning about entrepreneurship and meeting bills instead of making things.  Watching this scenario play out for another generation of hackers is somber.<p>But Y Combinator is still my favorite site on the web, because it's the closest thing to matching benefactors to hackers that I have seen, but perhaps it could go further.  My theory is that once entrepreneurs have reached a level of affluence where they could help someone else, their reluctance to do so has more to do with how life has changed them than any fundamental rule of business.  I'm hopeful that maybe benefactors are starting to arrive on the scene who came through unscathed enough to pay it forward.
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bmelton
My knee-jerk reaction, which I freely concede deserves to be downmodded to
oblivion:

<http://sugarsugar.com/>

Reading further though, it looks like you're basically hoping for somebody to
give you $100k to 'get started'. For what?

In response to the 'earning' a benefactor, the obvious way to do that is to
get started doing something. Build a prototype, get customers, look for
venture capital. If seed capital isn't enough to get you going, then you need
to do more before you seek investment.

In the meantime, get revenue, and pay off the $50k you owe. You're right that
it's going to be hard to get capital with $50k in debt hanging over your head,
but I can't imagine anybody, short of family, friends, or a good swindle, that
would be willing to give you $50k to pay off your last mistake so that you can
get started on a new one.

No offense meant, but there are so many great ideas waiting to be executed
that can at least get to prototype level with close to zero capital outlay.
Find one, attack it, demolish it.

~~~
buzzzlight
Ya I've come to the same conclusion. I realized after posting this that there
are really two concepts here: 1) earning a benefactor and 2) my life lessons,
which for the most part nobody cares about. So this topic is dead in the water
for now, but I may try again if I find some new angle on it.

Just a little more background for anyone still reading this: I was trying to
pay off my debt for 3 years at $1000/month at my last job, and finally
realized that it couldn't be done and that the rat race was destroying any
chance I had at doing something relevant, which is why I quit.

It turns out that bootstrapping with my repair biz actually provides enough
income to live on at the proverbial 4 hours per week than all of my previous
jobs provided at 40 hours per week, because of self employment leverage.
Instead of earning $15-20 per hour in wages for the $100/hr that the business
charges, I can just keep the whole $100. Without that leverage, there is
little to no hope of getting ahead as an entrepreneur IMHO.

So right now I am working on some apps to steadily replace my repair income so
I can transition to a sustainable income from software, and then I will settle
my debts as a four year consolidation or whatever.

What frustrates me most is the timescales involved in this: 12 years in the
school of hard knocks after the 16 years of mainstream school, and now another
4 or 5 years to pay for the mistakes I've made. I have the potential to make
world-changing concepts like facebook, but odds are, I'll spend half my life
just working as hard as I can to break even, and I see this pattern repeated
over and over in our society.

Something is fundamentally broken, I think we can all sense that, but I'm not
sure I can simply blame rich people who don't do anything cool anymore,
because many of them realize that capital is so difficult to obtain that it
can't be given away lightly.

Your final sentence is true, where "close to zero capital outlay" is in terms
of technology cost, but that's overshadowed by time and cost of living. The
general public overvalues security so I think it's important for hackers to
shut that out to some degree, and find a way to be left alone and do their
thing, because the reward/risk ratio of making something epic is so high that
it outweighs the risk of austerity.

