Ask HN: How do you support yourself while validating a technology? - hsikka
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rdegges
I've done a bit of this myself. You really have 4 primary options.

1\. Save enough money so that you can live off your investments in a minimal
way while working on your project. How od you do this? Calculate your yearly
spend and multiple it by 25. Need 100k per year to survive? That means you
need 2.5 million invested in index funds in order to "retire" and be able to
withdraw 100k/yr from your portfolio to use.

2\. Save enough money to cover your expenses for a set amount of time. Think
you need a year to prove that your tech works? Save up enough money to cover
your living expenses for a year.

3\. Raise funding. If you can convince a VC that your idea has a probably
chance of success, there are VCs willing to take risks on it. Getting VC
funding will allow you to pay yourself a very small amount of money to hold
you over while you build and experiment with your tech.

4\. Survive with the help from a family member/spouse. Move in with your
parents for free rent/food, or live off your spouse's income for a while as
you experiment.

These are the primary options most of us have.

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icedchai
Depending on what is actually meant by "validating a technology", you could
also take a more reasonable approach: do it part time and keep a regular job.

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technobabble
By support yourself do you mean economically? For endeavors like this

1\. Save beforehand: Save six months of living expenses. Estimate cost of
technology validation, and multiply that by three

2\. There's no same in working part-time as a barrista or waiter/waitress.

~~~
hsikka
Yeah I meant economically, I’m working on a pretty cool ML architecture that
makes use of Modular Neural Nets with adaptive Topology, but I don’t see a
clear commercial application for them yet, so i was wondering how I should go
about surviving while working on it. Your advice is excellent, thank you

