
Do a startup or travel around the world? - paraschopra
http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/do-a-startup-or-travel-around-the-world.htm
======
jasonkester
Why did you put an "or" into a question about two things that go together so
nicely?

I'd highly recommend starting your own software company. And I'd highly
recommend traveling around the world. I've been doing both for the better part
of 10 years. At the same time.

So my advice is to do a quick search & replace on your question. Switch "or"
for "and", turn it into a statement, then go do it.

~~~
paraschopra
Would love to hear your point of view on this. Have you documented your
experiences anywhere? Blog post or HN comment?

Also, do you think having such a lifestyle can have be called as truly
financially independent?

~~~
jasonkester
A quick spin back through my blog reveals that I've been shamefully lax on
writing about the actual mechanics of running a software company from the
road. I'll need to do something about that.

In the meantime, here's a quick overview of what I've been up to since I
started working from the road:

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/getting-it-
dow...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/getting-it-down-on-
paper.html)

From a financial perspective, it's completely counterintuitive that traveling
is actually a lot cheaper than staying at home. But if you think about it a
minute, it starts to make sense. Imagine you cut your rent and car payment
down to zero (by ditching both car and apartment), as well as all the little
bills that went along with them. Now replace that with the comparatively small
expense of staying in $5/night accommodation, and otherwise living on about
$20/day.

When I was planning my first long trip, taking the $2,000/month "keep life in
the US alive" line-item out of the spreadsheet extended my $10k budget from 2
months to 10 months. Bill a day per month, and yes, you're pretty much set for
life. Of course, you're only set for life if you don't plan on coming home, so
it's probably best to leave a bit in reserve for when you do.

~~~
hbt
I'm guessing those rates only apply for south-east asia and south america and
maybe some rural locations in Europe or eastern europe.

Out of curiosity, are you writing software or managing programmers remotely? I
tried traveling and working as a consultant but dual screens and comfy chairs
don't do well in a suitcase.

~~~
jasonkester
Given the option of a 22 inch monitor in a cube or a 12" thinkpad on a sandy
beach, it's amazing how quickly you can get used to coding with small fonts.

South America is more realistically $25/day all in. SE Asia, as mentioned is
about $20. Indonesia is more like $10. Africa is free.

~~~
kiddo
Can you elaborate on Africa being free?

~~~
jasonkester
Free enough that you don't need to think about it as an expense. I think I
bottomed out at $0.70 per night for a room in Malawi. Double that if you want
to splurge on something nicer.

------
micaelwidell
All you people suggesting "do both" - do you really know what you are talking
about? We may have different definitions of what a startup is.

If by startup, you mean a one man website that is some kind of low-maintenance
subscription service, then yeah sure, go travel the world.

But if you define startup as I do, as a venture-backed, aggressively growing
company employing people, then how the hell are you going to travel the world
while managing that? Please tell me if you have a way, because I would be
genuinely interested :)

~~~
swombat
I entirely agree. You can sustain a travelling lifestyle with web work,
whether a niche, "muse" product or freelancing work, but that's not a startup.
A startup requires a lot of "personal, on site" touch.

I put my thoughts together here too: [http://swombat.com/2010/12/27/startup-
vs-travelling-lifestyl...](http://swombat.com/2010/12/27/startup-vs-
travelling-lifestyle)

~~~
paraschopra
Hey, great blog post! Little nitpick: can you edit my name as 'Paras Chopra'?
I know my name is not exactly as easy as John Smith :)

~~~
swombat
Oops! Will fix as soon as I'm in front of my computer (on my iPhone now). I
hate it when people misspell my name... But to be fair, I did try to find your
full name and couldn't find it on your blog or on twitter, so I had to make a
guess :-)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
How can you misspell Smooth Wombat :-) I always wondered: is that a Bloom
County reference?

~~~
swombat
Nope... don't know what Bloom County is. It's just the last iteration that I
got to when I decided that my previous nick wasn't up to scratch...

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
FYI: It is/was a newspaper comic strip. The relevant quote was "SMET: the
sound of a wet rag hitting a smooth weasel!"

------
simonw
We launched our startup <http://lanyrd.com/> while travelling around the world
- we got ill in Casablanca, Morocco during Ramadan, so we hired an apartment
for three weeks and launched the first version of the site. We've continued to
work on it while travelling around Egypt and South Africa.

Now that the site's starting to take off we're planning on staying in the same
place for a few months (still outside of our home country), but so far we've
found balancing the two less difficult than we had expected.

------
gommm
I think the problem is that it's a question of definition... A lot of people
here who say that it's possible to travel, define a startup as a smaller
"lifestyle" business... If you find a good niche it can bring good money while
taking less hours. See for example patio11 for an example of someone in that
camp, as a result of his experience and way of thinking he wrote
<http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/04/work-smarter-not-harder/>

Now paraschopra's definition of a startup is closer to the traditional VC
backed, big payoff definition. He hopes to make it big, become a leader in the
field of A/B testing and get FU money...

None of those two ways of thinking are bad. It's essentially a question of
risk and reward... The first can lead to financial independence with a nice
recurring revenue (for example letsfreckle.com or one of my customer who earns
20 000$/month profit with his website while delegating all the work) and is
usually less riskier and less stressful.

The second type of company is more of a high risk high reward scenario where
if you get bought or IPO, you get enough FU money to truly have financial
independence...

So, it depends on where you stand on the risk/work reward scale... I don't
want to look back in a few years and feel that I've wasted my life trying to
earn it. So, while I do work long hours, I take breaks, I go on holidays and I
travel and use Wifi connections to do any urgent work that comes up. I don't
expect my business to be the next google, facebook or flickr but if it's
profitable and allow me to support a comfortable lifetime while eventually not
taking too much of my time I'll be happy..

------
elblanco
Travel, then startup. I'm kinda doing it backwards at the moment, but I did a
fair amount of traveling before going to work at this place and it was some of
the most valuable life experience I've ever had.

I think that if I can sum it up in a thought it's this: there is a remarkable
difference between reading and thinking and reasoning about a subject, and
actually experiencing it. Even if I don't use many of the facts I learned
while traveling (i.e. the odds and ends of the Knights of St. John's defense
of Rhodes against the Turks and their subsequent move to Malta), I learned
that it's one thing to read about the layered defense of Rhodes, and another
to actually walk among it.

In other words, I can read and reason all I want about the situation of my
customers, and their problems and solutions to those problems, but until I
actually get about working with them, in their space, on their problem set,
with their data, and within their constraints, I'll never really _get_ their
issues and thus never really provide a 1-1 solution for those issues.

It might seem like a simple concept, one I thought I understood before I set
about traveling far and wide, but I really _grokked_ it much better after
seeing the world and trying to understand.

(oh, and the never ending different national interpretations of historic world
events I find endlessly fascinating and very perspective setting -- very
helpful when understanding how to think like your customers)

------
senko
_You have to work extremely hard (think 100+ hours per week) for several
years_

<http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/04/work-smarter-not-harder/>

~~~
paraschopra
Interestingly I'm mentioned in that blog post :)

But I still don't agree with that premise..

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shin_lao
>Startup requires a lot of sacrifices from you. You have to work extremely
hard (think 100+ hours per week) for several years.

100 + hours of work per week?!

What kind of startup is this? That's 14 hours / day!

~~~
joshfraser
yep, sounds about right.

~~~
shin_lao
You need to hire people. If you can't afford to hire people, then you don't
have a business.

------
drKarl
I'd say travel now, and do a startup later. You need a kind of focus if you do
a startup that you just can't achieve when travelling.

~~~
bobds
Why not?

~~~
drKarl
Some posts here talk about living in a foreign country for some time while
doing a startup. That is different from travelling around the world. It's not
the same spending 2 or three months in the same place than spending just 1 or
2 days in a place and then continue travelling. In the latter assumption, I
don't see it viable.

~~~
bobds
Why do you have to spend only a couple days at each location?

My rule of thumb is I need to stay about a month at each location, so that I
don't feel rushed and it's worth the time to setup a temporary base.

A week-long vacation, trying to cram everything in the shortest amount of
time, is not real "traveling" for me.

------
prateekdayal
Why can't you work and travel? Many cities in the world have good wifi, cafes
and cheap hotels and its possible to work and travel at the same time.

In fact, it can be quite refreshing to meet different kinds of people (not
just more startup people). I did this for three months this year (lived in
Saigon) and I look forward to doing more of this in the coming years

~~~
jasonkester
I think I see a big false assumption in a lot of comments on this thread. That
being, that good wifi only exists in cities.

That's probably true in the US, and to a lesser extent Europe, but in places
like Southeast Asia, Central & South America, etc., the internet is
_everywhere_. As in, pick the most remote beach you can find, and so long as
there is a little grass hut to sell you beer, there will also be an internet
cafe.

The cool part is that the more off the beaten track you go, the cheaper things
get. Look in the jungle behind that beer-selling, wifi-having, hammock-laden
beach bar and you'l find rows of little bungalows that you can rent for $200
per _month_.

Bootstrap your startup on a beach like that and suddenly "ramen profitable"
becomes "paradise profitable", and you'll discover that you can live there
indefinitely on just a few dozen new paid accounts per month. Or, if you
prefer, do one day's worth of billable work per month to keep you living like
a king.

Don't forget to send us a postcard.

~~~
mdp
I'm typing this from my iPhone in a bar in Siem Reap, Cambodia, so forgive my
brevity and spelling.

Wifi might be prevalent in most places but quality and reliability will always
be am issue. I've found it to be ubiquitous is SE Asia, however I've had days
where slowness could cause even SSH to bog down to a few characters a minute.

Bigger issue, do you mean travel or live in a foreign country? Because yes,
you can very easily find a cheap country with good internet, but traveling
itself can be a full time job when you're only spending a week at a time in
one place.

If it were me, I'd just travel, and do the startup later.

~~~
toumhi
Hey, I'm thinking about stopping by in Siem Reap when I set off to southeast
asia (and start working on my project) in a few months. Do you have some tips
about good places to stop by in southeast asia?(by that i mean, interesting
places that are also work-friendly) Can I reach you somewhere (no contact on
your HN profile)?

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jasonlbaptiste
Seriously, it can easily become an "and" statement right there. In the past 2
months, I've been in almost every major US city and that's without a huge
sales/marketing push. If you build the culture and company right you can
literally go anywhere for a good purpose:

a) telecommuting employees

b) visiting customers

c) potential recruiting

d) valuable conferences

Startups are a crazy crazy adventure.

------
elvirs
I would say if your startup is not in one of the current 'hot' spaces like
private shopping, group buying, etc. and can wait then definitely travel
around the world, but travel with a entrepreneur perspective, dont just spend
your money on the beaches drinking expensive cocktails :) travel the
countries, watch their economy, local business models. I thinks most of the
travel destinations are current emerging economies. Think about how technology
can facilitate the developments in those markets. Face the realities. Talk to
people from the industry your startup is aiming at in those countries. Note
everything, think about if your idea is applicable in those markets. How will
you expand if you decide to go global. Think big. After travel I think you
will have a more solid and healthier business idea with global perspective.

------
sashthebash
In a couple of weeks I will launch <http://storageroomapp.com> and a little
later move to Buenos Aires for a couple of months and work from there.

This of course has disadvantages, I cannot speak to local customers in person,
but on the other hand living is much cheaper and more interesting than at the
current place I call home.

I wouldn't want to manage a startup while traveling from place to place, but I
think it should be no problem to just work from somewhere else and do weekend
trips. This is exciting enough for me and I think I can get to know the world
better with a couple of short term stays than traveling non-stop.

If I feel I need to go home to make progress, I go home, otherwise I will
continue to live in different places all around the world.

------
rdl
I've done some startups in interesting places (Anguilla, Sealand, Iraq), and
decided to take 6 months to travel around the world diving before going full
time on my new startup (in Palo Alto). I figure once I have employees,
customers, etc., it will be several years before I can go on a stress-free
vacation.

While it's possible to travel and do certain kinds of "lifestyle" startup, I
think traveling around the world, or even extensive personal trips, are
incompatible with a high-intensity venture funded startup. It's just not fair
to the other team members who depend on you, your investors, etc. I can see
taking 4 weeks a year off (spread out a bit) as long as you stay reachable,
but that's about the limit.

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maxklein
Traveling around the world solo while running a business is not going to work
out. If you travel in a group, it's possible.

~~~
dmix
Can you expand on why this is so?

~~~
maxklein
You will be lonely, and making new friends takes a lot of time away from your
work, and you'll not know where to get cheap stuff or where to go and all
that. If you just go to one place, it's doable, but travelling around the
world alone and trying to bootstrap something sounds near impossible.

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setori88
do both, learn the needs of the people, find an interesting problem to solve,
then find an interesting city where you can teach English and earn a steady
income to finance your project.

------
joshfraser
I started to comment before deciding to turn it into a blog post instead:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2042452>

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jkaljundi
Whatever you do, enjoy every minute and day of doing it. Don't make it feel
like a sacrifice, waiting for that magical future to happen. Worst thing you
could do is run a startup and feel bad about it or that you are missing out on
something. Happiness is in the here, in the now.

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charlesju
I swear someone really famous wrote a book on this...

~~~
chadp
haha. . does it start with a 4 by any chance ;)

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Guatejon
I don't really see the point of doing a start up to fund some vague future
travel. If you want to travel go travel.

------
robterrell
If you have to ask, travel.

