

Joel Spolsky on exactly how much money it took to start Fog Creek - gregory
http://www.venturevoice.com/2008/04/joel_spolskys_first_time_raisi.html

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mixmax
Interesting to note how to Joel Spolsky says that $50.000 is "a very small
amount of money". Where I'm from that amount would be fairly high for an angel
investor.

Maybe it's time to move...

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aston
That sort of thing scales with cost-of-living. Joel was making NYC money at
the time of founding Fog Creek. $50k in South Carolina takes you halfway to a
decent house. In NYC, a salary that big is barely enough to pay for an
apartment in Manhattan for a year.

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mixmax
This makes it even worse - I'm from Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is the
6'th most expensive city in the world to live in, just behind Hong Kong.

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mhartl
It took $50,000 plus tremendous distribution from his widely read "Joel on
Software" articles. Don't underestimate that second part.

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aston
Now you're talking about how he made that money work for his company. Might as
well throw in the whole "don't pay myself or my co-founder," "work odd
consulting jobs to get more cash," and "work out of my grandmother's old
apartment," among various other tricks of the bootstrapper's trade.

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pchristensen
Joel did corporate work (MSFT, Juno) for 10 years, had MSFT stock from the
early 90s, etc. If you did corporate work for the entire decade of the 90s,
were single, and owned hot stock, and still couldn't have $50K, then I
question whether you have enough financial discipline to run a company.

Big difference from fresh college grads or undergrads.

