

Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business? - stenmorten

What is is that compels you to start a business of your own? Dreams of freedom? Money? Success? Autonomy? What is the key driver? I mean, you know there are a lot of hurdles and endless hours of work, and no guarantee of succeeding, so why do you feel you still feel you <i>have</i> to do it?
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biscarch
It's in my bones.

I'll attempt to clarify. I started a business because I had experiences
through school that made me think hard about why I was doing what I was doing
at all times. Things like endless piles of homework were forced upon me by
authority figures I didn't respect, even though I had already mastered the
material.

I have this unending urge to learn more; All the time. I started programming
with self-taught ActionScript. Then JavaScript/html/css. I spend a lot of time
attempting to master my mind (Thinking in different ways/languages) and this
has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.

Show me a company that is receptive to using those languages in production and
has a distributed nature. A company that allows it's employees to choose
projects and throw their weight behind them. With as few managers as humanly
possible. Where collaboration is collaboration and not forced.

The closest I've seen to this mindset is probably Basho. Maybe Valve, but I've
never talked to anyone at Valve.

I apologize if I'm not clear or not fully explained. The answer to why my life
is forcefully thrust in this direction would require a blog post of massive
length that I am not ready to write. An interesting note is that consulting is
likely a side effect of not being able to find anywhere I wanted to work.

~~~
stenmorten
That's quite an interesting take. So do you make your living doing consulting,
or do you create products?

~~~
biscarch
I make my living consulting. I took a couple months off to try and build a
product with a friend, but it didn't work out for non-product reasons, so I
moved to SF and started looking for new contracts a couple weeks ago.

------
csixty4
I want the chance to do things right. So I guess "autonomy", but it's more
than that. Dare I call it "revenge"?

My career started with six years in a legacy development ghetto. I started
looking for work in the tail end of the dot-com crash, and the only thing I
found after months of searching was a position doing Pick database
development. It was a mistake to take that job, but I really wanted to get out
of my parents' house. Pick developers are an interesting breed, like a cross
between mainframe die-hards and ravenous DBAs. And here I was, using things
like "functions" and "templates" in my code like some young thing who just
wants to jump on the latest trends.

One shop had an middleware app that put a web-based GUI on top of the Pick
database. I got called into my boss's office and told to stop putting &nbsp;
in my pages because it confused the other developers. At another job, the
sysadmin refused to install risky open source things like CURL or wget on the
server, and Pick had sockets by then but no HTTP library, so had to write my
own HTTP client in PickBASIC so we could talk to a partner's API. It was like
being stuck in the 60s, only without the drugs. I was writing green-screen
apps...in 2005!

Anyway, the point of all this is that my resume was tainted at that point. I
could quote Stroustrup with my eyes closed, but nobody would bring me in for
an interview for anything other than Pick because that's all my "professional
experience" entailed. That changed when I put $1000 of my own money on the
line and got Java certified.

My first Java job quickly morphed into a PHP job, and now I've been in that
world for seven years. There's lots of cowboy coders slinging PHP, you know.
Don't know if anyone's ever pointed that out on HN at all. Version control,
classes, prepared queries, frameworks...I've been fighting uphill battles over
those for years. Yes, prepared queries were controversial because they're
"slow"!

Now that my wife is out of school, I finally have the chance to go & do things
my way. I'm giving freelancing a try. I set up my own Git server the other
day. I do commits every time I'm done implementing a feature, and it's so damn
satisfying -- almost orgasmic after nagging my co-workers for years. I develop
on my laptop, not on the production server. I write clean, well-documented
code. I use templates to keep HTML out of my code. I'm branching out into Ruby
on Rails for a side project and probably some of my client work.

It's stressful as hell, but at least I'm making things I can be proud of, and
the product of my work reflects well on me as a developer. I'm actually
enjoying programming again.

------
stenmorten
Somebody outside of this forum told me the question was pointless: go do
something that makes you money instead, he said.

So my answer was something like this:

On the contrary. The answer to this question will make me money. Thus far, I
have made $100,000 online, and I am one of those people who "have to" do it,
and I know what my motivation is.

Now I am wondering what yours is.

Why do I wonder?

Because I am making a product that targets you, obviously. So this is basic
research

...

So there you have it, I guess that was a "full disclosure" that should have
been included in the first question.

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abr0414
I'm driven the desire to be the best at what I do. I get this drive from my
dad, who owned a plumbing company. He always told me that he obviously didn't
originate the concept of plumbing, so he can't take pride in inventing it, but
he took a lot of pride in being the best.

The service that I'm offering is only a tiny bit unique but I take pride in my
execution. I don't think that I could feel this level of satisfaction while
working for a boss.

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OafTobark
I love it. I do it over going out with friends, going to the movies, or just
about anything else you can name. And I have. But its not so much the business
part as it is inventing and doing something. Business is just the vehicle to
get things done and part of it.

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rauar
1\. Fun (business development)

2\. Fun (technology)

3\. Self determination

4\. Not having to deal with unmotivated employees and their low quality
results

~~~
stenmorten
Fun. I like that a lot :)

In addition to that, I love being a "creator" -- when I do programming and
writing (no matter if I'm creating the product or the sales material) --
there's a substantial difference between "creating what I've thought up" and
"creating what somebody else thought up". Having creative powers, I would
rather make my own "dreams" come true, than somebody elses.

I guess what also drives me is "time freedom" -- that I can choose to work
less, and spend more time with my kids, if I want to.

So for me, autonomy, freedom, creativity are at least some keywords.

------
dear
I don't want to work for a boss. I want to control my own destiny.

~~~
sharemywin
I read something in rich dad poor dad that made sense to me. If you owna
company you can work on the things you want or are good at and outsource the
parts that you don't

