

Why you shouldn't start a startup - lolizbak
http://laurentk.posterous.com/beating-startups-dead-horse

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rgarcia
Kind of a linkbait title since less than half of the presentation is caveats
and the remainder is advice for starting a startup. Nevertheless I thought it
was well done--definitely lays out the risks very nicely.

One thing I'd like to hear more about are people who took "secure" jobs for a
period of time out of college and then jumped ship for a startup once they had
some money saved up. I feel like most people coming out of college are very
risk averse, so they'd rather get a guaranteed salary over a startup with
uncertain prospects.

~~~
evilduck
If you took on student loans (incredibly common), you have 6 months before the
collectors come calling and survival then requires an additional $100-$1000
income per month. Failure to pay or having insubstantial means to pay can
result in substantially larger amounts of interest to repay, substantially
longer repayment periods or garnished wages. Since there's no way to escape
repayment a debt-encumbered individual has more at risk than a debt-free peer.
I think the pervasiveness of student loans and the exploding cost of higher
education is dividing equally risk-tolerant people into two paths.

I'm on the "secure" path at the moment to pay off student loans between my
wife and I, and we just had a child. My obligations are more than paid for and
things are stable, which is good because my family life is happy and fun and I
value that highly, but it means that my risky endeavors have to be on-the-side
and bootstrapped because doing stuff that's likely to fail now puts 3 people
at risk instead of 1. I don't particularly enjoy the jobs I've had, and that
gives me motivation to do things for myself.

~~~
nkassis
I know how you feel man, almost the same situation (no kid yet). My wife is
finishing her Masters, I figure once she's done with that and has a secure
job, it might be time for me to try something. It's risky but right now we
make it with one salary. We've talked about it and she currently says that
since I helped her with her dream she can help with mine. I think it's a fair
trade.

But I'd be stupid enough to go for it now. They can come after me for all I've
got and get pretty much nothing. In the end if you don't make any income, they
have nothing to garnish. Naive view of things for sure.

~~~
matt_s
Technically (per Suze Orman) the two things declaring bankruptcy will not
clear are Student Loan debt and debt determined by Criminal/Civil courts, in
the USA.

I found it shocking that those two debt types are on the same level. The
student loan one is probably limited to Federal/State funded loans. I imagine
if you pay your College bill with a MasterCard then you could get around this.

~~~
WildUtah
Student loans, child support/alimony, tax debts, criminal penalties, civil
penalties, and tax witholding for other people will all follow you even past
bankruptcy.

Pretty much all you can get rid of is unsecured consumer debt. A modern
bankruptcy is just a way to get out from under your credit cards (or health
care debts).

------
wccrawford
I think the 'peanuts' slide is an especially good point. Many people here seem
to think that a startup is a fast-track to success, but it's not fast at all.
It's a lot of work and sacrifice for years.

Don't get me wrong... That time has some valuable lessons that will help you
constantly for the rest of your life. But it's not easy. If you go into it
with your eyes open, you shouldn't regret it.

~~~
localhost3000
toughest part is dealing with sig. other who'd really like to have a nice meal
every once in awhile and wonders aloud when she learns of your friends/peers
who make six figures in "real jobs"... "Maybe you should go to law school?"
<\-- have you heard that one? _cringe_

~~~
patrickod
maybe that's another reason that the mean age for founders is quite low. I
mean if you're older and have dependents it's not the best time to throw your
salary out the window and go it alone.

~~~
zeemonkee
The mean age for founders in the US is 39:

[http://blog.checkadvantage.com/2011/02/09/baby-boomers-
job-m...](http://blog.checkadvantage.com/2011/02/09/baby-boomers-job-market/)

~~~
patrickod
I think the mean age for YC founders is ~26 from what I gather.

~~~
nkassis
That's because I don't think older entrepreneur usually would go for a YC like
program. A lot of them have worked long enough to have savings to bootstrap
and connections. At least that's my hypothesis.

~~~
patrickod
That may be so. I see the real value of YC as being mentorship from the team
and the connections that follow rather than just funding and a stamp of
approval for connections. Then again I haven't been in the business as long as
most older entrepreneurs so I'll withhold judgement.

~~~
modoc
There's a value there for sure, but for folks like me (30's, savings, used to
a large salary, own a home, married, etc...) relocating and everything else
required may not be worth the trade off.

------
patrickod
This rings true with the TEDx video posted last week about what skateboarding
can teach us about learning methods.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHfo17ikSpY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHfo17ikSpY&feature=player_embedded)
We learn from mistakes, so failure is to be as embraced as success. The
startup community should be just the same. Take the lessons you learn and try
again and again.

~~~
sgrove
The goal should be to have frequent, small failures that you have enough time
to learn from, rather than a few catastrophic failures which end your startup
and saddle you with baggage afterwards.

Failure is a part of success, but only when taken in the right quantities.

------
lolizbak
Slides from a presentation I gave last week at HEC - would love some feedback
if I reuse. Thanks!

~~~
jasonkester
How about writing something up to give a bit of context to those slides. I
clicked through 20 or so of them and couldn't find anything resembling a
narrative.

~~~
lolizbak
i thought they were self explanatory, but you're right - thx !

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sebastianconcpt
Not to mention how freaking harder is to startup it from South America.

Observation: the topic of "think mobile and platforms" yes, but they're a plus
(not the core of the thing.) Besides, relying too much in platforms are a bad
idea (adds to the equation some risks parameters that are out of your
control.)

The best is to start with the epicenter and iterate often keeping happy the
people that will leverage you to ramen profitable.

Lastly, the epicenter should be human centered.

------
siiily
There are 63 slides, the 60th slide ends with: sell anything, learn to code
the 61th slide contains a photo of the author the 62th slide contains the
word: Questions?

~~~
andreadallera
_Ruby on Rails is easy, if you're a business guy learn to code and save
yourself some money & equity_

Okay, now I know I don't want to use this guy's products...

~~~
lolizbak
Comon', you know what i mean :) I'm not saying i have an "engineer-level", but
i'm good enough to throw an MVP together. Try out <http://fastfwdme.com>, it
works fine for a small project I developed. Of course there are years of
training to be a good hacker, but my point is that you can achieve a
sufficient level to test ideas out yourself.

~~~
andreadallera
Nice attitude... but just the sentence "throw an MVP together" makes me cringe
:) do yourself a favour and find yourself a good dev before you realize your
code doesn't actually scale...

~~~
localhost3000
who would you rather work with, a "biz guy" who has built a prototype that
can't scale or a "biz guy" who has been talking about an idea for 3 months but
doing nothing?

~~~
viandante
I would rather not work with any developer who underestimates business guys at
this level.

Now, if you want to make the next "To Do" app, a dev can be fine, but if you
want to do something useful, you will need a biz guy.

I mean, this thinking from the dev side is exactly why companies today are
full of crappy products (SAP, Windows, etc.).

~~~
khafra
Read the comment you replied to again; you misinterpreted it as attacking "biz
guys," but it's actually commending those willing to get their hands dirty.

~~~
viandante
It is implied. It is kind of the norm to think of business people as useless
around here.

My point is that this is stupid, really stupid. There are tons of problems in
the business world and they are tackled with old software from the '90
(Windows, Office, SAP, etc.). Web technologies have not even touched the
corporate world.

Devs will never get the potential behind business problems because they hardly
know about them. They need business people, they really do. And the business
world needs them, because things are getting crazy, mining data with Excel...

------
dporan
"You're a visionary product guy? You'll spend your time chasing money,
customers, users, employees, facing No's."

How true!

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zem
it sounds like the talk would have been good, but i learnt nothing whatsoever
from the slides (possibly because i've been through the startup experience,
albeit as an employee, but it just seemed like the usual collection of
platitudes)

~~~
lolizbak
thus the title: beating a dead horse :)

the talk was for last year + mba students at HEC, and most of them never
started / worked at a startup.

~~~
zem
ah, okay, missed that bit :)

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kristofferR
Slightly off-topic, but how did you make the SecretPoke video?
<http://vimeo.com/19517022>

Did you make it yourself or was it done by someone else?

~~~
lolizbak
There are a few services online where you can download after effect source
files, and then edit. we used videohive, but don't tell anyone :)

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yannski
Nice slides! Thanks for spreading the word about Rails at HEC ;-)

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storm_kid
I think it is a good article, nowdays EVERYBODY is triying to go rich just
like that, mostly because of"The social network" movie, we need to understand
that this succes cases are rare BUT we need to learn from them, this guys made
something different that the rest and place them on the top. Follow me on
twitter: @storm_kid

~~~
hzay
What's wrong with trying to go rich like that, even if it is because of the
movie?

