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How long did your “non-funded” friends put into it before it could pay their own expenses? Unless it was really fast, it’s probably more accurate to call it sel

by boulos 9y ago

How long did your “non-funded” friends put into it before it could pay their own expenses? Unless it was really fast, it’s probably more accurate to call it self-funded or bootstrapped and then compare numbers. I’m not disagreeing that bootstrapping can often be the better path, but it’s also not credibly available to everyone. What percentage of folks can work for a year without pay? In my experience it’s fairly “U-shaped”: people just out of school (minimal expenses) and people who don’t need money anymore. People in the middle rarely are up for burning through their savings for an idea.

ericd 9y ago
Self funding amounts and seed funding amounts are generally at least an order of magnitude different, sometimes two. It doesn't really make sense to draw an equivalency between them. For example, I started my company with 20k of savings. It's not uncommon for seed rounds to be in the 2M and up range now.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  I was going to say something like that. There is a tendancy around HN to equate "startup" with: Me, my laptop, and a couple of AWS instances at $0.70/hr. On the other hand, if "default alive" means paying a pattern shop for a master pattern and buying 1000 aluminum castings to fill in 3% of your BOM cost, most folks need outside money.
john_moscow 9y ago
It depends how good are you at planning your time/money and what your goals in life are. People in tech tend to make ~2x the median wage, so if you set a goal of scaling down your lifestyle to save enough cash for a personal safety net, it's totally doable. It also doesn't have to be that - you can do consulting in parallel, or find a part-time remote job or whatever. It's just a totally orthogonal skill set to fundraising. If you're charismatic and can sound confident talking about trendy topics, sooner or later you'll find someone willing to write you a check even if you are crap at planning and delivering.

by boulos 9y ago

ericd 9y ago

Self funding amounts and seed funding amounts are generally at least an order of magnitude different, sometimes two. It doesn't really make sense to draw an equivalency between them. For example, I started my company with 20k of savings. It's not uncommon for seed rounds to be in the 2M and up range now.

dbcurtis 9y ago
I was going to say something like that. There is a tendancy around HN to equate "startup" with: Me, my laptop, and a couple of AWS instances at $0.70/hr. On the other hand, if "default alive" means paying a pattern shop for a master pattern and buying 1000 aluminum castings to fill in 3% of your BOM cost, most folks need outside money.

john_moscow 9y ago

It depends how good are you at planning your time/money and what your goals in life are. People in tech tend to make ~2x the median wage, so if you set a goal of scaling down your lifestyle to save enough cash for a personal safety net, it's totally doable. It also doesn't have to be that - you can do consulting in parallel, or find a part-time remote job or whatever. It's just a totally orthogonal skill set to fundraising. If you're charismatic and can sound confident talking about trendy topics, sooner or later you'll find someone willing to write you a check even if you are crap at planning and delivering.