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I started working full time at 15 to keep the roof over our families head after my mothers cancer diagnosis. Until the early death of both my parents I had an a

I started working full time at 15 to keep the roof over our families head after my mothers cancer diagnosis. Until the early death of both my parents I had an anti-safety net, I can vouch that people underestimate the soul crushing nature of real poverty. My own congenital heart defects cost me many surgeries, procedures and money. Thank goodness for medicaid for children, I would probably be dead without it. I have fought without connections or degree to hit 1% in earnings for my age bracket in my late 20s, but the lack of wealth, the lack of security means developing ideas requiring runway and capital is nearly impossible. Struggling and succeeding through the financial equivalent of having you head held underwater by life is very very different than even a lower middle class upbringing. Thank goodness software development exists, it has the closest thing to effectively 0 signaling/gatekeeping to a very good income. I'd still kill for a couple years of runway and the money to hire two or three devs.

gen220 6y ago
Speaking as someone with a not dissimilar background to yourself, and happening to have friends in similar circumstances. You might want to consider what it is, exactly, that you want out of your career. You already are in a position to give your children a 10x better life, if that’s something that drives you (this is a common denominator for a lot of people). The stress of chasing the 100x and the fear of the 0x, without connections and an infinite runway, might make you a 10x worse partner, parent, friend, etc. and you end up losing the things you were trying to secure. Again I don’t know you or what drives you, but just wanted to share this idea in case you hadn’t considered it before. Escaping poverty into 1% of income is a huge accomplishment that can never be diminished, from my humble armchair you don’t need to prove anything more to people. You’ve made it.
- fellowniusmonk 6y ago
  The heart defect thing definitely puts me in a weird psychological bucket when it comes to underlying drive/motivation. I've only met one adult that had similar feelings/views and they had childhood multiple recurrence leukemia. I have some concepts that I want to try to bring into the world. One is a first principles notes/app platform I've been using for personal use that upends how apps and data relate. The goal is to reduce context switching costs to nearly 0 and reduce cognitive overhead for 80% of "life things". One is a social software approach to ending involuntary homelessness that is invasive enough that it needs tons of homelessness education for the general public and buy in from existing homelessness resources. I want to upend charitable giving by combatting the learned helplessness society inculcates from childhood.. because we perceive it as an intractable problem. Another is a platform for developers to "never" interview again and for high signal employed developers to capture 50/60% of profits going towards recruiters (piggy backing off my work with speaking talent and how speaker bureaus work.) I'd like to take an honest, well funded stab at those three things before I die, the notes app is the first on the docket because it's the easiest and I'm working my way there via bootstrapping atm because I'm weak at fundraising. Succeed or fail I want to birth these things into the world you know? Do my damndest before I die, that's really it.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I definitely relate to wanting to birth projects like this into the world! The ending-involuntary-homelessness one sounds particularly interesting to me, personally. I'd love to hear more about it. A follow-up question, is there a reason you want the stab to be well-funded? As opposed to a FOSS, nominal-fee-for-hosting-bootstrap? From my limited perspective, the worlds' most successful technologies, in terms of (value created) - (costs incurred for each impacted party) tends to follow the FOSS/open model. Again, limited perspective, but having observed some "well-funded" things from the inside: being well-funded comes with the cost of an incessant demand for outsized and near-term returns. This demand is, quite frequently, at-odds with net value creation. In fact, it urges your project to become re-distributive: sucking money from bottom-to-top, either directly from the global poor, or indirectly, through government subsidies funded by taxes that are paid by those who need an income to survive (86% of federal revenue comes from individual income tax + payroll taxes, in the US in 2019. 7% from corporations. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sources-revenue-federal-government https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...). The redistribution passes through you, the founder, near the top, which is nice for you because you get to keep some of it, but it doesn't change the net value equation. All this to say, if your goal is to create real, enduring value, you might be on the right path already, today!
    - fellowniusmonk 6y ago
      I agree with what you are saying, another thought I have, which could be incorrect, is that there is a reason that so many second startup attempts by founders are successful. I think it has to do with general experience and many other things but one of the big ones is that a first startup that does "modestly" well or has a decent exit can setup a founder in a place where they have more breathing room financially for the next, a 20k chunk of cash gives a lot of breathing room for savings/disaster that takes stress off. I almost had it with my talent booking agency (which was bootstrapped over nearly 4 years), and then the money we were making went to a co-founders head and he blew up the company after developing a coke/sex addiction that unhinged his mental health, he couldn't handle the money and the access it gave him and that was at ~50k mrr.... it was like a whole world opened briefly opened up for me before getting crushed. For me personally I experienced that having an income source not dependent on personal labor has a very strong benefit for being able to focus on execution and setting the company up strategically, it also let me hire devs who I trusted and had a compounding effect on speed of development. I like to think I am a good dev, but I'm not as good as 3-4 good devs, I can't afford that hiring in my current state. For the homelessness thing in particular, well funded also means well connected, it means you have buy in and backers and vested people going to bat for you. It means I don't have to do all the dev on my own. That's my current thinking at least.

gen220 6y ago

Speaking as someone with a not dissimilar background to yourself, and happening to have friends in similar circumstances. You might want to consider what it is, exactly, that you want out of your career. You already are in a position to give your children a 10x better life, if that’s something that drives you (this is a common denominator for a lot of people). The stress of chasing the 100x and the fear of the 0x, without connections and an infinite runway, might make you a 10x worse partner, parent, friend, etc. and you end up losing the things you were trying to secure. Again I don’t know you or what drives you, but just wanted to share this idea in case you hadn’t considered it before. Escaping poverty into 1% of income is a huge accomplishment that can never be diminished, from my humble armchair you don’t need to prove anything more to people. You’ve made it.

fellowniusmonk 6y ago
The heart defect thing definitely puts me in a weird psychological bucket when it comes to underlying drive/motivation. I've only met one adult that had similar feelings/views and they had childhood multiple recurrence leukemia. I have some concepts that I want to try to bring into the world. One is a first principles notes/app platform I've been using for personal use that upends how apps and data relate. The goal is to reduce context switching costs to nearly 0 and reduce cognitive overhead for 80% of "life things". One is a social software approach to ending involuntary homelessness that is invasive enough that it needs tons of homelessness education for the general public and buy in from existing homelessness resources. I want to upend charitable giving by combatting the learned helplessness society inculcates from childhood.. because we perceive it as an intractable problem. Another is a platform for developers to "never" interview again and for high signal employed developers to capture 50/60% of profits going towards recruiters (piggy backing off my work with speaking talent and how speaker bureaus work.) I'd like to take an honest, well funded stab at those three things before I die, the notes app is the first on the docket because it's the easiest and I'm working my way there via bootstrapping atm because I'm weak at fundraising. Succeed or fail I want to birth these things into the world you know? Do my damndest before I die, that's really it.
- gen220 6y ago
  I definitely relate to wanting to birth projects like this into the world! The ending-involuntary-homelessness one sounds particularly interesting to me, personally. I'd love to hear more about it. A follow-up question, is there a reason you want the stab to be well-funded? As opposed to a FOSS, nominal-fee-for-hosting-bootstrap? From my limited perspective, the worlds' most successful technologies, in terms of (value created) - (costs incurred for each impacted party) tends to follow the FOSS/open model. Again, limited perspective, but having observed some "well-funded" things from the inside: being well-funded comes with the cost of an incessant demand for outsized and near-term returns. This demand is, quite frequently, at-odds with net value creation. In fact, it urges your project to become re-distributive: sucking money from bottom-to-top, either directly from the global poor, or indirectly, through government subsidies funded by taxes that are paid by those who need an income to survive (86% of federal revenue comes from individual income tax + payroll taxes, in the US in 2019. 7% from corporations. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sources-revenue-federal-government https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...). The redistribution passes through you, the founder, near the top, which is nice for you because you get to keep some of it, but it doesn't change the net value equation. All this to say, if your goal is to create real, enduring value, you might be on the right path already, today!
  - fellowniusmonk 6y ago
    I agree with what you are saying, another thought I have, which could be incorrect, is that there is a reason that so many second startup attempts by founders are successful. I think it has to do with general experience and many other things but one of the big ones is that a first startup that does "modestly" well or has a decent exit can setup a founder in a place where they have more breathing room financially for the next, a 20k chunk of cash gives a lot of breathing room for savings/disaster that takes stress off. I almost had it with my talent booking agency (which was bootstrapped over nearly 4 years), and then the money we were making went to a co-founders head and he blew up the company after developing a coke/sex addiction that unhinged his mental health, he couldn't handle the money and the access it gave him and that was at ~50k mrr.... it was like a whole world opened briefly opened up for me before getting crushed. For me personally I experienced that having an income source not dependent on personal labor has a very strong benefit for being able to focus on execution and setting the company up strategically, it also let me hire devs who I trusted and had a compounding effect on speed of development. I like to think I am a good dev, but I'm not as good as 3-4 good devs, I can't afford that hiring in my current state. For the homelessness thing in particular, well funded also means well connected, it means you have buy in and backers and vested people going to bat for you. It means I don't have to do all the dev on my own. That's my current thinking at least.