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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

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.
908B64B197 6y ago
> 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.) That's interesting. You mean to get rid of "Coding Interviews?"
- fellowniusmonk 6y ago
  Get rid of coding interviews for devs not already employed is one aspect. Lead gen for filling a companies open roles either 1. Doesn't get engagement from the employed or 2. Extracts value from the already employed with little career return. It distracts from core competency. Software engineers path to self monetization is basically be a dev and get paid for labor or start an agency (which sucks and changes what your work actually is), but there is a third path that is pretty well trod that most people haven't experienced (and no devs really), that lets dev write code like they love and still reap most of the profit from placement without an active time sink. It's basically bringing what Zig Zigler originally modeled with his company and current speaker bureaus do for "hot" talent to the developer world.

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.

908B64B197 6y ago

> 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.) That's interesting. You mean to get rid of "Coding Interviews?"

fellowniusmonk 6y ago
Get rid of coding interviews for devs not already employed is one aspect. Lead gen for filling a companies open roles either 1. Doesn't get engagement from the employed or 2. Extracts value from the already employed with little career return. It distracts from core competency. Software engineers path to self monetization is basically be a dev and get paid for labor or start an agency (which sucks and changes what your work actually is), but there is a third path that is pretty well trod that most people haven't experienced (and no devs really), that lets dev write code like they love and still reap most of the profit from placement without an active time sink. It's basically bringing what Zig Zigler originally modeled with his company and current speaker bureaus do for "hot" talent to the developer world.