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If most people followed that advice, they would stay home in their parent's basement and rot away there until they died. Most people aren't even exposed to a si

If most people followed that advice, they would stay home in their parent's basement and rot away there until they died. Most people aren't even exposed to a single good idea/opportunity in their lives. I'm 33, I've been coding since I was 14. It only happened once in my life that someone offered me to co-found a company but they had no funding, no connections and the idea sucked. I didn't join and the project failed. If I get any semi-decent opportunity at all, I take it because otherwise I will have to wait 10 years for the next mediocre opportunity to come up. Trying to find opportunities is also not viable. At one point, I reached out to some VCs and attended some events which I knew they would also attend; it almost got to the point of stalking them... Still couldn't even raise $20K from them... All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time. The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... They would have been a waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe; but in my world, if the opportunity is even moderately good, someone else with a few million $ in funding is already doing it and Google will send every single user to their platform and won't send a single user to my platform.

Tepix 4y ago
Why don't you take the initiative and ask others to be co-founders?
- jongjong 4y ago
  I did but as a tech guy, non-technical CEOs with connections don't like a tech guy who takes the innitiative. They like to be the one with the vision/idea. Maybe I should just offer myself up as raw talent though and ignore my own ideas. I haven't tried that yet.
  - csujoy 4y ago
    No need to depend on non-tech CEOs in early days if you can speak with (prospective) customers yourself. Just reach out to a few in your network and show them an initial prototype
tapland 4y ago
'Success is having good ideas to say no to'
- all2 4y ago
  I took the title of this to be "saying no to my own good ideas". :D That assumes my ideas are any good! Edit for spelling.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  In my experience, creative work tends to produce ideas. Even without the inevitable new ideas, I probably have a year or two's unrealized ideas littered around on post-it notes. Dunno if that is a measure of success as it is a measure of actually doing something interesting.
mkl95 4y ago
> The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... Waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe I agree... one of my relatives hates programming and used to tell me learning to code was a waste of time. Now I get a bigger check at the end of the month despite the fact he's an overworked doctor, and I'm sitting on my arse at home building some CRUD. Pick carefully who you listen to.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- doubled112 4y ago
  I'm in my thirties and my mother still gives me a hard time about the hours I "waste" on a computer, both now and as a kid. Sure mom, but I make more than you and dad ever did doing less, and it's feeding your grandchildren. What do you want from me?
  - mastersummoner 4y ago
    What does she think you should be doing instead?
    - doubled112 4y ago
      The discussion usually starts with "I wish you'd have gotten good money and done..." and ends in whatever career is better in her mind that day. It's usually a trade. Stopped paying real attention years ago, but it's usually a story where she knows a person who makes however many dollars a year and I could have too. I don't think this discussion would have been any different if I was in one of those jobs. That person usually works 60-80 hours a week. She leaves out the times when it isn't a great year in that area and they were laid off for 8 months. She misses the toll on your body working like that takes. She doesn't realize the cost of the trucks and the tools, if you need them. I guess it is easier when you simplify down to $X a year for your best year.
diob 4y ago
Have you tried being born to a different family? In all seriousness I know what you mean. A lot of entrepreneurs come from well off families because they can afford to say no, or spend time on a bunch of middling ideas until they strike it rich on a single one. I'm finally getting to the point where I might feel comfortable going off on my own venture (I have a bit of a safety net built up, but no family to count on still if things go awry). It's nice, but at the back of my head I'm still struggling to let go of what's providing me stability. That and being American I'm about one health problem away from losing it all so... I would love for the stability that allows others to "self actualize", so to speak.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > until they strike it rich on a single one. and THEN they will start a nice side business where they brag about their success and what they did to ensure it - re-emphasising the survivorship bias.
  - short_sells_poo 4y ago
    Ah yes, the good ole' "look at me working 3 hours a week afforded by selling advice on how to work 3 hours a week". Or the "self made" success story who got just a "minor" cash injection of $500k from their parents' slush fund and then could afford to not generate any income for 5 years. Unfortunately the stats on all these (and on this site in particular) are going to be extremely skewed. I'd hazard a guess that just the viewership of HN already heavily skews the sample towards a very privileged %ile of the total population.
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  > Have you tried being born to a different family? Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one... But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales. Luckily I met my cofounders through a mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.
jll29 4y ago
$20k is not worth bothering for a VC (if that is all you need, get a bank loan or "FFF" round - friends, family & fools). $1m might.
- danwee 4y ago
  Depends on the country I guess.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Are there countries where VCs are writing $20K checks? That seems like an incredible amount of overhead for them to bother/for it to be worthwhile to them.
    - dagw 4y ago
      Are there countries where VCs are writing $20K checks? Most of Europe.
      - terryf 4y ago
        Terminology matters. VCs are absolutely not writing €20k checks in Europe. Angel investors are.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Some VCs blend the line between angel and VC (often the angels are on the board/involved with various VCs).
- jongjong 4y ago
  That particular VC was on the board of directors of an incubator program which did small $20K rounds.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
It sounds like you are only talking about a large VC backed tech startup as a "good opportunity", which is a pretty narrow perspective.
darkerside 4y ago
> All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time. This sounds like part of the problem. Lucky people tend to think they are lucky. Because when an opportunity arrives, they assume it's lucky and look for the reason why. If you assume you have bad luck, you could, for example, get invited to an exclusive 1:1 meeting with a high powered VC investor, who has a ton of wisdom, many connections, and access to resources, and somehow think it was a waste of time.
dbrueck 4y ago
I hope this doesn't come off wrong, but here are two things that helped me and might help you: (1) shift your thinking and (2) take the initiative more. For 30 days in a row, come up with and write down a million dollar idea per day. It's hard at first, but gets much easier, and after awhile you'll see that there is so much real opportunity around you that the challenge is deciding what to go after. But as long as you are convinced that good ideas and opportunities are few and far between, then you are probably going to be stuck. Get into the habit of looking for weaknesses and inefficiencies in everything around you, for example. Or look in niche industries that are too small for the Googles of the world to care about. An idea can be worth more money than you'll ever use and still be way too small to be interesting for Google. When you find something that can work, don't wait for somebody to hand you money or invite you to join them, but go bootstrap it yourself. Maybe just do it as a side gig, but choose something with the potential to be far bigger. For example: I noticed that the nearest dry cleaning company appears to be using a DOS-based system, they seem to be somewhat disorganized, and they have to manually notify me (phone call) when my clothes are ready. Odd are, there are lots of other dry cleaning companies like them. It probably wouldn't take much time talking to them to figure out a number of ways to dramatically improve things with some better software and maybe some RFID tags or something. Their customers will love that, on your system, they automatically get notified when their clothes are ready. The companies will love that, on your system, they can handle more orders per day, they never lose track of stuff, and the software is much easier to use. Plus, your system lets them send out coupon codes and reminders ("It's been 6 months since you got your suit cleaned - bring it in this week and we'll give you a 25% discount!") and so they see people taking stuff to them more often. Google is never going to compete with you there, but you could probably demonstrate that a company could save $10k/yr and/or increase revenue by $10k/yr using your system, and you'd "only" charge them $3k/yr (or whatever). There are about 14k dry cleaning companies in the U.S., so converting a small segment of the market would be enough to be self-sustaining, with a much higher upside if you got to, say, 10% of the market. The above is just a random example off the top of my head, but I guarantee you are swimming in opportunities like this, so if that one isn't appealing or the numbers don't hold up under scrutiny, then look around and find something else.

Tepix 4y ago

Why don't you take the initiative and ask others to be co-founders?

jongjong 4y ago
I did but as a tech guy, non-technical CEOs with connections don't like a tech guy who takes the innitiative. They like to be the one with the vision/idea. Maybe I should just offer myself up as raw talent though and ignore my own ideas. I haven't tried that yet.
- csujoy 4y ago
  No need to depend on non-tech CEOs in early days if you can speak with (prospective) customers yourself. Just reach out to a few in your network and show them an initial prototype

tapland 4y ago

'Success is having good ideas to say no to'

all2 4y ago
I took the title of this to be "saying no to my own good ideas". :D That assumes my ideas are any good! Edit for spelling.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
In my experience, creative work tends to produce ideas. Even without the inevitable new ideas, I probably have a year or two's unrealized ideas littered around on post-it notes. Dunno if that is a measure of success as it is a measure of actually doing something interesting.

mkl95 4y ago

> The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... Waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe I agree... one of my relatives hates programming and used to tell me learning to code was a waste of time. Now I get a bigger check at the end of the month despite the fact he's an overworked doctor, and I'm sitting on my arse at home building some CRUD. Pick carefully who you listen to.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
doubled112 4y ago
I'm in my thirties and my mother still gives me a hard time about the hours I "waste" on a computer, both now and as a kid. Sure mom, but I make more than you and dad ever did doing less, and it's feeding your grandchildren. What do you want from me?
- mastersummoner 4y ago
  What does she think you should be doing instead?
  - doubled112 4y ago
    The discussion usually starts with "I wish you'd have gotten good money and done..." and ends in whatever career is better in her mind that day. It's usually a trade. Stopped paying real attention years ago, but it's usually a story where she knows a person who makes however many dollars a year and I could have too. I don't think this discussion would have been any different if I was in one of those jobs. That person usually works 60-80 hours a week. She leaves out the times when it isn't a great year in that area and they were laid off for 8 months. She misses the toll on your body working like that takes. She doesn't realize the cost of the trucks and the tools, if you need them. I guess it is easier when you simplify down to $X a year for your best year.

diob 4y ago

Have you tried being born to a different family? In all seriousness I know what you mean. A lot of entrepreneurs come from well off families because they can afford to say no, or spend time on a bunch of middling ideas until they strike it rich on a single one. I'm finally getting to the point where I might feel comfortable going off on my own venture (I have a bit of a safety net built up, but no family to count on still if things go awry). It's nice, but at the back of my head I'm still struggling to let go of what's providing me stability. That and being American I'm about one health problem away from losing it all so... I would love for the stability that allows others to "self actualize", so to speak.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> until they strike it rich on a single one. and THEN they will start a nice side business where they brag about their success and what they did to ensure it - re-emphasising the survivorship bias.
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  Ah yes, the good ole' "look at me working 3 hours a week afforded by selling advice on how to work 3 hours a week". Or the "self made" success story who got just a "minor" cash injection of $500k from their parents' slush fund and then could afford to not generate any income for 5 years. Unfortunately the stats on all these (and on this site in particular) are going to be extremely skewed. I'd hazard a guess that just the viewership of HN already heavily skews the sample towards a very privileged %ile of the total population.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
> Have you tried being born to a different family? Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one... But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales. Luckily I met my cofounders through a mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.

jll29 4y ago

$20k is not worth bothering for a VC (if that is all you need, get a bank loan or "FFF" round - friends, family & fools). $1m might.

danwee 4y ago
Depends on the country I guess.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Are there countries where VCs are writing $20K checks? That seems like an incredible amount of overhead for them to bother/for it to be worthwhile to them.
  - dagw 4y ago
    Are there countries where VCs are writing $20K checks? Most of Europe.
    - terryf 4y ago
      Terminology matters. VCs are absolutely not writing €20k checks in Europe. Angel investors are.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Some VCs blend the line between angel and VC (often the angels are on the board/involved with various VCs).
jongjong 4y ago
That particular VC was on the board of directors of an incubator program which did small $20K rounds.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

It sounds like you are only talking about a large VC backed tech startup as a "good opportunity", which is a pretty narrow perspective.

darkerside 4y ago

> All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time. This sounds like part of the problem. Lucky people tend to think they are lucky. Because when an opportunity arrives, they assume it's lucky and look for the reason why. If you assume you have bad luck, you could, for example, get invited to an exclusive 1:1 meeting with a high powered VC investor, who has a ton of wisdom, many connections, and access to resources, and somehow think it was a waste of time.

dbrueck 4y ago

I hope this doesn't come off wrong, but here are two things that helped me and might help you: (1) shift your thinking and (2) take the initiative more. For 30 days in a row, come up with and write down a million dollar idea per day. It's hard at first, but gets much easier, and after awhile you'll see that there is so much real opportunity around you that the challenge is deciding what to go after. But as long as you are convinced that good ideas and opportunities are few and far between, then you are probably going to be stuck. Get into the habit of looking for weaknesses and inefficiencies in everything around you, for example. Or look in niche industries that are too small for the Googles of the world to care about. An idea can be worth more money than you'll ever use and still be way too small to be interesting for Google. When you find something that can work, don't wait for somebody to hand you money or invite you to join them, but go bootstrap it yourself. Maybe just do it as a side gig, but choose something with the potential to be far bigger. For example: I noticed that the nearest dry cleaning company appears to be using a DOS-based system, they seem to be somewhat disorganized, and they have to manually notify me (phone call) when my clothes are ready. Odd are, there are lots of other dry cleaning companies like them. It probably wouldn't take much time talking to them to figure out a number of ways to dramatically improve things with some better software and maybe some RFID tags or something. Their customers will love that, on your system, they automatically get notified when their clothes are ready. The companies will love that, on your system, they can handle more orders per day, they never lose track of stuff, and the software is much easier to use. Plus, your system lets them send out coupon codes and reminders ("It's been 6 months since you got your suit cleaned - bring it in this week and we'll give you a 25% discount!") and so they see people taking stuff to them more often. Google is never going to compete with you there, but you could probably demonstrate that a company could save $10k/yr and/or increase revenue by $10k/yr using your system, and you'd "only" charge them $3k/yr (or whatever). There are about 14k dry cleaning companies in the U.S., so converting a small segment of the market would be enough to be self-sustaining, with a much higher upside if you got to, say, 10% of the market. The above is just a random example off the top of my head, but I guarantee you are swimming in opportunities like this, so if that one isn't appealing or the numbers don't hold up under scrutiny, then look around and find something else.