Way back in the year 2000, when you and I were kids, Joel Spolsky had just finished managing the addition of VBA into Excel 5.0 and was quitting Microsoft to st

Way back in the year 2000, when you and I were kids, Joel Spolsky had just finished managing the addition of VBA into Excel 5.0 and was quitting Microsoft to start his own companies like StackOverflow, FogBugz, and Trello, and wrote this illuminating blog post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... > Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do ... Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital. Unless you have a trust fund to fall back on - and it sounds like you don't, with the mortgage and job and all - you can't gamble with your responsibility to your family. Your answer to the question above must be "slow, organic, and profitable," you have to abandon the dream of becoming a gazillionaire with the next big risky "Tinder but for carpooling" idea. Even if you think you have a 10% chance of becoming a billionaire and a 90% chance of losing your house and destroying your family in the next 10 years, versus a 100% chance of holding a boring $100k/year job, the former is not 1000x better than the latter even though the estimated iterated return is $100M/year. You should either learn to be content at your ordinary job, or you should slowly build yourself enough of an emergency fund/runway to be unprofitable for 6 months to a year, and give a safe, organic, slow-growth business a try. You can call it a "startup" if you want, but you can't burn VC money like it's going out of style. I have no idea what you do, but perhaps building a network of contacts during your current employment, and starting an independent consulting business could work?