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this is the only realistic post i saw on here. the people who say they saved 2k before starting their venture are probably 18-22 years old and crashing at thei

this is the only realistic post i saw on here. the people who say they saved 2k before starting their venture are probably 18-22 years old and crashing at their parents' pad. if you're a grown up, i don't see anyway you can start a venture without a year of savings built up or some sort of income (investments, part-time work, etc). let's say you give your venture 6 months and you fail. you'll need a few months to get yourself a paying job again before you're evicted/foreclosed.

agibsonccc 13y ago
18-23* :) Use what you have available to you. Took me 6 months and now I'm ready to go. It would have been a significantly harder position to be in otherwise. Before I am even leaving I'm saving up around 20-30k or ensuring a minimum of 4k coming in per month though. A stable income is definitely a must. Edit: I suck at english apparently.
PaulHoule 13y ago
If you're in that situation (can crash at your parent's pad) you should take advantage of it. Remember now it's not just about "not getting evicted", it is also useful to have working capital. I have a project I'm working on that will probably cost $600-$800 of computation in a Hadoop cluster in Amzazon AWS assuming I don't screw it up and have to do it twice. In my situation I can "just do it". To make an analogy with Poker, you do not want to be short stacked. I know many "entrepreneurs" have an idea which they could move forward with personal investments in the $50-$5000 range. Instead of making a cool demo or any kind of prototype, they go talking to angel investors and they wonder why they get nowhere. Somehow though, they manage to find $150 to give to Time Warner and $150 to give to Verizon every month. For a while, for instance, I was talking w/ people in NJ, CT (imagine a donut centered around NYC) about applications of text analysis in financial services. Lots of talking to investors, but no demo. I spent about 40 hours and about $12 (domain name) on a demo over the course of six months, which failed. It's material for a blog post. I can say I didn't know anything at all about the problem when I started and now I know something. Also you really gotta pay attention to taxes when you're self employed. I lost about a year because I owed the IRS and NY about $15k of estimated tax I didn't pay, so I took a job I shouldn't have taken. I can be philosophical about it because I met one of my competitors at a conference and he was bouncing off the walls because he'd spent a year fighting with the technology transfer (prevention) office at his uni.

agibsonccc 13y ago

18-23* :) Use what you have available to you. Took me 6 months and now I'm ready to go. It would have been a significantly harder position to be in otherwise. Before I am even leaving I'm saving up around 20-30k or ensuring a minimum of 4k coming in per month though. A stable income is definitely a must. Edit: I suck at english apparently.

PaulHoule 13y ago

If you're in that situation (can crash at your parent's pad) you should take advantage of it. Remember now it's not just about "not getting evicted", it is also useful to have working capital. I have a project I'm working on that will probably cost $600-$800 of computation in a Hadoop cluster in Amzazon AWS assuming I don't screw it up and have to do it twice. In my situation I can "just do it". To make an analogy with Poker, you do not want to be short stacked. I know many "entrepreneurs" have an idea which they could move forward with personal investments in the $50-$5000 range. Instead of making a cool demo or any kind of prototype, they go talking to angel investors and they wonder why they get nowhere. Somehow though, they manage to find $150 to give to Time Warner and $150 to give to Verizon every month. For a while, for instance, I was talking w/ people in NJ, CT (imagine a donut centered around NYC) about applications of text analysis in financial services. Lots of talking to investors, but no demo. I spent about 40 hours and about $12 (domain name) on a demo over the course of six months, which failed. It's material for a blog post. I can say I didn't know anything at all about the problem when I started and now I know something. Also you really gotta pay attention to taxes when you're self employed. I lost about a year because I owed the IRS and NY about $15k of estimated tax I didn't pay, so I took a job I shouldn't have taken. I can be philosophical about it because I met one of my competitors at a conference and he was bouncing off the walls because he'd spent a year fighting with the technology transfer (prevention) office at his uni.