If you want to really do a start-up, quit your job. If you can't or won't quit your job, it is not yet time for you to do a start-up.
I quit my job with six months in savings to start my company. It took us almost 8 months to get somewhere - we filled the gap with just a little web design work on the side. I have never regretted leaving my job.
+1 I was working in my cushy corporate job while my cofounder (also in the same company) and I tried to get our startup going on the side. Eventually I realized that I just didn't have the time to be successful at both and I had to make a choice. It's been over a year since I left and the learning experience alone was worth it. There is so much work and problems to deal with in building a successful startup that unless you're willing to devote yourself 100% to it, you're not ready for it.
I would suggest it's not just a matter of willpower. You should be in a material position to execute effectively - having to start worrying about how you'll feed your family, or pay your rent is a massive distraction.
Build up a buffer so you won't have to worry about it, at least in the beginning.
If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.
Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.
I don't think this makes economic sense. Equity in startups who don't have enough cash on hand to pay rent is likely to be more risky than equity in those who do.
Giving away equity for rent at an early stage doesn't make sense for founders either - making a mess of your cap table for office space is a poor decision when you could work from many other places for free, or remotely from home.
This sounds like a bad deal for both parties in the marketplace.
Do you see any way you could structure the deal to make sense for both parties?
Also - the main idea for this was for residential space, we added the commercial cause, well, why not. But this was literally to give you a home to work out of.
From my own recent experience, there is definitely demand from the side of founders for an AirBnB style deal specifically aimed at a place to live-and-work, especially for start-ups who need to relocate.
AirBnB doesn't accommodate them effectively because this is not their target market - AirBnB is mostly about holidays and residential space. Similarly, 42Floors doesn't do this at all because they are about Co-working and Commercial space.
I would suggest, forget the equity part of this completely. Start-ups are already bad customers without having to wait to recognise any revenue, and also have to go through regulatory implications. Let me rent a place with a sleeping area, a bathroom, a kitchen area and an office area for my whole team for a reasonable price.
It cost me a $4,000 deposit, $2,500/mo in rent and about $1,500 in IKEA/WalMart, and $3000 in temporary AirBnB accommodation to get my team situated in the bay area. Give me a better deal than that, especially one that saves me time.
Ship me groceries weekly, get me a rental car as part of this deal, and have it all ready as soon as I arrive and I wouldn't use any other service ever.
Additional features I would want:
- Connect me to the local hacker community
- Tell me where I can get exercise and where I should shop
Isn't this basically what a relocation specialist does? Other than the startup focus, I've lived through pretty much this exact deal in several relocations with the oil industry (I spent my childhood bopping around the country courtesy of Big Oil).
- Temporary furnished corporate housing and vehicles
- Expertise on the local area (shopping, restaurants, schools)
- One signature for all of this, paid by the employer
Surely those firms could offer similar services for startups? That said, service providers in this area seriously pad their margins. You wouldn't believe what I've seen some apartment complexes bill a basic 1-bedroom unit out at as part of a corporate relo deal. $3000+ for suburban Houston. The family doesn't care, they aren't picking up the tab.
Exactly. But those services are typically provided to entire families by BigCo - padded margins sound like this is a space where a cost-focused company could stand to make quite a bit of money.
Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.
Livejournal added it to make it easier for depressed people to be found by each other. Facebook added it to make it easier for depressed people to be found by drug companies.
The best advice I ever got about how to hire people and fill gaps in your team is to do the job yourself first - this applies to everything, not just tech.
The advantages of this approach are enormous - it helps you understand what you're looking for, helps you evaluate candidates and helps you understand the needs of your own company better than anything else ever could. And you're no longer desperate - you can afford to wait until you've found the best person to work with. It means that when you do start talking to people, they will respect you more because you took the time and effort to work out exactly what it is they do and how valuable they are.
It might even turn out that you don't even need that person, that the company is doing just fine because you worked out you can do it yourself more cost effectively than bringing on someone else.
Develop your skills so you can be the tech co-founder until you can get someone better than you.
The advantages of this approach are enormous - it helps you understand what you're looking for..
That's true, but keep in mind that the disadvantages are relevant too: you lose maybe 10x time doing something you were not supposed/skilled to do, so your time-to-market is way longer AND you're not doing other stuff that are needed (customer/product validation - marketing - fundraising etc..)
Outside of Ayn Rand novels, collective action is necessary for the livelihood of free peoples. Old-fashioned civic virtue used to fill the roles that the state usurped (see Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, The State").
I have a soft spot in my heart for Ayn Rand, but her moral system would be a poor foundation for a free people (which I am here using as a euphemism for market anarchy).
Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense?
Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.
Well, through SR, DPR helps all parties involved be safer. For buyers, all products have ratings and reviews, and sellers have overall satisfaction statistics, and there is a forum. For sellers, there are buyer statistics.
He's a pioneer. When SR has strange technical problems, he can't just jump on IRC or Stack Overflow and ask. He has to deal with attacks against Tor no one else has experienced. I don't know of anyone else betting more heavily on the security of Tor (at least the hidden service aspect).
He's also just plain inspiring. He had a bold idea, coded it up, kept it working, by himself or with a small group, despite opposition by the worst possible adversaries. He puts his life on the line for his principles. If the world had more brave and highly capable people like him, we might not still be in the drug war.
Sorry, but you you've got the concept of "rent seeking" completely wrong.
"In public choice theory, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created."
A black market - almost by definition - is one in which the players are cut off from the channels of official lobbying or patronage that make rent-seeking a viable economic strategy.
That's not to say that a dark symbiosis can't develop between black marketeers and legitimate authorities. For instance, the police, by enforcing laws against drug trafficking, increase the risks of trafficking. This increases prices and profits alike. High profits attract a constant supply of traffickers, who also tend to be far more ruthless than the average businessman, which brings additional layers of criminality to the trade, thereby ensuring continued employment for the police - to say nothing of an unsettling expansion of their powers.
But at no point do the traffickers and the police feel a mutual need to formalize this relationship, since public opinion remains, on balance, opposed to the narcotics trade. That is to say, the police can rely on the ballot box to stay employed, stripping them of any incentive to do business (at least on an open, institutional level) with traffickers. Meanwhile, the traffickers can count on public opinion to keep police on the beat, and need not go to any further expense to keep their racket going.
Contrast all this with the retroactive extension of copyright terms which has got to be the canonical example of true rent seeking, illuminating the practice in its most naked and unproductive form.
EDIT: An more germane example is the lobbying done by pharmaceutical companies with an interest in keeping the law and public opinion in opposition to illegal substances that may have pharmacological properties. Because these substances are too well known to be patented, their legalization could lead to patent-free formulations that reduce demand for patentable substitutes that pharmaceutical companies have created, or ones they could develop in future. Blocking the legal use of one widely and cheaply available substance to create a market for a more expensive but conceivably inferior alternate is a text-book case of rent seeking.
I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour!
You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.
I don't really understand your point. In my understanding, for silk road to be rent-seeking it would have be actively working to keep drugs illegal, thus maintaining their profits. I have seen no evidence this is the case.
I'm also unsure why you think SR "creates no value"? It creates value in the same way eBay does.
Morals of being a drug market aside, in what way is SilkRoad a "rent-seeking enterprise" any more than any other transaction facilitating entity? Every transaction has friction and facilitators provide the service of matching buyers and sellers. Maybe not the highest ideal of productivity but hardly deserves to be described as rent-seeking.
Well, I guess we just disagree on the definition of rent-seeking. Matching willing buyers and sellers creates value by increasing the satisfaction of both the buyer and the seller since both should be better off after the transaction. The facilitator who creates more mutually beneficial trades is increasing the wellbeing of society as a whole. From wikipedia "Rent-seeking behavior is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking behavior, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." SilkRoad is not rent seeking because they are not looking to change or increase the transaction friction and regulatory control of the drug trade for their own benefit. That is why rent-seeking is usually used to describe entities trying to create a government policy which benefits them but hinders mutual exchange of others. To define rent-seeking is such a loose way as to cover all facilitators who don't produce anything directly is to distort it's original meaning and make the word useless to describe true rent-seeking.
Consider that it's very much in Silk Road's interest that the regulations that currently create the transactional frictions on which it makes a profit remain as they are, or perhaps become even more restrictive. It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking. This does not require a broadened definition of rent seeking at all.
>It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking.
Smuggling illegal immigrants is not rent seeking. If an illegal-immigrant-smuggling company lobbied the government to tighten immigration controls, that would be rent seeking.
It's in the interests of the smugglers that tight immigration controls remain in place, just as it's in the interests of Silk Road that regulations on restricted substances remain in place.
They need not lobby directly for these restrictions, they have other organisations that will do that for them.
Who is creating the majority of friction in the drug trade? Nation states and their war on drugs.
Silk Road is using technological advancement to remove as much friction from the process as possible, but it's obviously still non-zero, just like any market in the world.
Do you have any points to offer other than useless snark? You have multiple comments challenging your initial claim that Silk Road is rent-seeking and you have yet to offer any sort of defense of your position.
Unless a business in that position attempts to enforce its position, what's the problem? If he is making something easier for others he should be rewarded or he'll stop.
It's like saying a road has no value because stuff isn't created on the road, just moved.
As for ethics, you could sleep better after buying a kilo of coke on silk road than paying your taxes.
Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.
There were lots of private highways and roads in early US history[1]. I'm not saying it's always and everywhere a good idea, but the historical reality or private roads suggests we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
I think you're arguing with the mirror. I said it's like [the fallacy of] thinking a road has no value ...
And I see a lot of businesses selling stuff like 3d printers who use open designs and contribute changes back to the community. Lock-in is a choice people make.
I quit my job with six months in savings to start my company. It took us almost 8 months to get somewhere - we filled the gap with just a little web design work on the side. I have never regretted leaving my job.