Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business?

3 pointsgreat_psy2 comments

What are the things that motivate you? When did you decide it was the right path for you? What does/will having a business provide for you?

I think there is a big hype around startups and starting your own business, and I am wondering how much is influenced by social pressure, and how much by innate will.

Obviously not everyone who visits HN wants a startup, but I am asking the ones that do.

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For me, it was two things:

1. I saw lots of problems that I had ideas about (ideas that I'd pay for if they existed). A business was - is - the only way to implement those improvements and discover whether they actually helped other people as much as they helped me.

2. While I enjoyed working on problems for other people, other stuff - broadly, poor execution by parts of the business I didn't oversee - got in the way.

#1 led me to implement many things over the years (businesses, projects, whatever), but #2 was basically the catalyst to do it full time.

In software you are often working in an organization where the "important" people are not software people and there is just no path for advancement.

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