Consulting Cofounder | Hacker News Reader

Consulting Cofounder

2 pointsquinten5 comments

I'm planning to start a startup with a cofounder in January. However, he's considering a consulting offer from his current company: 8h/week + fly abroad to their HQ every 2 months for 8 12+ hour days (excl. travel time of 12h + jetlag), all while working on our own startup. He's citing as pros: money for our startup ($2500+/month) + contacts + we get to keep the stuff he develops + the company is working on interesting stuff. I'm weighing the pros and cons, but I'm gravitating towards 'no': it takes too much time, it will be a distraction, and it's unsettling that he'll have responsiblities to another company than our own. What do you guys think?

View on HN

If you total up those hours, you're getting 160 hrs per 2 months = ~20 hours a week. So

a) that's a pretty large time investment

b) $2500/mo for 80 hours of consulting is pretty poor pay -- $30 an hour?! That's $60k/yr with no benefits...

Seems like a pretty poor deal to me.

I was netting it after taxes, the deal is about $50/hour. Plus his options keep on vesting.

Given the lack of other data (what would be his role in your startup, how good is he at multitaskig, what are you building, how much time will it take, can you augment his absence with another person, is this Forever or For a While), it's really hard to make any good recommendations.

Some people will tell you they did this and it worked out fine, others will tell you it was the cause of their demise.

I don't mean to attack your question, it just seems that you're asking for an answer to a multi-variable problem, and you've only given 1 constant.

Also, what would happen to that $2500? Is it to pay his bills, or fund your venture?

The money would be completely for the startup. Of course there are many variables to consider in this dilemma, but I didn't want to make the post too long.

As for our roles in the startup, he is a web developer, I'm a mathematician/developer, so we complement each other. Just the two of us, at least for the coming couple of months. The idea that I'm getting, already in this phase of preparing for the startup, is this: in a startup, there's always work to be done and you get bonus points if you iterate fast. So that kind of mitigates the factor if somebody is a good multitasker or not (I'm more of a believer in focus).

completely depends on your roles in this startup and what you're planning to make,

it's going to be one of those things where you have to decide what's best on your own, because you are the one with insight as to what needs to happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com