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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

Another alternative is to save aggressively working at a lucrative job when you're young, then do the startup when you're thirty-five or forty and can live, with discipline, on the gains from your investments. I know at least one very successful person who took this approach (anecdote != data, I know). Not always an option depending on your credentials, but there's something to be said for a hybrid approach of building a personal runway (and gaining skill at the craft) before quitting and throwing the dice.

Obviously you shouldn't do anything to shorten your personal runway if you plan to make a startup. Big houses and mortgages and expensive cars are out, even if you don't plan on quitting immediately.

Some of my bias may be showing here, because I'm fairly satisfied with my life and work at BigCo right now.

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Or get married to someone who can support you while do something risky. If the Korean immigrant with a wife and kids who starts a dry cleaning business in your neighborhood can do it, then it can't be intractable.

Your post is inaccurate on two levels:

1. You assume because a "korean immigrant" can do something, that it must not be intractable (hard). Immigrant entrepreneurs are usually highly motivated, especially the kind who start small businesses. I would rescind that comment.

2. You are comparing a dry cleaner to a startup. The failure rate of startups is several order of magnitudes worse than a dry cleaner. Figuring out the potential numbers for a dry cleaner is simple math that you can base on the local population, income/employment stats, and # of dry cleaners. Most startups would kill for that kind of estimate.

1) Intractable means infeasible, not hard. 2) I'm focusing on the "family obligations angle." Having a spouse and kids makes it hard to devote time to a startup. But starting a dry cleaner isn't a less time-intensive thing than starting a tech company.

I read the "Korean immigrant" comment slightly differently. Not as a "if that schlub can do it so can you!", but rather as pointing out that immigrants to most countries generally face all the same business challenges of any citizen plus the burden of being an immigrant in a society that may not always be welcoming. If someone can succeed facing all the same challenges you would face plus a few more it can show you that your challenges aren't insurmountable. Or maybe the person is just so head-and-shoulders above you that you shouldn't even compare, but that is less likely in my experience (i.e. variation amongst people in sub-groups, say entrepreneurs, are generally not as vast as people think, mostly because most people only compare against the outliers).

> 1. You assume because a "korean immigrant" can do something, that it must not be intractable (hard).

Or he assumes that integrating yourself and your family into a new culture, quite possibly while learning a new language, are both difficult problems which the OP would have the benefit of not having to overcome.

That's a good approach as well. I think it's highly dependent on your personal living situation. I sorta lucked out with my first startup in that it's producing a little passive income and I couldn't stand the thought of squandering it (ie, putting it in the bank to earn 1% pre-inflation).

I'm all in favor of doing work you like. If you are happy working for a larger employer, you're probably a lot better off than some crazy guy like me wanting to run a startup. :)

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