Hacker News Reader

Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

The more I think about it, the more I believe the startup game is the worst way to do this.

If you can keep your expenses to $1,000 per week, and get your billable rate to $200 per hour, then you only need to work 5 hours a week to break even. If you work 80 hours a week for a year at this rate, that's $800,000 - which means you could then spend the next 800 weeks, or 15 years, doing whatever you wanted.

How you get to $200/hr is something of a question, but it has a much more direct path than being a founder, which you could spend 80 hours a week on and still be broke after 3, 5 or even 10 years.

View on HN

Eh, this is something I've thought a lot about; I funded my company doing consulting. ($100/hr is a pretty good rate for me, - I /have/ gotten $200/hr, but that was short-term stuff. Most of the time I'm $75-$100/hr, but that's still a lot of cash.)

Now, there are reasons to stick the cash under your mattress (or in an index fund) - that's not the choice I made, though; I chose to buy some means of production and manage those means of production myself. Not real-estate;servers. I had a few pretty good years; it really has yet to be seen if I'm a fool or not.

I do think it has been interesting; I've gotten to experience being a boss. I've hired family, I've hired friends. I've hired people who weren't friends, who became friends after they left. It has been an experience. It's really yet to be seen if this experience has been profitable or not. Estimating the value of a small company is difficult, and one could reasonably value my company at a level where I have done okay (not never work again okay, but at least buy a nicer condo okay) - you could also reasonably value the company at the 'buy a compact car' level. The only solid offers I've gotten were earn-outs that were heavily dependent on me sticking around for years, so it's unclear how much of that is the company and how much of that is, you know, me.

But yeah; the other option would have been to just contract half-time and spend the rest of that time hanging out in social situations. That would also have been a really interesting experience. Maybe it would have been better than what I did? I don't know.

Now, I'm not chasing investors or anything; That is a very different game. But it is a mistake to equate the hacker news crowd with funded startups. Yes, that's what everyone wants to be now - but that's only because of the amount of money available. Go back three years and it was all about bootstrapping.

80 billable hours per week. That's double a normal work week. And I assume that you would need extra for administrative stuff that you can't bill for. I doubt this would be either healthy or productive for most people.

I doubt this would be either healthy or productive for most people.

The same could be said of start-up founders, which was the point.

But you can re-do the math at 40 hours a week if you like:

40 hours * 50 weeks * $200/hr = $400,000 / 52 weeks @ $1,000 per week = 7.69 years to do what you want.

And again, we're only talking about a year. Spend a year killing yourself, and then spend the next 5 on the beach or climbing Everest or writing a novel.

The Alberta oil sands are hiring. They pay upwards of $100-$200 an hour and pay for all your housing and meal expenses if your willing to live on camp for 6 months of the year. Works if your single but puts a big strain on your relationships with friends and family.

A lot can happen in a year not to just you but your family and friends that you could miss out on. Look forward to the future but don't rely on it because it might not come.

> If you can keep your expenses to $1,000 per week, and get your billable rate to $200 per hour, then you only need to work 5 hours a week to break even.

True, if you don't pay taxes.

>True, if you don't pay taxes.

Spreading out the income across tax years can make a fairly dramatic difference in the number of hours you need to work.

For a while I was trying to time my working for other people so I had one year on/one year off, and was attempting to time that I had 6 months of income to report in each tax year.

There are also more options to spread out income across tax years when you are consulting through a company that does business other than consulting (but it gets complex fast. You need a competent tax adviser if you go that route.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com