random_user

I can't really argue with your logic here. Yes, ideally you want to do something you are passionate about.

Now, to be fair, that isn't always the case. I have a small business running almost in auto-pilot that is generating probably $10K a year. Not a ton of money. At the same time, it requires almost no attention. I am not passionate about it. It isn't a scalable business. With a lot of effort it might generate $20K, tops.

That said, yes, if something is going to scale and grow beyond a hobby business you really have to want to be in it because business is hard work. For me it is easy to become passionate about something if it starts making money. It might not be the love of my life, but I enjoy making money. I hope that's not a bad word on HN.

[6] Hold on to it

    - Do nothing right now
    - Elections and voting will never go away
    - Keep thinking and look for other opportunities to build a
      product or brand around the domain

[5] Sell the domain

    - Less work
    - Far less money than a successful site could generate
    - Currently working on other products, including:
          - Redoing an existing mobile app to start monetizing
          - Planning another mobile app with a partner
          - Chipping away at two web projects
    - Only the right person or organization is going to put the right
      number on the table not to make me feel like a moron after
      selling it.  My guess is that this is somewhat unlikely to
      happen but you never know.

[4] A platform for voting and survey taking online

    - Not necessarily limited to politics
    - Site provides the tools to organize voting for whatever purpose
    - Embeddable voting forms 
    - Possibly self-hosted solutions
    - Free and a couple, or more, paid tiers
    - Mobil integration
    - Aimed at C2B, clubs and any instance of needing to get people
      to vote or opine on something
    - Provide analytics, etc.
    - Not a new idea; many competitors
    - The engineer in me likes this far more than any of the above
    - Monetization is based on actually selling a product
    - Could also have ad-based revenue in the free tier
    - If approach is unique, intelligent and hits a nerve the service
      could be an attractive acquisition target

[3] Build something that Democrats or Republicans can use

    - Make it a useful get-out-the-vote tool for young people
    - Aim squarely at providing it as a service to one of the parties
    - Perhaps even look at selling the site to on of them
    - It still requires articles and becoming an educator of sorts
    - Lightweight content that is easy to digest by a younger audience
    - Not much effort in terms of immediate monetization
    - Focus should be on content and tools that bring that younger
      audience to the table
    - Not an easy task
    - Two major election events coming up in 2014 and 2016.  These
      will be highly contested and are potential opportunities for
      a brand like "ClickTheVote" to rise to the surface.
    - People getting more of their news and info online.  With elections
      taking place constantly a brand like "ClickTheVote" could be
      positioned to be the party-independent go-to resource for
      relevant information
    - Probably easier to liquidate than [1] and [2] but just as hard to
      build and position

[2] Political blog, again aimed at younger audience

    - Also easy to setup: Wordpress
    - Seeding with posts happens more organically than forum
      because one or two people write
    - Probably takes just as long as [1] to build an audience 
    - No need to depend on members for content, which can be 
      a big advantage
    - Possibly better SEO ranking due to issues with user generated
      content sites and how search engines treat them
    - The easiest ways to gain traction are the extremes:
      - Be the voice of reason: analytical, research and fact based
      - Be an asshole at one or another extreme of any issue
        (Howard Stern "shock jock")
    - Far more people will levitate towards extreme views than 
      sit there and read through well reasoned arguments backed
      with facts, calculations, models, etc.
    - Have to be comfortable with this reality and be able to 
      consistently be that persona under a pseudonym
    - Still competing with biggies
    - Monetization: AdSense, affiliate, etc.
    - Maybe even crazy ebooks
    - Not an appealing idea intellectually speaking but have to 
      recognize that in today's political climate the extremes
      probably convert better than a reasoned middle ground
    - Not sure about liquidation.  Could be a flipper site.

[1] Political discussion forum aimed at a younger audience

    - Relatively easy to setup.  vBulletin or phpBB would do.
    - Needs seeding with lots of posts in order to even begin to pull
      real people in.
    - Fighting spam posts is a daily reality.
    - Site depends on converting enough eyeballs into posters
      (not just lurkers) in order to gain position and value
    - Monetization through AdSense
    - If it gets real traffic you can sell advertising space directly
    - Some affiliate potential
    - Liquidation is far more likely to take the form of selling
      through a site flipping service

Anyone serious enough wanting to have a conversation about what I've got on the table can easily contact me off-list and have detailed discussions. I've already had a number of them with people who reached out.

I understand you might want to see more info exposed publicly. Sorry. Not going to happen. I suppose you might not understand this until you experience what it is like to be open and have a good opportunity taken away from you by a competitor. Having lived that wonderful experience I chose to conduct things using a different approach.

Well, I think we can agree on some points. There are tons of web businesses that can be started and run with $100 per month...you don't even need to buy the hardware. All you need is a few Linode's and you are good to go.

At the same time, there are web businesses that need cash, people and resources. VC's can be a good match for that type of business.

The other variable is time to market. This is something I did not fully appreciate when I was younger. There are lots of cases where time to market can make or break a business. This is yet another variable or qualifier on the concept of good vs. bad ideas. An otherwise good idea can be rendered bad simply because of an inability to get to market fast enough. Often times this is a matter of the money necessary to bring to bare the resources necessary to accelerate execution.

As is often the case, there are tons of ways to approach a problem.

Thanks for the recommendation. If I could use a bad analogy I'd compare the two world, setting up servers and engineering software to selling marble and being a sculpture.

Part of what drives those of us who write code is that we use that code as a creative outlet. I'll generally extend that to the process of designing products, be it hardware or software. Mechanical design isn't about setting up the CNC machine but rather about the creativity and the designer's expression of interesting ideas. I've walked away from designing sheet metal parts with a huge sense of, yes, artistic and creative accomplishment. Designing something that is beautiful and well done in your eyes are the highs that drive some of us. Software or electrical engineering have similar embodiments of the same concept.

I can do Linux at a reasonable level and know most of the tools you listed, some superficially and others reasonably well. However, setting up servers isn't something that appeals to me as an occupation. At some level it would be dishonest to go work for someone knowing that I would not bring a degree of passion to the job. As an entrepreneur I would feel cheated if an employee took a job with me just to get by and not to knock it out of the park. There's a huge difference between a business where everyone is really engaged and one where nearly everyone thinks "it's just a job". Perhaps the canonical example of this is the contrast between a rocking startup and a large, stratified and somewhat stagnant company with tens of thousands of employees. There's a huge difference between what both of those can accomplish given the same time and resources.

I am not diminishing what you do. You seem to be passionate about supporting servers and that's fantastic. Those of us who prefer to create software products need people who can provide us with solid systems on which our software can run reliably and efficiently.

A long way of saying: It's not for me.

Cash is like the blood running through the veins of a venture. You need it to survive. You also need it to walk and you need more of it to run. There are web businesses that can certainly be entirely bootstrapped, sometimes by a single coder/designer/everything.

On the other hand, most businesses that scale need more people and more resources and more of everything. This is where the "it's just a server in a rack" model breaks down quickly. Scaling means, at the very least, hiring people and providing them with all of the resources they'll need to do their work. You could very easily be at a $50K per month burn rate very quickly after launch, say, thee months. That doesn't account for legal fees and other expenses that might not be obvious on first inspection.

If you have the money and the ability to scale a business and are willing to risk it all, by all means, do it. You don't need external money for this.

Most of the young folks who seem to make-up the HN audience there are lacking three things: money, experience and the business network. All three of these are critical when you need to press on the accelerator and go. Learning while doing is possible but far less than ideal. If a VC can offer smart money this is probably the best bet for young HN'ers. In this context "smart money" means that a VC makes an investment and also contributes experience, guidance and contacts to the process. This can often mean the difference between success and failure.

In many ways this concept of a good vs. a bad idea has to be qualified with a set of variables. Off the top of my head:

    Startup cost
    Market
    Competition
    Barrier to entry
    Cost of sales
    Capital intensity
    Regulatory landscape
    Technology risk
    Intellectual property ownership
    Intellectual property minefield
    Domain expertise
    Funding
    Business operating expertise
    Marketing expertise
    Local labor requirements
    

I could go on and I could expand on all of the above but that's besides the point which is that a business that isn't a hobby and can scale is far more than a server in a rack.

Money comes with side effects and it also comes in various grades. At the extremes you'll find smart money and dumb money. The latter is the most dangerous.

Not all money is created equal.

Email address now in my profile. Here it is:

hn.rocks@yahoo.com

I'd appreciate contact with identifying information such a LinkedIn profile. I'll reply in kind, of course.

With respect, I think you are drinking too much of the cool-aid. Yes, in general terms you are right. The difference is that if you have thirty years of entrepreneurship under your belt, having tried, failed and succeeded you should develop a good sense of the good, the bad and the ugly. I am not coming here as an idealist who's never done a thing to proclaim I can save the world.

No. I have logged somewhere in the range of 500 ideas over the last three years. Most are not what I would consider to be opportunities. And that's the way it usually goes. I am fairly certain there are a few that are very interesting and, yes, they are true opportunities waiting for funding and execution. One of them is based on years of using similar services in the context of running my own business and then realizing there's an interesting approach that could do very well. The other, as I said in another comment, is one that's the result of constantly thinking and being involved in one way or another in a couple of market segments and finally having "seen the light" that connects the two worlds. The markets are there for the taking. It's all about funding and execution.

No. An opportunity is an idea connected to a market need.

There's more than one way to connect an idea to a market need.

One case is where the market already exists either entirely or to some degree and you have a solid idea of how to make it better: iPhone.

Another is where you are the target market yourself and know the market very well. You see the need. You see the pain points and you are equipped to address them. I could argue that might have been the start of Hewlett and Packard.

FedEx is a case of an idea that was discounted and then proven to have been right on the mark. Some ideas can't be tested with $15,000 over a summer.

There are other cases where the idea and the market opportunity reveal themselves during some kind of an instant or event that provides the necessary clarity, if you will, that connects the two. A friend of mine and I had the idea for what eventually became LoJack a year or two before that company came out with their product. We were young, making very good money at our respective jobs and simply didn't have enough of that "clarity" (for lack of a better word) to take the idea seriously. To this day we laugh about it.

Ideas that are just ideas with no connection to a market happen at least two ways.

One is the case of a well established or entrenched set of players against which it'd be almost impossible to compete. It'd be hard to go up against Google or Facebook. The insight an idea would have to have in order to connect with a market opportunity in search or social would have to be so incredible that people would literally want to throw money at you. Even with that, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to even begin to have a shot at that. For all intents and purposes you can say that ideas in social or search really don't have a market because you really can't get that market.

The other category are ideas that really don't have markets, at least in the context of what makes for a good scalable company. Local restaurants. Great idea if you want to work 20 hours a day seven days a week, have huge risk of failure, no real scalability and no prospects of any kind of an exit that makes sense. For some people that would be a market. If it weren't there would be no mom-and-pop local restaurants. For most ventures that are looking for or need scale in order to be considered successful a mom-and-pop restaurant idea is an idea without a market.

I could go on. There are, of course, ideas that really lead to nothing useful. Most of those are obvious to most except for the guy married to the idea.

Here's the problem with that approach: It takes a long time and you are invariably going to talk to a lot of people who have money and nothing else to contribute. The only type of money you want as an entrepreneur is smart money. Just because someone is a VC it doesn't automatically mean they have value beyond what they might be able to contribute financially. Not a put-down. It's just a fact.

If I assume that, on average, each of the 100 VC pitches you are suggesting require, say, five hours of work that means 500 hours would be devoted to this effort. The truth is likely a much larger number. If I have to take that approach I would much rather bootstrap by using some of the smaller opportunities I've identified (Kicstarter being an interesting domain for such projects) and work my way up to the larger projects.

I am serious about business. I'd rather talk to five well-qualified people than engage in endless dances with those who will only waste your time. I am not saying this out of an enlarged ego. I am saying this out of experience.

How do you know which category they fall into? Well, experience in business is a big part of that.

Well, I know current SV culture is to put it all out there and let the world see. I have cuts and bruises to prove this is not always the best approach. Business can be war and there are a lot of people out there ready, willing and able to steal from you. I had just that happen to me many years ago. I won't go into the details. I'll just say another business got started with my ideas. Competing against your own business plan is painful.

> Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that matters.

And you are right. And if I had done absolutely nothing in my life. If I was a kid either dropping out of school or just out of school your sermon would be well applied. I'm not.

After over thirty years of entrepreneurship I tend to use "idea" to really mean "opportunity". Most ideas are utterly worthless. They are great as thinking tools. Never stop generating ideas! A few ideas are worth millions, o billions. Instagram started as an idea. Of course, that idea happened thousands of times. One team executed it well and at the right time.

What this means is that ideas are not always obvious identifications of market opportunities. To over-use Instagram, I know I would have thought that was a stupid idea. I wouldn't have given the Instagram idea the time of day. I would have discounted it as useless and moved on. So, here's an idea, worth billions when matched with the right team, timing and execution, that most people would think was just plain stupid.

As I got older I've tried to be less critical of ideas. I listen to them and I log mine assiduously. I allow myself to generate and consider ideas that, on first inspection, seem utterly ridiculous. I try to review them from time to time. What happens is that sometimes two or three combine into one. That's the case of the quadcopter opportunity I have uncovered. It's the combination of a number of thoughts and an interest in a couple of market segments I've had for years, decades, possibly. Now it's just about execution.

Still, inspired by your comment I edited my post and replaced "idea" with "opportunity". That's what I am talking about, opportunities, not ideas. I have hundreds of ideas, the vast majority of which are not opportunities.

Thanks.

Yup. Twenty-five years ago I could walk out of a job and into another within hours. Things change.

I've done the meetup thing. I'll say that most tech meetups have been a total waste of time. "I have an idea for <x>. Could you be my tech co-founder and build it for nothing?". Please.

The other aspect of meetups is that a lot of them are loud drinking parties. I don't drink. No, not some prudish thing. I just don't drink. The stuff doesn't attract me at all. And, of course, if I my intent is to meet people I kinda want to be able to hear them. So driving to a meetup an hour away, at a bar, with loud music and booze isn't my idea of something productive. Could be wrong.

That's easy to answer: Intelligent robots.

Humanoids have fascinated me since childhood. I went to school to get an EE because I wanted to work on robots. Life took me in a different direction. And that's OK.

When Georgia Tech widely publicized their online CS Masters program AND they explicitly stated that they'd offer credit for relevant experience I jumped on it. I got in touch with them to learn more. Within days they rescinded their experience-based credit offer and went back to the standard credits-for-classes approach. The reason this was interesting to me (and I am sure lots of others) was that I could fast-track a Masters and then consider doing an MBA either online or in person. That, I reasoned, could possibly open some doors. Not sure. It just seemed that the low cost of the Georgia Tech program coupled with probably being able to pull it off in a year or two could have been worth the gamble.

In general terms, it is disappointing that there seem to be no reputable programs that recognize the value of people's life experience. I've shared some of my code with CS department heads in the process of exploring various options for admissions. A couple came back with praise for the range of work I had done and even went as far as saying they didn't understand half of it. Regrettably that was not enough to work out any deals.

The other aspect of engineering education I despise is the need for credits in non-engineering areas. I'm sorry, I'm fifty years old, I have almost no interest in taking a course in sociology, history, geography or English literature. My self-education was not limited to the technical domain. I've read most of the classics, dozens of business and marketing books and have had skin in the game at all levels for years. I can see asking a 19 year old to take an English composition class as part of the path towards an EE or CS degree. I can't see it as even remotely relevant for people at different stations in life. Just a pet peeve of mine.

Sent reply off-list. Thanks for your pointers.

Email sent

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> Why not a degree in mathematics and a Master's in education?

Well, mathematics is a tool for me. I couldn't see going for a degree in mathematics at all. Frankly, it'd bore me to death. Probably the same with a MS in Education.

I am a maker. I love to create. Not engaging in the creative process would just kill me from the inside. Of course, not being a useful member of society is probably killing me from the inside as well. Choices.

I have been dealing with with some of the consequences of this for the last three years. Details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932327

The fact that most of my professional life was very publicly exposed online has now gotten in the way of me being able to land a job. Not because there's anything bad in there. Quite to the contrary. The issue is that you can't dumb-down or narrow your resume when a simple Google search reveals you are far more than the resume says.

Some people are scared (is he after my job?) others are protective (he just wants to get inside to learn the business and then become a competitor) and others think you are over qualified (he's going to get bored and leave in x months).

Short of legally changing your name there's no way to disconnect from your online fingerprint.

At fifty years of age I am in a situation where, after hundreds of resumes over three years I have come to the conclusion I am not employable. It seems my only path will have to be through entrepreneurship. Read my post for details.

Yes. My resume is under version control. I have six versions I've evolved over time to address very specific job categories.

I wonder how many people on HN have actually touched a VT-100? Or an 8 inch floppy disk? Or how about removable platter 10 MB hard drives the size of a washing machine?

Well, retirement isn't for me. I will never stop working on something so long as I have the physical and mental ability. That's just how I am wired.

Teaching at universities is out because, well, I don't have a degree. Ironically, I am a pretty good teacher. I've conducted seminars in the past with audiences in the hundreds of people. I enjoy it and I do have a knack for making complex topics accessible.

I have been thinking about perhaps authoring a webinar or two or launching some kind of an engineering-related educational effort. I have one idea that could be an interesting Kickstarter project for young (and not so young) engineers. Thinking about all options right now.

Well, that would be combining business with teaching. Maybe that's a good option for me.

> Clearly, being (viewed by employers as) a jack of all trades is bad.

My problem is that I can't dumb-down my resume. One Google search and most of what I've done, going back thirty years, is all there. I can't get it all deleted. At some level, why would you want to? For example, there's a 1985 paper on robotics I presented at an ACM conference (while still an engineering student) that still shows-up on a search.

> So it sounds like you have as much technical talent as anyone who's launched a successful tech venture

Without any ego at all, I'd say, yes. I may not be absolutely up to speed on every aspect of the cadre of web technologies out there but that's not an issue. I'm comfortable with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript/Jquery and PHP. I am now switching to Python and Django due to a number of reasons not relevant to this discussion.

Can I code all of these technologies like a possessed monkey? No. My style is different. I rely on reference material to support what I need to do. I know what needs to be done and I get it done. In other words, to throw out an example, I know when a state machine is the best way to solve a problem, I know how to design it and code it right the first time. During that process I might need to look up language details here and there because in working with so many languages I decided a long time ago it was pointless to try and remember everythign about every single one of them. I get to job done. Now, if I am working on, say, Objective-C daily for weeks the reference material moves to the background pretty quickly as I don't have to "task switch" between five different technologies in the course of a week. Not sure if this is how young coders work at placed like Google. Perhaps they do rock at the tools required for the entire stack, from server to client-side. Or maybe they specialize and only do JS. Don't know.

> so will a com sci degree help?

I can't see how other than, perhaps, if employers or investors place value in the credentials. I understand that a degree is useful to establish a baseline. At the same time, I can code FizzBuzz just fine and, apparently most CS graduates can't code their way out of a paper bag. Currently crunching through ProjectEuler.net as a neat way to get better at Python.

The one area that's of great interest to me is machine learning and AI. I've dabbled in it here and there but my work never landed me solidly in projects where I had to learn the material. With all the new-found interest in robotics I find myself thinking that this is an area where I could do very well. I mean, I am expert level at Solidworks and fairly decent at mechanical design and can also do all of the electronics and software. I could see formal learning in ML being a good approach now that I am not busy trying to run a business from day to day. Yet, I find myself asking if that's reason enough to enter into a four+ year program when I could acquire the knowledge from one (or all!) of the excellent ML courses available online today. I'd have to bone-up on statistics, calculus and linear algebra before I could jump in head first. The difference is that I could do this on my own and only on the stuff I don't remember rather than having to endure a year and a half of math towards a degree.

As you can see, I am fairly biased against the whole idea of going for a degree at this juncture. Still, I want to keep an open mind and listen to reason before making a decision. Because my wife is not an engineer I don't think she understands what the landscape looks like for engineers my age, degree or not, any more than I might understand the nuances of her medical practice.

> I was in college less than a decade ago and we started with C

Right. Most anything an engineer (software or hardware) will do today probably wasn't taught in school ten years ago. If you are not learning new things on a constant basis you'll quickly become irrelevant. As an interesting point, I do have friends around my age who have not kept up as I have and are pretty much done with engineering as it's known today. One of them actually stopped doing hardware and software about fifteen years ago and shifted into management. He got laid off. He is unemployed. Nowhere to go.