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Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#291

Post by paulryanrogers »

j45 wrote: post #181
julianlam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100%. When people ask me what the best time is to work on a startup, it's always when you have no dependents, living with parents, and perhaps no significant other. It's quite amazing just how much you can skim down your expenses at that point in life. Minimizing expenses, maximizing runway. The rest is luck. Just blind luck.

Lots of indie hackers defeat blind luck and exit as much as the small percentage founders receive in a funded startup. Lots of good reading out there

Right it's a lottery, with very expensive tickets. You may have to pay with years of your life for each one, possibly significant others.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#292

Post by hack-burn-123 »

Have some experience with this ... using burner to be 100% honest and say things that I normally don't get to say to anyone else.

I left very good paying job in 2008 ($400-$500k+) right after my first child was born to pursue startup life. To be honest, I had a romanticized notion of startups before going into it. In my defense, I was working at a very successful company that itself had been a runaway hit startup, and it sure looked easy while I was there. I never really thought about how many startups fail, never thought of how quickly you can burn through your savings with no income, and never really thought about the impacts on my family.

15 years later and multiple not-so-successful startups later I'm still grinding it out. Making enough that I can scratch out a living but still making a lot less than if I had stayed employed. Yes, each startup up that I've done has provided me with a lottery ticket with big upside potential, but no home runs yet. I do have a very interesting public profile that people like and respect, so I guess that's a cool kind of non-monetary currency. Current business I'm working now could be decent sized over time as a regular old business, but we shall see.

I will say that every day I'm wracked with guilt regarding whether I made the right decision to pursue the path that I'm on. I wonder whether I've harmed my wife and children and provided them with a less than stable future. I am saddened as a man that I not the provider that I want to be and I feel shame in the sense that I'm not providing as well as others do. I hate worrying about money and I hate thinking about what could have been if I stayed employed. These feelings have complicated my marriage, and while my wife still supports me, I often hear the disappointment in her voice when we talk about our finances.

My recommendation would be to do a start up only if "you can" or "you must". "You can" means that you have a lot of wealth laid up already, or you have a spouse who can carry the income burden alone and doesn't mind doing so. "You must" means you have no other options and you can't find another job or you're simply unemployable for some reason.

A boring, stable life is greatly under-appreciated and I think our society fetishes entrepreneurs to a fault.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#293

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Kranar wrote: post #267
SoftTalker wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats to you that you've made this work. I've made attempts at the "super efficient optimise every moment" thing and it always eventually collapses for me with severe mental exhaustion. I cannot be "on" that much. It just isn't in me.

Yep absolutely, it's not for everyone. One question I'd ask of you is do you exercise regularly? The one thing I'd say that gave me the kind of energy to be "on" all the time is having a daily exercise/cardio routine and changing my eating habits. Not saying this works for everyone, but the effect that doing that had on my life was enormous.

Kranar, with all due respect, you are lucky to have a partner who shares the responsibilities equally. All it takes is for one 1/2 not to contribute equally - or to be a single parent - and your plan would simply not work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#294

Post by _8j50 »

doubled112 wrote: post #262
_8j50 wrote: post #176

Can you educate on why the existence of wife and children is such a burden? Is it social committments? Children don't take up 8+ hours a day after 1yro+ And wives... get one that understands stuff like this? I ask because I know multiple talented people using this as an excuse to not use their abilities as they claim they want to. My ignorant guess would be people these days think you need to spend a ton of time with…

> I wouldn't care about spending time, just feed, clean and transport, not that much worse than pets burdenwise This stuck out to me. I'm not sure if you're serious, but I'll bite. Kids need more than pets. They're people, not a puppy. You can't just leave them to figure it out on their own, nor can you lock them in a box with a tablet and some Cheerios, although I'm sure most parents have wished they could from time…

What can I say, thanks for educating me on that. If I may ask a follow up, I know one guy whose wife doesn't work, if your spouse (man or woman) is willing to stay home until they are 5-6, how can they still use the family excuse?

You have changed my mind about the burdens of parents but I wonder how people were able to raise 10-15 kids, sometimes 5 of them will be toddlers at the same time.

I look at what you said and I see why people are having less kids these days as well, maybe stay at home parents are not supported or encouraged enough?

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#295

Post by Kranar »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #293
Kranar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep absolutely, it's not for everyone. One question I'd ask of you is do you exercise regularly? The one thing I'd say that gave me the kind of energy to be "on" all the time is having a daily exercise/cardio routine and changing my eating habits. Not saying this works for everyone, but the effect that doing that had on my life was enormous.

Kranar, with all due respect, you are lucky to have a partner who shares the responsibilities equally. All it takes is for one 1/2 not to contribute equally - or to be a single parent - and your plan would simply not work.

I am very lucky and never said otherwise. I am lucky to have an amazing daughter, to live in an amazing country, an amazing wife, to have had all of the opportunities afforded to me.

Not that you explicitly state it, but don't assume that because someone is successful or is giving advice to people about potential paths they can pursue, that they are ungrateful or don't appreciate their life circumstances. One of the other things I'm grateful for are the mentors and role models who have shared their knowledge with me and I'm happy they did so without being drowned out by people dismissing their success as simply due to luck.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#296

Post by atzero »

jensneuse wrote: post #120

Hey, I'm Jens. I'm 34, married, with two kids (1 and 3), and I'm also the founder of WunderGraph ( https://wundergraph.com ). I've done exactly what you're trying to do. Let me give you the playbook. In preparation, I've done years of research in the field I'm working on (APIs, Integrations, developer experience). So you need a clear advantage. Next, choose a topic that you're thrilled to be working on for many years…

Hey OP here, thanks for all the advice and the offer at the end. However I am nowhere near ready to start down this path so maybe way down the line ill send you a DM haha.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#297

Post by atzero »

esel2k wrote: post #99

If read through nearly all comments but can’t see where you say « why » you want this? To become a billionaire? To leave your job that makes you sick? To have a more exciting job? I am mid-30s 2kids good, not crazy paying job (think 160-200k$ range TCO) and spend time with kids and travel 1-2x amazing trips a year with them. I decided not to give up that precious time and don’t regret it so far. But what I did is cha…

Because I have an idea I cant stop thinking about and I feel like ill regret it the rest of my life if I dont try it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#298

Post by dangus »

earino wrote: post #95
dangus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your advice, because it amounts to "sit around and do nothing, give up on your goals." I know someone who has a family who stated a side business in their spare time in their 30's. It started extremely modestly using just some spare time, and I think a lot of people have at least some spare time. The average person spends, what, 4 hours a day watching TV? If OP has an hour a day they can make at least…

I agree with a lot of the sentiment of your comment, particularly about introspecting and understanding what your reason for doing a startup is. I think that's very good advice. However I don't feel that "being a solid professional making a solid wage, and be a good parent and partner" amounts to "sit around and do nothing, give up on your goals." I feel like the advice I gave is "wait until the time is right", which…

I still think your original comment was way closer to "don't bother trying " than that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#299

Post by atzero »

jakobnilsen wrote: post #271

I did this seven years ago as the sole provider for the family. We did not have any savings, so it turned out to be a very busy time for me. I had two years of overlap of the paying job and startup. I am opposed to the common advice of waiting until the children move out to pursue the dream of owning your own company. My father did this and bought a small startup that already had some traction when he was 55. He spen…

Is there any non obvious pitfalls that I should know about? I mean theres the general pitfalls about starting a company that everyone on HN knows, but anything about starting a company in your 30s?

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

#300

Post by HWR_14 »

randomdata wrote: post #290
HWR_14 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person I was responding to used wealth as the signal of success. But, unless I mispredict how things will go at Twitter over the next year, we are likely to see a major failure attributed to Elon. Again, not that he won't be fantastically wealthy or successful. But he will probably take a nasty hit to both his wealth and his reputation because of Twitter.

He alluded to Musk's wealth being the only signal that may have diminished. His presence in the public mind has blown up more than ever as of late, so on that metric alone his success is growing. It would require a substantial hit elsewhere (like his wealth) to see diminishing success overall.

That's not what the poster said. He said that if unless Musk was no longer a billionaire Musk was still successful.

I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive. Most of the news for Elon this year has been: "billionaire tries to back out of ill advised takeover event", "billionaire loses lawsuit", "speed run to twitter's destruction", "advertisers pause relationship with Twitter", "fires half of twitter workforce, then asks some of those people to come back to work", "loyalty oath leaves some twitter teams with 0 or 1 employees", "locks doors of Twitter until Monday following, changes mind and asks all twitter employees to race in Friday night"

Taking the sink into Twitter was lighthearted and fun. Everything since then was a disaster. It hasn't made Musk look like a good leader. Literally doing nothing would have been a better plan, and he still could have made news whenever he wanted by doing anything - after he knew what he wanted to do.

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