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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?

#301
Just to add some inspiring notes to the thread — I've personally known several successful entrepreneurs who started tech companies while having kids (often 1+ kids).

Ranging from humble "providing okay level of life for the family" to ~1B valuation company (it's not 1password mentioned here, but comparably known company in its niche).

2 key insights I've got from those cases:

1) you'd better have a rock solid healthy relationships in your family

2) you have to become a god of time management and work prioritization

Most of them followed "classical" startup path of building a prototype while living on savings -> raising first money to survive death valley -> raising next rounds to scale found market fit.

Though I'm sure there are plenty of "side hustle solopreneurship" examples too.

TL;DR for me — it's doable? Yes. It's easy — hell no!

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

#302
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. My impression is that most parents are already overworked at their day jobs, and then proceed to not even workout. Lots of people don't even have hobbies.

I’ve heard a recommendation to can get a job that pays a little less for way less effort and save the energy for what I really want. A lot of people want to eat their cake and have it too though though. Hopefully building a money printing startup is enough of a hobby :)

The cake is always eaten, but what the cake is might not be apparent until it's too late

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

#303
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hal…

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

Yes, exactly. Given his increasing success elsewhere, it is suggested he would have to fall below billionaire status for the net change to run negative. The other commenter was quite clear that a a million dollar loss wouldn't see a net decline in his success, even though a million dollar loss would unquestionably be a decline in wealth.

> I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive.

We're talking about success, though, not positive qualities. Often the people with the most positive qualities aren't even considered successful at all. They are very much unrelated.

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

#304

VC here. If you're building a bootstrapped business, then starting as a side project and building up revenue until you can go full time is probably the way to go. If you're going the venture-backed route, I think there's a misconception that there's no salary or minimal salary at early stages when you're funded, but this is not true. Most founders take a reasonable salary, where reasonably is defined more by your per…

lol founders taking a salary... I got 5 startups for you to fund! Founders need to show a lot of work done / churn to get VC backed.

right. as if seed rounds grow on trees

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

#305
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah dude just "take" a salary from your seed round. lmao

Very rare for an investor to want a founder they invest in to be constantly worrying about money. Very good signal you shouldn’t be working with them if they don’t get that.

the point is getting a seed is hard

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

#306
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Have you ever had a job where you're on call 24x7x365, and nobody else can do it if you're not available? That's parenting.

Every relationship is different, but your spouse is also a person, with person needs. The stay at home parent still wants time to shower in peace, or a day where they don't feel like they play chauffeur, maid, nurse, and chef. It's a lot of work. Sometimes you need help. It is easy for it to feel one sided, and for a partner to feel like it's not much of a partnership.

If you make it through a day where they're just hungry, grumpy, and screaming as they sometimes do, and you haven't had 5 minutes to yourself that day, would you be happy your spouse was "just running a little late at the office" and arrived home 2 hours later than normal? Or maybe just after bedtime, so you did it all that day?

Numbers wise, if you have fifteen children, and five are toddlers, it's likely some are old enough to babysit. One thing I've realized about a lot of those old school big families is that the older kids spent a fair amount of time doing things parents do - walking the younger ones to school, keeping an eye on them at the park, cleaning the house, helping with cooking, etc.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon founded two companies Zip2 and X.com which merged with PayPal, was mega rich and didn’t need to work ever again on his own efforts, before even doing SpaceX and his other ventures

Even if entirely accurate, he also had a safety net in his father. Few get into Stanford, even fewer can afford to drop out to bet on some new market.

How is this "safety net" relevant? Literally millions of people in America have same or better "safety net". Are they some kind of lazy losers because they haven't earned billions like Elon had?

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but there's lots of other things that get missed when trying to give short feedback. I have a degree from a prestigious university and I've built relationships in the area I'm now trying to do business. I joined a golf club and a yacht club, I made friends with a former CEO of an NYSE listed company, I watched all the start-up school curriculum videos, I've been repeatedly rejected by YC (though we got an inter…

At which point is YC not worth the effort. You come off as being well enough connected to organically contact VCs. I've largely given up on the business side. I make small games I hope people enjoy. Not that there's tons of VC money going into video games anyway...

Hey, what's your gaming niche?

I've been trying to hunt down decent iPhone/Android games with decent polish/production values and no sinister monetization, but it just isn't working out.. Not counting Apple/Google/Netflix subscription options, I've only found maybe half a dozen games that are high enough quality that they could make it on a game console or PC.

I feel like this is an untapped market again, since some of the most successful and most popular games out there treat their customers with respect. Or at least, did at one point. The issue is that there's no way to discover games like that for customers, and no funding from publishers to make them.

(I wish I had some clever idea about what to do to re-energize that market.. I was thinking to make a review site a la TouchArcade, but I have no idea how to get it to take off and there aren't enough games to fully populate a site like that)

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

#309
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the flippant comment. You completely missed my point, but that’s ok, this is the internet.

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

#310
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the flippant comment. You completely missed my point, but that’s ok, this is the internet.

Didn't miss your point at all, just informing you that on the whole it's superficial and implied from my post. There is a myriad of things that many of us posting on Hacker News are lucky for, and it's not necessary to point them all out since it can be assumed from context.

To the extent that your reply telling me that I'm lucky to have the wife I have could possibly serve a purpose, it's to be dismissive and to make huge assumptions about me personally that you're frankly not in a position to make. It presumes that my marriage is the result of luck and happenstance and ignores the incredibly hard work and amount of effort that successful marriages require in order to make sure both partners are respected and satisfied.

To be honest, it's not at all uncommon for people who fail to find meaningful relationships, whether it's strong friendships or love to think that they just happen on their own through chance, instead of being something that actually requires putting in effort, compromise, communication, sacrifice, and yes it's true... it also involves luck as well.

Given the context and the general audience of people on this website in a position to meaningfully talk about starting a business, it is likely that said audience is very lucky for many many things; we don't need to point those out, what we need to do is determine how to best put that luck and the opportunities afforded to us towards a meaningful and productive life instead of squandering that luck away.

And finally, when someone prefaces a post with "with all due respect", that's usually a passive aggressive way of telling them off, so if you want people to afford you some degree of respect in the future then think about cutting that out.

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