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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?

#41

Post by lpolovets »

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 personal needs than anything else. $100k-$150k salaries are pretty common at seed. That's not Google level, but it's not bad. Here's a thread on that: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1365123608905879555

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

#42

Post by thisisbrians »

As usual: it depends.

I don't think you have to drink the hustle koolaid to succeed. I think individual output/hr. follows a power law distribution like most everything else. A lot of younger founders work crazy hours to overcome their lack of experience.

What's more important is your fitness to address the particular problem you choose to work on, the folks you team up with to do so, the timing relative to market needs, and the amount of time you can operate with little/no revenue. Having more work hours to dedicate can certainly help, but I've seen both people that overwork and people with ~normal schedules succeed.

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

#44

Post by pcthrowaway »

etothepii wrote: post #19
bmitc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also arranged to leave my previous employer with a 6-figure exit payment. How does that even work?

Throughout my career I'd survived 7 redundancy rounds. One time I chose not to survive. When management raised the idea of moving my team to Ireland I negotiated for exit payment rather than making the usual case about how important my role was.

Were you in fintech or other highly classified work? I've only heard of employers paying (former?) employees for basically a year of their salary on "garden leave", where the employee is kept on the payroll without doing any work in order to prevent them being able to bring trade secrets to a competitor

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

#46

Post by andrew_ »

I'm 44 and starting a few small startups; individual SaaS products that are small enough to be able to complete to market in a reasonable amount of time in between responsibilities. Unfortunately that's been a year in the making now. Fortunately it continues to progress. There's an old saying; "progress is better than perfection" and I feel it applies to this phase of life trying to accomplish this sort of thing.

The biggest thing for me was mitigating risk. I have a full time job that I'm keeping while doing this, and I've leveraged things like using Wyoming for an LLC to reduce fees and cost of having the business entity, and startup credits on cloud providers to kick off the business at minimal cost. If I fail, I probably won't be out much other than the time I've invested and about $1000. Worth the risk of another income stream, and a better bet than the casino.

Also want to add that my top and first priorities are my children and financial responsibilities. The startup comes second.

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

#48

Post by thenerdhead »

If you look at statistics of successful founders, the average age is like 45+. Why? Because you now have time to start a startup and you went through all the lessons in your 20s.

The answer is simple. You keep building on the side part time until it can become your full time thing. There are plenty of success stories from people in their 30s with families who made the transition (rare, but there's plenty).

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

#49

Post by princevegeta89 »

roustem wrote: post #5

My friend and I started it as a side job, working nights and weekends. We also downsized and cut all our expenses to about $1,000/month (mortgages were smaller back in 2005). We quit our full-time jobs when 1Password revenues were close to $80,000/year.

Great story. Did you have a family with kids at that time as well?

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

#50

Post by pc86 »

lpolovets wrote: post #41

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…

If you're not a FAANG engineer, and like 95% of people work somewhere that doesn't give you a ton of stock or RSUs, and you don't live in a super expensive metro, $100-150k is basically strong mid/weak senior money. I know plenty of places hiring with no stock, no bonuses, and seniors top out at $160k or so. They hire capable engineers no problem.

With that in mind, taking a pay cut into the middle of that range to do your own thing and potentially make a lot more isn't as drastic as going from a $400k FAANG job to a $35k ramen-every-meal situation.

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