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

I think I understand what you mean. Bootstrap = use your current salary. VC = use startup funds to pay yourself but it gets touchy real quick.

I currently make 140k in MCOL, so to hear that taking a 140k salary isnt out of the question, eventually, is reassuring.

Hi there! I'm someone currently doing this. I'm CTO at a small startup in Oakland, am married, have a 4-month-old, have a mortgage. CEO just turned 40, also has a mortgage, is married, and has two kids.

Like everything, there's tradeoffs in time and money. Will you move faster if you're spending all of your time hustling on the startup? Maybe! Not every business and not every startup requires 24/7 hustle. Does this force ruthless prioritization? Yes. That's a good thing!

It also means my cofounder and I are very cautious in hiring, using offshore contractors anywhere we can, because we know that the pool we're dipping into is legitimately our own salaries. This is also a good thing! Paying yourself enough to live on without stress and keeping all other expenses low and tight is still "running lean" in my book.

Ok, so how: We got lucky of course, but some of that luck can be replicated. My CEO already knew some VCs from previous networking; those VCs gave us some pre-seed working capital, which allowed us to build enough to get more VCs on board, which gave us a year+ of runway to keep building. We did a _lot_ of pre-vetting with our target market before building, and the nice thing about pre-vetting is you can do it while you still have a job working for someone else.

The thing to remember as a founder is that part of why tech companies provide great salaries and so many perks is so their employees can be at work and fully focus on the work. You should treat yourself like a valued employee as a founder, and create the conditions for you to do your best work, which probably means not stressing about paying the mortgage.

The hustle and drive should come from your passion for the business and the approaching zero cash day, not forcing your family to live on ramen.

> if I told my wife I was leaving my job to pursue a start up

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but is the plan to make a decision and then telling your wife your about it? If no, then you can skip the next part.

If you answered yes, then I have one suggestion for you: ask your wife how she would feel about you perusing a startup. If a startup means dealing with financial risk, more work, less free time, have an idea about how you would handle that. Many founders' startups are built on the sacrifice of their partners' labor, time, and careers. This often goes unacknowledged.

Think about how you would feel if she decided to found a business and told you that you would have to start making sacrifices? If you are thinking, "That is something I would like to have input on," do right by her by asking her before making a decision. You signed up to have a partnership, right? That means meeting her as an equal in the decision making process. This isn't an opportunity to convince her either, it's an opportunity to explore the second and third order effects together and decide together if this is the right move or not.

I agree with all of this. Fortunately my spouse is very supportive, she just doesnt want to become destitute, and I cant blame her.

Also fortunately, we are both boring homebodys and she wouldnt really have a problem with me working on this every night.

I think the toughest part ends up being the time between when you leave your job and when you raise your first funding round. That could be a 1-2 month gap, or it could be a year. Best advice there is that you can probably do some of the initial startup work while working somewhere (e.g. customer interviews, spec'ing out a product, recruiting a cofounder, maybe even launching something), so that when you leave your job you can do a fundraise soon and have decent confidence in the company you want to build.