Ask HN: How do you earn your money?

I am currently working in my startup with some friends. I believe firmly that what I do is everyone's dream, though the need to have a stready income is greater for most.

I also have a part time job at the university, so I do have some sources of income. My startup provides no income, and takes a lot of time.

You can be happy both working at a company, and you can feel ownership to something you have made for that company, even though it might be labeled without your name. It all comes down to what you really want.

In any case I would say the time to try something for yourselves would be before you have ties somewhere, being a wife/kids, a car etc.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to live a good period of time with no money, and are prepared to work literally every hour of your day for a long, long time, I would go for it. If not the need to survive will become greater.

When creating something, unless you utterly hate the concept of the very thing you are making, I would say you gain a sense of ownership towards it. If you made the Paper app for Facebook you would certainly be proud of yourself.

    > The reason so many people are content with being employees,
    > rather than striking it out on their own, has to do (at least in
    > part) with their risk tolerance.

It's that now pretty much all day I can do what I like doing (programming) and come home at the end of the day and wind down from work.

If you're starting your own company you have to worry about everything involved in that tiny company from acquiring clients to managing staff to building the product, if that's something you want that's fine, but it's not something I'm particularly interested in.

I also very much enjoy working on programming problems at the scale you can only find in bigger companies, if I were to start my own company now and it grew like crazy at best I could get back to the level of problems I solve at work now in 10 years or so.

This is one reason why I try to limit myself to working with companies that are on a mission that I believe in.

A side effect is that it also seems to be easier to find a job there because these companies love hiring people who are passionate about the same thing as them. Cold emailing is fine if you can show good reasons why, and even more so when you come bearing gifts.

Background - employed software developer for 15 years.

I really don't see a problem with building other people's dreams. In fact, I enjoy it and have been rewarded for it well over the last 15 years. I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from some amazing developers and to build some very cool products. At the moment, I don't have an entrepreneurial dream and I may never have one. I am content to make a living doing what I love to do - which is simply to write software.

I don't think the issue is risk aversion or not following your dream. I just think that different people have different dreams and desires. At the risk of sounding like a Disney firework show - follow your dream. If you have a dream of owning your own business, you can make a plan to do that. That might involve striking out on your own early or later in life. I think you just have to ask yourself what you want.