Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

Everyone says the market is frothy and startups raise unreal sums of money they don't even need at high valuations, yet I'm failling to. I never attended Stanford, didn't work at FAANG and I'm not even from the US, so I don't have relationships with founders/investors. I'm technical, yet need engineers to launch. I built an mvp, pivoted, did customer development etc. I'm full time for over a year, and I'm 25. The market is fairly new and many don't understand it, but I've been working in this space for 8 years, been working with biggest companies. I have multiple ideas I'm confident about if this one will fail. If you had a similar story - please tell it, especially if you failed.

So should I sell my house to fund my startup to some milestone? I don't need cars nor houses, I only care about building stuff and learning, only things that make me happy. Should I YOLO the fuck out of my life?

No, you should not. Chances of it working out are probably slim. You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest. Hiring should be done once the business is already generating an income, and should be scaled based on that income.

What happens is that if you do sell your house, (assuming you'll pay rent) things will get a lot more stressful for yourself financially, and this will severely hinder your mental performance and chances of success.

An even better idea would be to get a regular job and bootstrap your business in your spare time, on weekends. Once it takes off, you can quit the job and focus full time in it. Successful startups coming from this kind of environments are way more common than those coming from YOLO, all-in approaches you are thinking of. And this is precisely because of the way the mammal nervous system works. The ability to do creative mental work is severely impacted when under a perceived threat (financial doom in this case).

I wouldn't. Having a place to be is nice for those times when you doubt yourself.

It's not the same being homeless than being unemployed.

Sure, never planned to pour everything into the startup, just some funding to launch and show more traction, then raise a round, or switch to another idea. Makes it possible to iterate more quickly and try more things, but yeah I will need to pay rent and still will have to get a job if my ventures won't be successful, so not much changes?

No don't shoulder all risk yourself, find investors, if it ever works out there will be more than enough to go around.