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

I want to start my own company, but Im not sure how to pay my bills while looking for product-market-fit.

I have a well paying job now, and I am pretty sure I would throw my marriage into chaos if I told my wife I was leaving my job to pursue a start up. Shes not stupid, she knows start ups have like a 90% failure rate.

So the question is: how do I continue my current standard of living for my family while working on a startup?

Are all startups at my age generally side hustles that become profitable enough to quit my day job?

Does anyone here have experience with this?

At 34 (but with no kids) I agreed with my wife that I could have 4 years with a sanity check at the end of year 2.

I also agreed that it would be an ABSOLUTE rule that I could not put any of my own money into the company. This included the $10 for buying the first domain.

I ended up selling 20% of my company to a friend for $5k when it was just weekend hacking with him getting diluted to a $2.5m valuation once I've been full time for 40 months.

[Edit] It massively helps that my wife is a partner at a law firm so we can pay bills etc, without having to have saved the cushion in advance. I also arranged to leave my previous employer with a 6-figure exit payment.

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.

Where in the world do you live and what social security systems are in place? What savings do you have?

Why do you want to start your own company? Is it because you’re sick of answering to people, or because you believe you have a genuine solution to a genuine need.

Aside from all of these points, the brutal reality of starting businesses is that it can be very risky and capital intensive, if you have doubts, you should consider why.

Over in the UK, many in the startup scene appear to be from upper middle class backgrounds or ex-bankers/finance. These people have security through assets they have inherited or earned.

Aside from that, you can be a contractor and grow your customer base from there, this is likely to be less risky.

Simple, do what all the highly successful people do: abandon your family, and become a fully self-centered asshole FTW!!!