One of the reasons is Immigration issues if you are working in other country (USA). Having H1B visas and pending Green Card (permanent residency) application are most common reasons of not able to leave your current employer. These laws are so strict and complicated, that it's not easy to leave the job and start your company.
Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?
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Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?
#52One of the reasons is Immigration issues if you are working in other country (USA). Having H1B visas and pending Green Card (permanent residency) application are most common reasons of not able to leave your current employer. These laws are so strict and complicated, that it's not easy to leave the job and start your company.
Good point, forgot about that one. I know people in that situation - not sure if they're looking to do a startup, but if they did it would be hard for them to leave their current company.
Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?
#536 and 5 are closely related. The way it worked for me was to (a) generate and *polish* the idea; (1) make sure it is technically sound (2) not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy (3) maps well on business opportunities (4) does not have IP (patents, licenses, etc) problems (b) implement it about 80-90% through, prepare solid beta (c) release beta and see how it's does (d) if all goes well, evaluate the progress and estima…
I'd love to hear some reasoning behind: "not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy" Who cares if it's easy to copy? Paul Buccheit says he built the first version of Gmail in an afternoon. Digg was famously built in fairly short order. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook-- all would be fairly trivial to clone. Less trivial to scale, obviously but... Feature-wise their V1 releases weren't that complex. If you want something that you ca…
Much more important if you're working part time and your competitors are working full time. The longer they take, the more life you have.
Re: Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?
#54I am working on it in my spare time, mostly since I have to pay bills.