91–100 of 256 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The intuition behind it still stands - if you're going to not fail 65% of the time when you try 10 times, that's pretty decent.
External factors (such as age, cost, or economy) may prevent you from reaching the 10th time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I recall of chances of success, earlier failures do not correlate with success - either way. So basically one is throwing fair dice every time. I might be recall wrong...
That is with dice. Startups are not independent random events because some people are better at making startups than other people are.
I remember reading something that corroborated this [1]. That source claimed that previous founders of successful companies had a much greater chance at additional success, but previous failures didn't increase your chances (ie. you don't, in fact, learn more from failure than success -- at least when it comes to founding failed startups).
Edit adding source: [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=933932
The math on this makes no sense at all. > - Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save. - Do this for a year. - Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. - Celebrate by living off of $30k a year. - Do this for three years. - Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year in…
4% withdrawal rate is a conservative figure often used to live “forever” from a portfolio (use 3% if you want to be more conservative, 5-6% for more risk friendly). To get $30k a year, that’s a starting portfolio of $750k. [0] If you’re making $140k a year and living frugally, you can amass $750k in less than 10 years, perhaps even 5-7 if you are really frugal + lucky with the market. It’s within reach of most softwa…
You live on $30K / year (in the Bay Area/NY, where you're most likely to find a starting / junior / midrange position that offers $140K - remembering that needs to be liquid)...
and after your ten years of "living frugally" (and let's be clear, it's gonna be frugal with $2500/month rent for a 1br 600 sqft apartment eating up well, 100% of your after-savings income, so you're going to be rooming with someone)...
That's what you've got for the rest of your life. Your $750K nest egg will give you an 80% chance of being able to supply $30K/year. Sure, now you can use it to work on your own stuff, but until (and unless) that catches on...
No one's mentioned it yet, so I guess I'll be the one. I can't tolerate that many misspelt words and grammatical errors...
> . . . grammatical errors.. Normally we only put one period at the end of a sentence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I recall of chances of success, earlier failures do not correlate with success - either way. So basically one is throwing fair dice every time. I might be recall wrong...
That is with dice. Startups are not independent random events because some people are better at making startups than other people are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe you learned tons and it makes your 10th attempt more likely to succeed? Ultimately these ponderations are kind of meaningless in the absence of great data to frame them with.
At which number would you no longer make the point you just made? 100 failed startups? 50,000? You’ve got a lot of faith in people. My number is maybe 5.
In 2003, I started selling chat bots on the Internet.
In 2005, I cofounded an affiliate marketing website that cracked the Alexa top 10k
In 2007, I built an app that scaled to 100k MAUs and was acquired for $20K
In 2009, I started a SaaS but couldn't break $~600/month in revenue.
In 2010, I built a business that ran for over 5 years and supported me entirely for two of them, but probably grossed less than $100K total revenue. But it couldn't grow, as I struggled to find a repeatable and predictable customer acquisition channel.
In 2013, I got involved in Bitcoin. Finally one home run after a portfolio of mediocrity. [I am choosing to omit various projects from this list, but between 2003-present, there have been a lot.]
In 2013, I also started doing stock market research with ruby. In 2015, my work had attracted enough momentum to bring on an outside angel investor and even piloted the strategy in the markets with $1.5MM. Didn't perform that well; investors withdrew their capital.
In 2017, I started a SaaS that is currently doing ~$2800/month in revenue. I also did consulting. I grossed about $190K this year from my business efforts - note, that's nearly 10 times faster (in terms of growing revenue) than I was 7 years ago. I also fixed a major hole in my previous business skillset, i.e., predictably acquiring customers - something I could never do for the biz in 2010. Furthermore, I have a lot more emotional maturity than I did 7 years ago - though Sam Altman was precociously mature, with the "emotional maturity of a 40 year old" (Paul Graham, on meeting Stanford undergraduate Sam Altman).
So I can tell you definitively, that:
- My skills are expanding due to systematically resolving the deficiencies in previous attempts.
- These improvements are a result of deliberate practice.
- Some people may have the ancillary skills, resources or characteristics that position them to perform better from early on - YC seems to be adept at identifying these people, but also credit them for making 1,500+ bets.
- My best success to-date has been as a result of luck.
I'm 30 years old now.
The math on this makes no sense at all. > - Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save. - Do this for a year. - Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. - Celebrate by living off of $30k a year. - Do this for three years. - Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those numbers are ridiculous. I saved up about $100k in 3 years at a tech job and I haven't worked in the last two years on that, no problem (living in a not-inexpensive US city with a car, also).
His actual income (after Apple and paying the original game creator) was $276k - which replenished the savings he had cashed-out for development time and then gave him several more years of development on sequels/prequels.
Edit: It seems the $800k includes Apple's cut. As an app developer myself, even considering that amount is torturing yourself. Apple _only_ report the remaining 70%, especially when you consider promo codes, refunds, etc... - doing a crude sales*price is somewhat inaccurate.
(Fun fact: I'm an Australian developer. Of the amount I get paid, I also need to deduct sales tax for any sales I make to Australian consumers. For a 99c app, I would make 63c for Australian sales and 70c for other countries).
The math on this makes no sense at all. > - Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save. - Do this for a year. - Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. - Celebrate by living off of $30k a year. - Do this for three years. - Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year in…
4% withdrawal rate is a conservative figure often used to live “forever” from a portfolio (use 3% if you want to be more conservative, 5-6% for more risk friendly). To get $30k a year, that’s a starting portfolio of $750k. [0] If you’re making $140k a year and living frugally, you can amass $750k in less than 10 years, perhaps even 5-7 if you are really frugal + lucky with the market. It’s within reach of most softwa…