81–90 of 172 posts
Starting a tech company is so cheap that funding should never be the bottleneck. If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea.
Starting a tech company is so cheap that funding should never be the bottleneck. If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea.
I rue the day when "tech company" came to equal "software company"... there are so many other kinds of tech, too.
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You're only looking the smallest of expenses. It also depends on how far along you already are with the company. For any non-trivial idea that you're trying to implement from scratch, (especially if you're doing all the work yourself) you're going to want to be able to work on it full time, which means you have living expenses. Depending on where you live, those can be quite high. You might need to pay for training m…
If you need living expenses, save up. If you live somewhere too expensive, move. "If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea." Sorry to be somewhat flip, but starting a tech company isn't complex, it's just difficult. These start-up costs are the easy part and if you can't solve them on your own, then a 10K infusion from the government isn't going to help you solve t…
1. I run a business. Therefore I make jobs. Or don't. 2. If I fire an employee, a portion of the cost of that person's unemployment claims is charged back to me. The employer. It isn't government largesse that funds unemployment claims. It's me. 3. Will this program be yet another potential cost to me? Hard to tell from the PR and press-gab. We'll have to see the law and how it is implemented. Devil in the details, e…
What could possibly go wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're only looking the smallest of expenses. It also depends on how far along you already are with the company. For any non-trivial idea that you're trying to implement from scratch, (especially if you're doing all the work yourself) you're going to want to be able to work on it full time, which means you have living expenses. Depending on where you live, those can be quite high. You might need to pay for training m…
If you need living expenses, save up. If you live somewhere too expensive, move. "If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea." Sorry to be somewhat flip, but starting a tech company isn't complex, it's just difficult. These start-up costs are the easy part and if you can't solve them on your own, then a 10K infusion from the government isn't going to help you solve t…
I think you're over-generalizing here. There's a big difference between a "tech company" that's an online TODO list monetized with Google Adwords, and a "tech company" that's selling enterprise knowledge management software to Fortune 2000 companies.
These start-up costs are the easy part
For some classes of startups, that's probably true. I argue that it's not true for all of them.
and if you can't solve them on your own, then a 10K infusion from the government isn't going to help you solve the actually difficult problems down the road.
Money is money for a startup... I don't see how it matters where founders "self funding" money comes from... stored savings, or this program. If you're self-funding / bootstrapping, you're self-funding/bootstrapping, full-stop.
I have my own issues with this program, being a libertarian who believes that the proper roles of government should be very limited... but within the context of the system we have, I can see this being very beneficial to certain would-be entrepreneurs.
Starting a tech company is so cheap that funding should never be the bottleneck. If your idea is too expensive to start with a laptop and cheap hosting, think of another idea.
I see your point, which is that you don't need a fancy office and an HR staff to get a company off the ground, but that doesn't mean every company can get to profitability on a laptop and cheap hosting.
genius. who needs voluntary transactions live venture capital or angels, what have they ever done? instead lets take money from everyone (if they don't like it we can lock them in a cage) and then give it to others who we decide are worthy.
Other option for people who don't like it: leave the country. You wouldn't know it listening to most people complaining but unemployment insurance was not something implemented in 2008, it goes back to the 1930s. That should have been plenty of warning for you to find a place with a tax rate and entitlement system to your liking. Sorry, there aren't a lot of options in the 1st world without taxes and entitlments, but…
Your underlying assumption is that the US can increase taxes and regulations indefinitely without consequence. But capital and talent are more mobile than ever before.
Record numbers have been renouncing citizenship in recent years (Google it). Most likely when the current flow of expatriation becomes a flood, though, there will suddenly be restrictions imposed on exit: an asset tax, a waiting period, anything to stop the talented from leaving. We've seen this movie before in East Germany, 1961. Remains to be seen whether the US government will do more than expropriate 50% of your assets (2008's exit tax) to deter you from leaving.
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all activities, or activities with associated revenue streams?
There are precedents for it being all activities . Particularly anything you're doing that would be in line with your usual profession, whether you're getting paid for it or not. The rules vary by state, though.
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This isn't a grant. It's a modification of the rules for unemployment insurance. It's a good change. It allows you to use unemployment insurance to pursue your own business for about half a year. Of course, for you to be eligible for unemployment insurance, you had to have been employed at some point and gotten fired. It's also a paltry sum. But, again, any movement in the right direction is a plus.
It's too bad that it's a modification of unemployment. I'd take this, but I have a job and it's next to impossible for me to be fired or laid off.
Though this program is geared toward people of all ages, young people are the best suited to maximize its advantages. Older generations tend to have families and other financial obligations, making it more difficult for them to transition into the roles of entrepreneurs.
I am married with a young child, and my salary covers all of my family's expenses, so my husband doesn't have the pressure to get cashflow-positive out of the gate. Contrast that with my younger, single self, when I burned through the start-up capital in a matter of months and had to take consulting gigs just to stay afloat on office expenses.
Young people can more easily adapt to less expensive lifestyles.
Young people care a lot more about what others think, the very foundation of "expensive lifestyles".
Further, young people have access to a wide range of resources, such as Income Based Repayment (IBR), SCORE, Startup America, [...]
IBR is a student loan repayment program, nothing to do with entrepreneurship. SCORE is open to all small businesses (and a waste of time, in my experience). Startup America targets young companies, not young people. And so on...