Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody even thinks about your legacy after you’re dead. Nobody has that much time. They’re all worried about themselves.
Then why are people like Steve Jobs held in such esteem?
Steve who ?
Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#32Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#33None. The company has trouble staying alive with me alive. It will be gone when I'm dead. Heck, the one that got acquired died even with me in an advisory position. There will always be competitors. Some may spawn or be inspired later. Someone eventually does the same thing but better. It's probably overengineering to try to keep a company alive longer than me. The primary responsibility is keeping my kids alive shou…
Beyond life insurance, what have you done to ensure your descendants future?
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#34Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#35None. The company has trouble staying alive with me alive. It will be gone when I'm dead. Heck, the one that got acquired died even with me in an advisory position. There will always be competitors. Some may spawn or be inspired later. Someone eventually does the same thing but better. It's probably overengineering to try to keep a company alive longer than me. The primary responsibility is keeping my kids alive shou…
Beyond life insurance, what have you done to ensure your descendants future?
Bought them a round of Ferraris
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#36[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#37None. The company has trouble staying alive with me alive. It will be gone when I'm dead. Heck, the one that got acquired died even with me in an advisory position. There will always be competitors. Some may spawn or be inspired later. Someone eventually does the same thing but better. It's probably overengineering to try to keep a company alive longer than me. The primary responsibility is keeping my kids alive shou…
Beyond life insurance, what have you done to ensure your descendants future?
Life insurance is one thing, but it has to be managed well. My will puts it into a fund that distributes it at a monthly rate until they're a certain age, so it doesn't get used up all at once. The rate is a little higher for college aged and some conditions let them cover college fee directly from the pool. There's also named guardians in case my wife dies too, and they get a caregivers stipend.
There's also a lot of stuff that isn't clearly handled by inheritance laws - crypto, steam games, income from say, Google Play, passwords, so you have to set that up as well.
Also because software made me paranoid about failsafes, I took a separate life insurance in case the people in charge of my will screws over the kids, so they'll get a lump sump once I die.
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#38Why? I don't think you would be in any relevant position at all to care about a startup which is run by you in case you die. Your family can't run it, others can't just take it over and you are 6 feet under. Get life insurance and stop worrying about this if you haven't brought the company far enough yet.
Once we are dead, our legacy is what is left of us. Since it all amounts to nothing, might as well try to make a dent in history. Maybe we'll be one of the ones people are still quoting two thousand years later without even realizing it ([... do]lorem ipsum dolor sit amet).
Perhaps.
Probably not.
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#39There was a very similar question posted two years ago, and it has a great reply by patio11: > There are, roughly, three very different rationales to have business succession planning in place, and at the scale of a solo operator they have very different best options available: > 1) I want to avoid negatively impacting paying clients in the event of a bus factor issue. > 2) I want to avoid negatively impacting "the c…
This was great, thank you.
Re: Ask HN: Solo founders, what’s your got-hit-by-a-bus strategy?
#40Open-source it. I don't really advise running any business 100% solo, but I have done it for a while until my company has grown a bit. At that time and now (with my current new project), my strategy is to open-source it if something happens to me. Then, any customer or close person can take it from where I left it.
Interesting answer - makes a lot of sense.
I’m on (what sounds like) a similar path to yours - in that the SaaS is growing nicely (and will one day afford a team and hopefully scale sustainably) but currently there is significant key-man risk.
My main concern is for my customers, so your open source idea sounds very practical.
How did you set this up? Do you have a private GitHub repo for example? With a Will / procedure to open it to customers?
Just trying to understand the practical execution of this idea.