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

Rule #1: don't listen to sweeping statements about law on HN.

I ask because I know multiple talented people using this as an excuse to not use their abilities as they claim they want to.

My ignorant guess would be people these days think you need to spend a ton of time with your family because other people blame their problems on absent parents? That's why I'm asking to be educated so I can be less ignorant about the burden of parents. Naively, if I had a kid (not that I plan to, don't worry lol) I wouldn't care about spending time, just feed, clean and transport, not that much worse than pets burdenwise. I would expect kids and spouses to understand the nature of the real world (when they grow older for kids).

My perspective changed when I had kids. And I had kids close together, Matter than friends to boot.

Mostly I realized how’s much time I was wasting to that point in life and I stopped.

It’s perfectly possible to do a startup at any age. Know many people who do and have.

Kids were a perfect prioritization and decision aid in my case. It makes you perfectly serious about doing what needs to be done. Innovation can happen just fine with constraints.

Leading up to it if you don’t have good adult habits and skills you probably some be a lasting successful entrepreneur anyways.

Doing a startup is a lot like being responsible for a baby. Some things need to be done whether you like them or not. Status aren’t just about working on the fun parts.

Getting it right also means making sure you are the kind of example you want to be for them to take their own shots. Sacrificing parents can better a sense of sacrifice in kids and it might be a cycle someone is looking to break.

Would there be more time before kids? Sure. But hard to find people in their 20s a made the most of their time beyond chasing every shiny thing. Generally our standards for how we spend our time are lost in our 20s and improves as we become more well rounded.

You only start getting good and dangerous in your 30s and 40s. It’s why so many vcs are older, they buy the years of young people and are ok if it goes no where.

If you don’t want to be a statistic, you can look at bootstrapping smaller and then growing. There are funds like tinyseed and others that specialize in it.

In your CV 30s you probably have insight in an industry need that you could bang out and have making money per easily to transfer to the next thing. HN might not be the place for this kind of thought especially if it’s orthogonal to the vc echo chamber that attracts a following and needs a decade to see in balance with other options.

If success is freedom of time, attention and resources where you want to put them, the path of startups as you are implying (likely funded) might not be compatible with you.

Todays the youngest you’ll ever be. If not now, then when?