131–140 of 339 posts
Congrats! Not sure how many employees you have, but as you get into the $200-$500k owner discretionary earnings level, definitely take a look at small business retirement plans. If it is just you, or just you and a family member, you can use something like a Solo401k to defer up to $69k in earnings to retirement accounts. The “personal” side of that (like $22k) can be Roth.
I'm currently contributing roughly that amount into a SEP IRA.
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not my friend, so let's not pretend. My response had nothing about whataboutism, and I am skeptical that you even know what that means based on your reply. I am directly saying that you are speaking from a high moral chair, while likely not actually doing anything to help the world. Its okay, I do the same thing, the difference between you and me is that I am not pretending to be Gandhi. Oh here is a definiti…
I think you two agree more than it seems. You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse…
"with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily"
Poverty around the world is being reduced on a massive scale. There are undeniable issues with wealth gaps, but the world population is still benefiting greatly from the imbalanced amount of downstream wealth coming to it.
"The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago"
The world has been dominated by these ideas for the majority of its existence. Several of the world powers still operate within these ideas, not to mention many of the third world countries, the power just moves from regime to regime. Acting like authoritarianism is "new" because the OP just got an inkling of it in their own country is pretty dense.
TLDR op just plucked a few news headlines that get re-iterated and made that their world view.
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
No way that 7, 15x is realistic. From my previous 2 startups none were sold for more than 4x. And these were healthy growing +10m businesses. I am not sure where you got those numbers from. I am curious.
So good to see some actual Startup News on here. I miss the old days of this site when things were more optimistic and less click-bait.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference when the 'product' is the company itself? When a buyer comes along offering 7-15x the company's earnings for it, why is that not 'the actual value it provides' them?
Company acquisition is possible without the existence of a stock market. What I’m objecting to is the latter.
Their tinypilot kvm works. It's in the category of boring infrastructure - I leave it plugged into whatever machine is currently in need of attention and ` https://tinypilot/ ` connects to it. Little box hanging off the PoE switch, much less bother than plugging a keyboard and monitor in. Especially so when I'm away from the office. Recommended. Saved me a lot of hassle. Thanks for the product! I'd like to be able to…
It's a good idea for a feature - many other out-of-band solutions have this. I think the issue comes mostly in that you would need to unplug the server to add (and remove...) some kind of relay-controlled power interrupt. I would assume that most users of this are in a rack/datacenter/server environment and have switched PDUs they can remotely trigger power with, and it might make more sense to build in PDU managemen…
[0] of course most of time it would just go under the radar, but you can find yourself in trouble, especially if the device malfunctions
You are an inspiration. I have been following your journey since your post about quitting Google hit the HN front page. And what a wild ride it has been.
You tried many projects (https://mtlynch.io/projects/), and it took a while for you to find your winning idea. And I have read each of your retrospectives on TinyPilot (https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/) and know that it wasn't easy.
Your journey shows how hard it is to build a business (especially hardware-based), but with discipline and perseverance, it's definitely possible to create one as a solo founder.
I also have a business idea that I would like to work on, but I am not ready to quit my full-time job yet. I have a few questions for you:
1. Have you always been so disciplined in life? If not, how did you improve it? 2. As you shared here (https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/), doubts are natural when you haven't succeeded yet; how did you keep going? Did you ever come close to giving up and going back to corporate America? 3. I believe you have a partner; how did this affect your relationship with your partner? 4. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
If you are ever in NYC, please hit me up; I would love to buy you a drink and chat more in person.
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
No way that 7, 15x is realistic. From my previous 2 startups none were sold for more than 4x. And these were healthy growing +10m businesses. I am not sure where you got those numbers from. I am curious.
I think people (and the founder) are focusing on yearly profits as their remuneration and comparing it to a salary... but the reality is you're creating a company that should be valued (and eventually sell) for 7-15X Earnings - and you really should be looking at that increase in value vs your increase in profits. In reality your net worth went up by over $1.5 million in the last year, in addition to earning 236k - t…
You're missing something. From the post: > I don’t draw a salary, so the total amount I earned from TinyPilot in 2023 was $236k. and > Result: I worked 35-40 hours per week, a reduction from previous years, and traveled more than any previous year. This is a person who is effectively full-time CEO of this business and whose market salary is likely at least $236k. If they sold the business, the new owners would have t…
You’re thinking of this like an engineer rather than a business person.
1. When selling a business like this, the $236k would be called SDI or SDE (seller discretionary income/earnings).
2. The buyer determines what, if any, of that SDE will need to go to paying someone to do what the seller does. These duties could be assumed by the buyer, they could be assumed by existing people the buyer employees, the tasks could be reduced or eliminated, etc.
3. Based on 2, the buyer will typically adjust the earnings multiple that they are willing to buy at.
4. For complex businesses that need someone doing one or more specific roles, the listing agency for the business, if good, will encourage the seller to fill certain roles to improve the overall salability of the business and multiple of earnings that it will be sold at.
5. Without really looking into the business, I’m almost certain that it can be sold for much closer to $1m (or more!) than to your suggestion of (edit) closer to $0.