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I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

mtlynch.io

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Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#141

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

hiddencost wrote: post #91
xyst wrote: post #35

Wild. I vaguely remember this founder spending an obscene amount of money on some boutique firm to give homepage a small update. Seems he exited the Google grind about 6 years ago. I guess salaries were between $180-250K during that time frame. Google grinder for 6 years: $1,080,000-$1,500,000 Entrepreneur: “$920k over four years (with sale)”, but doesn’t include the 2 bombs he had prior to successful exit. (None of…

Assuming he was a senior SWE, he would have made around $400k / yr staying at Google. I suppose if he can parlay this outcome into an L7 role at Google, E.G, then in another 6 years he would break even (compared to staying at L5)

$400k for Senior is an outlier.

According to Levels.fyi - and my personal contacts - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Median TC - something just-south of $300k TC (not salary) is more likely.

Furthermore, the higher you go, a greater proportion comes as RSUs, not cash - even if it was $400k TC, a good chunk of that is money you literally can't spend for a couple of years.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#142

Post by WJW »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #81
ignoramous wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how hard starting/running a business is That it is, but here Michael is explicit that most of the pain [0] was from doing hardware, software, and e-commerce all at once. Surely, there are other relatively easier businesses in tech? [0] Reminds me of Avery Pennarun's A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure (2012), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754531

If it’s easy, everyone would do it.

... by which time all the competition no longer makes it easy?

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#143

Post by ezekg »

> My wife and I also wanted to start a family. TinyPilot only occupied about 20% of my time, but it occupied 90% of my stress. I would have done a terrible job juggling founder stress with new parent stress.

I feel this. Being a founder is hard, and raising kids is very hard. I was a little bit sad when I saw this headline show up on HN, because I've been following you for years, ever since the beginning. I always admired your hardware business, and the yearly retros, and I was sad to see it all end. But after reading the post, I do understand. Congrats on the sale, and on the child. I hope you can find some relief from the stress of being a founder, and I hope your new family will bring you as much joy as my 2 kids have (with +1 on the way for me as well).

Would you build another hardware business, or are you going to try for a software business next?

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#144

Post by dhosek »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #124
yojo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife runs her own consulting business, I’m taking a break from tech work. This means we buy insurance on the federal marketplace (healthcare.gov). It is expensive, but not insanely so. Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not hav…

> Family of four, living in Oregon, non-smoking, our premium is ~$1k/month. Granted it’s a high deductible ($12k), but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic emergency that could wipe out our savings. We are fortunate to not have expensive, ongoing conditions. Family of two, living in the EU, non-smoking, our premium is ~€0/month. Granted it's a €0 deductible, but it protects us from the kind of catastrophic em…

Healthcare delivery in the US is — not good.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#145

Post by blehn »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #141
hiddencost wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming he was a senior SWE, he would have made around $400k / yr staying at Google. I suppose if he can parlay this outcome into an L7 role at Google, E.G, then in another 6 years he would break even (compared to staying at L5)

$400k for Senior is an outlier. According to Levels.fyi - and my personal contacts - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Median TC - something just-south of $300k TC (not salary) is more likely. Furthermore, the higher you go, a greater proportion comes as RSUs, not cash - even if it was $400k TC, a good chunk of that is money you literally can't spend for a couple of years.

Vesting for each grant starts at one year and is monthly after that. So you're really only waiting one year for the first big chunk of stock to be liquid. 400k TC at Google means that you have 400k (pre-tax) liquid at the end of the year (depending on the stock price, which has historically gone up).

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#147

Post by willsmith72 »

When they ask, "how do I know if I have product-market fit?", i will point them here

> With every other project, I had to beg and plead with people even to try my product. With TinyPilot, there was so much demand that I struggled for months to keep the product stocked.

Re: I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

#149

Post by groby_b »

not-my-account wrote: post #47
robszumski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broker was advising him on price point, strategy and fielding the interested parties for further discussion. Pretty important for this type of transaction.

How much of this can be learned by reading a couple books? I wonder how much higher profit he actually made compared to if one could self teach these skills.

About 80%. Which is great, if everything goes well. But if you're in the 20% that get to learn via failure, the cost is much higher to you.

One of the core skills of being a founder is learning when to delegate.

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