221–230 of 329 posts
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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.
> 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 ad…
Thanks, Zeke! > Would you build another hardware business, or are you going to try for a software business next? No, I don't think I'd try hardware again. It's a shame because I learned so much about hardware and selling a physical product, so I do have an edge if I wanted to do something else that involves both hardware and software, but bootstrapping hardware from zero is just so risky. I caught a lot of lucky brea…
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In what way were their interests aligned with yours? (this is not a snarky question. usually in real estate their interest is to make the deal happen asap, which doesn't align fully with your interests)
The deal happening ASAP was aligned with my interests in this case. I would have taken a lower sale price for a faster close. But even aside from that, they make more money the larger the deal, so they work to get a good price. They also feel the pain if the deal falls through, so they have incentive to keep the deal alive and both sides happy. The broker isn't perfectly aligned with me, but of everyone else involved…
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Thanks, Zeke! > Would you build another hardware business, or are you going to try for a software business next? No, I don't think I'd try hardware again. It's a shame because I learned so much about hardware and selling a physical product, so I do have an edge if I wanted to do something else that involves both hardware and software, but bootstrapping hardware from zero is just so risky. I caught a lot of lucky brea…
I am curious: to how many hours per week does the 20% of your time map?
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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.
Books tell you what they did in their situation.
They don't tell you what you should do in your situation.
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…
I also remembered his post about dropping $50k on the site redesign* I actually thought it was a big W for him when I saw this post. But I guess, if you consider the opportunity cost of Google employment, it's a financial L. * https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/
Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions about this post, the sale process, or my time running TinyPilot.
There are a lot of comments here comparing the financial outcome of your TinyPilot journey Vs what could have been had you remained at Google. Can you share your perspective on that? Are you happy you chose the path you did? If so, why?
Thank you
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> 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.