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A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

failory.com

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Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#111

Post by cdelsolar »

downandout wrote: post #69

I have never been directly employed at a large Silicon Valley tech company. Is it really that difficult to work on side projects on your nights/weekends while working at these places? To be sure, it would take longer to get your projects finished, but you would also be doing so with the benefit of a steady paycheck and health insurance. If you happen to hit the lottery with your finished project, great - quit your jo…

I have a pretty sizable side project and I'm starting another one. It's possible, but you have to be hyper organized with your time. I used to do a lot of my coding on the BART/Transbay commute back and forth (about an hour and 15 minutes a day), plus another hour at night. You can do a lot in two hours a day. Squeeze in a few hours during the weekend and you can still have a life and a full-time job. You do have to love coding though.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#112

Post by antisthenes »

GuiA wrote: post #30
justinpombrio wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also not independent trials. If you just failed 9 times in a row, you're probably not the best at startups.

Or maybe you learned tons and it makes your 10th attempt more likely to succeed? Ultimately these ponderations are kind of meaningless in the absence of great data to frame them with.

If you had the social and monetary capital to attempt 10 startups and fail, one wonders if that money and effort would not have been better invested elsewhere (if we assume that the goal of the startup is to achieve a successful exit), perhaps in easier forms to generate passive income or what have you.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#113

Post by freetime2 »

jaclaz wrote: post #110
GuiA wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4% withdrawal rate is a conservative figure often used to live “forever” from a portfolio (use 3% if you want to be more conservative, 5-6% for more risk friendly). To get $30k a year, that’s a starting portfolio of $750k. [0] If you’re making $140k a year and living frugally, you can amass $750k in less than 10 years, perhaps even 5-7 if you are really frugal + lucky with the market. It’s within reach of most softwa…

>[0]: http://www.firecalc.com/ gives us an 80% chance of success for a $750k portfolio on $30k withdrawal a year over 50 years. Which will be good 4 out of 5 times. This is using all available 50 years "stretches" since 1871. If you try limiting the "since" to 1960 the success rate goes to 25%. Still since 1960, 40 years are 44%, 30 years are roughly on par at 79%. And while sticking at the shorter 30 years, if you s…

To be fair, I think the parent poster is not suggesting that you retire outright with $750k in the bank, but work independently "free of bosses". Hopefully in several decades of self-employment, you would be able to generate some meaningful supplemental income during that time.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#114

Post by Noos »

evmar wrote: post #4

"If we spend a second thinking about this, if 9 out of 10 startups fail, then we only need to roll the dice 10 times and the last startup will (by statistics) achieve success." That is not how statistics works. : With a 90% failure rate, your chance of failing 10 times in a row is (9/10)^10 ~= 35%.

I can't understand why that is even in the parent article. Amir is incredibly open about how much what he did was down to luck, and how much he sacrificed just to roll the dice once. He lists all the things he did that gave him a shot, like living on 1/2 to 1/4 of his income for years, not having kids, being lucky that he never got sick since he didn't have insurance as he did his venture, and more.

That quote above is an odd postscript to an article very open about how much it really is luck.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#115

Post by JamesBarney »

computerphage wrote: post #92
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is with dice. Startups are not independent random events because some people are better at making startups than other people are.

I think your parent is saying that when you actually measure whether your claim is true, it isn't actually correlated in the failure case. I remember reading something that corroborated this [1]. That source claimed that previous founders of successful companies had a much greater chance at additional success, but previous failures didn't increase your chances (ie. you don't, in fact, learn more from failure than suc…

Ycombinator has made a lot of money based on the idea that some people are better at creating start ups than others. They don't just bet on ideas they also bet on people.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#116

Post by JamesBarney »

gargarplex wrote: post #96
jabgrabdthrow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which number would you no longer make the point you just made? 100 failed startups? 50,000? You’ve got a lot of faith in people. My number is maybe 5.

I've been seriously, actively interested in building a tech biz or startup since 2003. In 2003, I started selling chat bots on the Internet. In 2005, I cofounded an affiliate marketing website that cracked the Alexa top 10k In 2007, I built an app that scaled to 100k MAUs and was acquired for $20K In 2009, I started a SaaS but couldn't break $~600/month in revenue. In 2010, I built a business that ran for over 5 year…

Would you mind going into a little more detail about the hole that you plugged and how you plugged it?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#117

Post by swalsh »

evmar wrote: post #4

"If we spend a second thinking about this, if 9 out of 10 startups fail, then we only need to roll the dice 10 times and the last startup will (by statistics) achieve success." That is not how statistics works. : With a 90% failure rate, your chance of failing 10 times in a row is (9/10)^10 ~= 35%.

Here's what I've learned when I quit and tried to start my own thing. A regular paycheck is "nice", it's a safety blanket. But it also keeps you down. You can live nicely on a regular paycheck, but if you want "something more", whether that "more" is money, or "meaning", you have to give it up and go into the real world. You have to take a risk. I didn't really Succeed, but I gained new experience, a bunch of contacts, and learned what I needed. The next time I do it, I'm going to have a better chance of succeeding in it, i'm certain of it.

A business model is more than a product, and a way to charge for it. It's having partners, channels, product, and yes some resources. If you're a dev who's planning on quitting, and then spending 18 hours a day coding, you're probably going to fail. If you quit and spend 100% of your time networking, you're going to fail. But if you have a plan for how to get the product built, how to market it, and you have a quantifiable reason to believe people want it. You might just make it.

I think it takes a few failures to get there.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#118

Post by tikhonj »

JamesBarney wrote: post #115
computerphage wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your parent is saying that when you actually measure whether your claim is true, it isn't actually correlated in the failure case. I remember reading something that corroborated this [1]. That source claimed that previous founders of successful companies had a much greater chance at additional success, but previous failures didn't increase your chances (ie. you don't, in fact, learn more from failure than suc…

Ycombinator has made a lot of money based on the idea that some people are better at creating start ups than others. They don't just bet on ideas they also bet on people.

On the flipside, it could be that Y Combinator has made a lot of money by creating an environment that helps startups succeed. Apart from money, they provide founders advice, structure and a set of motivated peers. More cynically, they also provide prestige, validation and connections.

I have no doubt Y Combinator would still be successful even if their selection method was not very good. (I tend to think about top universities the same way—the quality of Harvard's admissions process is not the core reason they graduate so many successful students.)

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#119

Post by michaelt »

otakucode wrote: post #72
notl4wy3r wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if nobody was using scummy tactics, it'd be hard to compete. There are so many people who want to make video games. Hell, I wanted to, before I got my "boring" BigCo job. Personally, I'm really glad I decided not to make games. I like the safety a regular income brings. Maybe once I hit my number I'll make some games, and we'll see if I'm any good at it. In the meantime, I have nothing but admiration for those o…

Unfortunately, that 'safety' of a 'regular' income is almost entirely illusory as well. Employers stopped providing insulation from market fluctuations in the 1980s. If your market dips, your company will hemorrhage workers without a second thought. Your desire for a place you can 'settle down' will also be ruthlessly exploited, and if you don't jump to a different company every 4 or 5 years, you will rapidly end up…

  that 'safety' of a 'regular'
  income is almost entirely
  illusory as well
Sure, to an extent, but there are differences of degree here.

If I work for Google and they go bankrupt, worst case I lose a month's salary and I'm unemployed. And the chance of that is probably below 5% per year (obviously depends on the company)

If I take a year off to develop my indie game, the odds are much worse, I gamble a year's salary not a month's, and if I end up unemployed I've already burned through a lot of my savings.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#120

Post by diogofranco »

evmar wrote: post #4

"If we spend a second thinking about this, if 9 out of 10 startups fail, then we only need to roll the dice 10 times and the last startup will (by statistics) achieve success." That is not how statistics works. : With a 90% failure rate, your chance of failing 10 times in a row is (9/10)^10 ~= 35%.

More importantly, after 9 failures the last startup has only a 10% chance of success, by statistics.
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