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Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

deepsouthventures.com

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Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#151

Post by sanderjd »

anoncow wrote: post #135
sanderjd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

IMO, one of the reasons US has done better with startups is because there are people driven by the difficulty of life. Make life easier and I think some of that drive will go away. US has had a good (although somewhat difficult for the people) balance for some time now. It's just an untested theory of mine.

Sorry, but this is just total nonsense.

Life is much more difficult in most places in the world than it is in the US. We have had more success with entrepreneurship because of a culmination of specific things, not a generalized "difficulty of life", which empirically does not exist.

It's also more common for successful entrepreneurs to have grown up without financial distress.

Sorry to shatter your dreams, but your theory is very silly.

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#152

Post by the_af »

I hate this kind of article.

A weird mix of inspirational hogwash ("here's how I succeeded and you can do this too!") with some pretty crappy tactics, like domain squatting, crap ads business with no value added, and lying to customers to not let them know they could have cut the middleman.

Basically nothing this guy is explaining ads any value. He had little to no expert knowledge, he just got lucky with some low hanging fruit (mostly because his customers were even more clueless than he was).

No doubt he's making money now and is "his own boss" now, but nothing he did to get there seems inspirational or worth copying.

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#153

Post by _xiaz »

octopoc wrote: post #144
ilamont wrote: post #71

Had an epiphany like this after an earlier startup project failed, which my cofounder and I had tried to do following the formulaic approaches advocated by various accelerators, investors, and experts (often people with zero experience running a startup, but had been involved as angels after BigCo stock options vested, and then got into mentoring local accelerators). I hated the startup theater, pitching, networking,…

> 3) The product must generate revenue from day 1 You must have picked out your: - Payment provider (e.g. Stripe) - Authorization server (e.g. Auth0) - Backend language and framework - Frontend language and framework - CMS for your website (e.g. Wordpress) What else is there in your list of things you had to pick when starting a project? I'm very curious.

Most obvious thing missing is your hosting provider and how much control you want there (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#154

Post by sph »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #52

For me, I found out that us “olds” are not exactly loved (actively hated, more like), and gave up looking for work, after being laid off from one of the top imaging corporations in the world. Pissed me off, something fierce, being treated that way (especially as I figured out it was being supported from the C-Suite). However, I have since realized that it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I enjoy…

What is sad is that "olds" in software engineering means 10-15+ years of experience. I started in this career at 19, and around my early 30s I found myself at the apex of my experience, mental sharpness and talent, while pretty much any company finds me too experienced, too expensive and perhaps too hard to train and mould into shape.

Basically, after 10 years, you have three choices: become a consultant (I hope you like being a salesman), become an entrepreneur (I hope you have a good idea and a lot of savings) or get into management (I hope you love herding cats and playing politics)

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#155

Post by sph »

lassoiat wrote: post #139
bornfreddy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frontier is always moving. You don't see people looking for gold in California anymore.

You also can't assume you would strike gold just because you have a pan and the right timing. I know a guy that had podcast in 2009 or so. He had great timing but the problem is his podcast completely sucked and he has nothing interesting to say in general. Shifting things forward or backward in time would not have solved anything.

You certainly won't strike gold by saying "there is no gold to be found here" and sitting on your bottom.

Two massive parts of success in entrepreneurship are luck and doing something others didn't want to do, or didn't think was worth it. Both require showing up.

Having a world-changing idea is an overrated and oversold approach. Some people make billions selling underwear or bottled soda. You can make millions out of selling literally anything.

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#157

Post by sph »

renegade-otter wrote: post #58

I was putting off starting my SaaS idea for years (has to do with assigning code reviewers based on specific file patterns and notifying them on Slack) but the idea was much more marketable 10 years ago when I first had it. GitHub did not even have the concept of CODEOWNERS back then. After getting laid off, I decided to roll the dice instead of looking for another work-for-hire. Yeah, it's too late, but I needed thi…

> Take The Globe, for example - the Facebook before Facebook. They failed

"The company's IPO made history when it posted the largest first day gain of any IPO with a 606% increase in price.[3] Early in his tenure, Paternot became known in popular media as "the CEO in the plastic pants" after he was filmed in a nightclub saying 'Got the girl. Got the money. Now I'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life.'"

Then they lost everything in the dot-com bust, but is this really failing? They had an idea and probably made life-changing money. theGlobe failed, the people behind it have not. They unlocked the next tier of freedom where they can work on anything they fancy and drive a McLaren to work. I hope to fail like them.

The right time is defeatist nonsense. It's like the stock market: you can't time it, so just enter and stick with it. Hindsight is a useless tool to entrepreneurship.

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#158

Post by matwood »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #146
GenerWork wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be honest, I don't believe this at all. It seems like one of those things that everybody says because they want it to be true.

Ya. It sounds good. But then the question is why doesn’t every other country destroy US in entrepreneurship? Why does US still have so many small businesses?

Well obviously there is more to it than just UHC. The US encourages and rewards risk taking, and has a healthy funding culture not found anywhere else, etc... But, I believe if you take how good the US already is with entrepreneurship and then add UHC it would trigger a boom.

Re: Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship

#160

Post by tredigi »

financypants wrote: post #87
tredigi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect the part of diving in to build something on your own. I don't respect what he actually built. Leeching off others' work and while doing it blasting out ads which ended up being the first wave of making browsing unpleasant in the early 2000s. Without any actual contributions. And that then paired with "I didn't know how to code, and I hated reading." It's this attitude that software engineering is somehow wh…

But isn’t software engineering one of the easiest domains to self-learn? I don’t know of any other profession that has such vast amounts of completely free resources online.

I'd disagree that really learning it and being proficient is any easier than other domains. People may have impression that it's easy to pick up since the number of 20 minute python tutorials vastly outnumbers 20 minute heart surgery tutorials, but it takes a long time, hard work and good mentorship to really pick up. A formal education helps as well, just like in other professions. You can self-learn carpentry or accounting or physiotherapy, but just like with software engineering, a good (!) proper education brings you further and quicker.
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