Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup

I'm a freelancer that has started his own company, and I contract with a lot of companies, one in particular could have been considered a startup at one point, but I'm not sure you'd call it that now.

I think of VC as debt. I've worked really hard to stay out of debt. Apart from a house, my goal is to never take a loan out or borrow money for anything. We have two pretty crappy cars, but we paid cash for them, and honestly, after some repairs and such, they've been running fine.

To bring it home: I treat a lot of my business the same way. I'm extremely skeptical of doing work on "borrowed money." This once-startup contract I have has been profitable (by good margins) for 5 years now, and I've been working on a $2 million project for them about 7 months now, but it was all with money the company already had.

I've turned down lucrative work in the past because they had financiers involved. I tend to work on smaller, more manageable projects (with the exception of the aforementioned example) because of this. Maybe a little more work at times (to find work), maybe a little less money, but I've never had an issue getting paid (except that one time when the business literally got washed away in Hurricane Sandy), I've not had to meet crazy deadlines or feel that sort of pressure, and I'd still consider myself to be doing very, very well.

All that said, and I am a college dropout. But I wouldn't recommend people do drop out of college, especially for a VC gig.