Why to Not Not Start a Startup

Or, perhaps more to the point, things that people don't yet want, because they're too new and too alpha. Or things that you don't know how long it will take to produce a product with, but which will definitely one day be useful and people will want them. Robots fall into most of these categories at the moment. I don't doubt that one day people will want tons of them, just like what happened with computers, but I don't think the technology is there yet for an Apple-for-robotics to jump in and succeed as a for-profit company. I hope I'm wrong, and if I'm wrong I hope to be part of what proves me wrong, but that's what I think at the moment.

As a young startup founder myself, the one point that really drove me to uproot was the monotony of the day to day life in cubeville. I lasted a little over a year - told myself "what the hell" - and two weeks later.. I quit and started my own company.

The primary reasons I left corporate are already iterated in the essay.

1. I'm only two years out of college and fairly young, My living expenses are fairly low.

2. I was bored out of mind. I now know the real meaning of corporate drone and can relate to the movie 'Office Space'.

3. As each day of work passed by, I swear the work made me a little dumber.

4. Nothing to loose. Last straw was when the company got bought out, and the CEO jumped ship with his golden parachute.

5. I don't want to be remembered as a person who was a [insert job title] at Big Company A.

Paul, your essays inspired me to quit my job even though I was looking forward to a nice promotion. A couple of years was enough. I'm two weeks into my startup, which I'm basing on a Paul Graham/Joel Spolsky hybrid model. I'm building up capital by taking on some small- to medium-sized projects while prototyping my real idea behind the scenes with a few collaborators.

While my work struggles to find my replacement, I have no problems finding people that A) want to work for me on contract projects, and B) want me to work on their projects (right now there is a queue). I actually work longer now than I did in the office. But I'm not tired. In fact, I have more energy. Additionally, if you normalize my work hours, I am even more productive working on my own. I just generally feel better about myself and am only experiencing "good" stress these days. I encourage anyone who finds themselves agreeing with Paul Graham in his essays more often than not to make the leap.

I fundamentally agree with Paul Graham about the change we are seeing. In fact, my little prototype bets the farm on the premise that this change is indeed happening.

I'm sufficiently capitalized having had a couple of years out of school to make some money that Y Combinator's funding is, quite frankly, an unattractive proposition. Plus, I'm in Toronto and I love the city. I live/work downtown right near the university. I would not want to move. All this said, is there any chance that you will do a talk up here in Canada?

A sad thing about life is that after squandering ten years on playing in bands and stuff (point 11), if you eventually do get your act together and go to university and then (point 16) take the default route to a job in a big company, happy to make a living at all; after a while, if you have half a mind, you'll end up realizing that you're getting dumber by the year (point 14), but by then you've also stumbled into a family, and a start-up is no longer a realistic option (point 9, 13, and maybe even point 12 has kicked in). But then it's just 25 years to go until you're retired, just clench a fist in the pocket, produce a smile and keep coding for a salary. Sorry.

What if I'd like to accomplish something, like building an operating system or a world wide web, and don't really care about the money. What if I just want to change the world. Should I start a company and if so why?