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I can live at my current spending level in the Bay Area for 3-ish years on $125k. In my small, Midwest hometown, I’m sure I could stretch that to 6-8 years. The disadvantage, of course, would be living in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere.
Is that living in a shoebox? Eating comfortably? Raising a family? Having any fun?
My salary could support a much looser budget, but we find our life very fulfilling as-is and don't see a compelling reason to spend more. Different way of seeing the world I guess.
TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.
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VC want you to efficiently spend money. Grow. Raise more. Exit. Or die ASAP
>VC want you to spend money. Grow. Raise more. Exit. Or die ASAP FTFY ;) Too many unprofitable / "pre-profit" companies have five figure monthly office rents for this to be untrue. Maybe I am biased but having heard and seen horror stories of founders losing their companies because of _having_ to raise money: no thanks. Bootstrap and if it doesn't hit ramen profitable, no biggie. If it does, go raise at favorable ter…
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Can you explain your approach/philosophy, or is it intuitive?
I believe the most successful companies don't discover markets, they create them. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk forge the macro (10x) jump and then ask customers for the micro improvements. I'm writing an essay about this topic, feel free to take a look the draft if your are interested :) https://ab0ve.substack.com/p/ec282c2c-95fa-4914-820f-7463cb5...
Likewise, Elon Musk has been a big personality for years. Now he can start a company drilling holes and attract big partnerships and investments. When he started, he was just a nobody making maps software, then still nearly a nobody making internet money transmission software. Both relied on the massive wave of internet popularity in the 90s, with PayPal riding eBays wave. In hindsight, victory seems obvious, it looks like they created their markets. In their time, they rode a market wave. Markets are people, and you can’t make people want something they don’t want.
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Is that living in a shoebox? Eating comfortably? Raising a family? Having any fun?
That’s living in a 2BR apartment by myself, eating well, and having a bit of fun here and there.
Just a 2BR and food for 3 years = close to impossible on $125K gross.
But it is very much possible on $125K net.
NB: you're right, in the sense that if you're living off of savings it's net (and then some). But I can see why parent is... more than a little confused :)
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I live in Barcelona and love the quality of life. Happy to answer any questions. Twitter @unamashana
What would rent be like for a 2-bedroom apartment?
If you go to neighborhoods where the locals live or outside the city limits you'll see the price drop considerably. A friend is living one hour away from here and paying 600 EUR for a nice house that's four times the size of my apartment.
I couldn’t quite tell from the api docs but is the user’s email required? Can I just supply an external ID? I’m just wondering from a privacy point of view.
You can use (as you guessed) an `userExternalId` - https://developer.magicbell.io/docs/browser-js#identifying-u... . That's how we built our HN Chrome extension that never asks for your email - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-notifi...
Cool extension. A Firefox version would be great!
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You know what's going to happen with that mentality brought to investors. They gonna demand lower pay rates, forcing people to move to lower income areas.
Not really. The investors will want you to use capital efficiently. If that means hiring remote developers in the Philippines then that’s what they will want but for other applications, hiring away the $500k engineer from Google is the only way to accomplish the task.
I'm not sure the first stages of a startup is the right time to start handholding offshored devs. You typically want talented folks with you because change will happen fast. No time to draft new requirements and make sure via lengthy meetings that the offshored devs really understands them.
> The biggest one was that Ycombinator is all about raising money, and if you are not in the mindset of 'raise as much as you can, as often as you can,' you won't fit in. This must have changed. I went through YCF #2 and we were essentially laughed at each time we mentioned staying local or becoming profitable. Literally the only thing our advisor talked about was raising.
I'm sorry you had that experience - I would hope it's an outlier. We're on the same W21 cohort as OP. I remember when we started, they hammered home frugality as a key trait of successful founders. One founder talk stood out - "If they have office snacks before product market fit, you know they're going to fail". W21 wanted to put that on a T-shirt. This advice seems to be repeated all over YC's manuals, partner offi…
If you have snarky shirts before you have a product...