[HN Gopher] My Third Year as a Solo Developer
___________________________________________________________________
My Third Year as a Solo Developer
Author : mtlynch
Score : 256 points
Date : 2021-02-01 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mtlynch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io)
| qqj wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, this is both informative and
| inspirational.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Did you consider doing a KickStarter (or similar) for TinyPilot?
| Or was it unnecessary?
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading.
|
| _Did you consider doing a KickStarter (or similar) for
| TinyPilot?_
|
| I did at the beginning. I was considering ditching the
| Raspberry Pi and building my own custom board using the
| Raspberry Pi Compute Module. I expected that to be $20-40k, so
| I thought it might be a good match for Kickstarter.
|
| But the more I went, the more I felt like it was better to keep
| making progress incrementally. I'm not sure if it's just
| because I'm a software guy primarily or hardware is inherently
| slower and harder, but changing tiny details about the
| manufacturing process is always _really_ hard. There are so
| many people involved, and I almost always fail to anticipate
| some consequence of the change. The Pi is my most significant
| component, so changing it would be a huge jump.
|
| I focused instead on things that let me keep the core Raspberry
| Pi system and OS and then change things on top of that like the
| video capture chip and creating a custom 3D-printed case.
| magmasystems wrote:
| I have been following your blog since it first came out, Michael.
| Congrats on your successes. Coincidentally, I also wrote up my
| 2020 recap today for my CTO-as-a-Service, and posted it on my
| website (ctoasaservice.org). It was a really strange year. You
| would have thought that everything would have shut down tight
| after the lockdown in mid-March, but quite the opposite.
|
| For both of us, we left good-paying jobs in order to persue
| something that we felt strongly about, hoping to make some sort
| of dent in the word. Success to your future endeavors!
| pythonbase wrote:
| Do you offer a team or just yourself as a CTO? How do you find
| clients?
| magmasystems wrote:
| I just offer myself. I do everything (except coding) for my
| clients. Right now, many clients come from word-of-mouth. If
| a client of mine is happy with my work, they tend to
| recommend me to others in their incubator/accelerator space.
|
| But I came here to congratulate Michael, not to discuss my
| own work. Happy to take this conversation to an email thread.
| hkyeti wrote:
| Love the clarity of the goals and self grading, though I'm
| wondering what happens when things change part way through the
| cycle.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _I 'm wondering what happens when things change part way
| through the cycle._
|
| Good question!
|
| The goals are flexible. The goals work for me, not the other
| way around. If I realize partway through the year that
| circumstances have changed or I set a bad goal, then I do
| something else.
|
| This happened to a small degree this year. I knew that making a
| course would prevent me from achieving my goal of 10 blog
| posts, but I felt like it was okay to deliberately miss that
| goal in favor of something I thought made more sense.
|
| But generally, I try to set goals that are high enough in
| abstraction that they don't require adjustment when
| circumstances change.
| bbirnbaum wrote:
| "Before I quit my job, I constantly read books and listened to
| podcasts about startups. The part that intrigued me most was the
| boundlessness of possibility."
|
| ^ This is me right now. I've struggled to explain to people why
| I'm interested in entrepreneurship for its own sake (and not
| because, e.g., I'm passionate about a particular problem). This
| quote really encapsulates the draw of it for me.
|
| Thanks Michael, just came across your blog recently. Great stuff.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| I'm glad that section resonated with you! I spent several hours
| writing and rewriting that section, trying to articulate what
| exactly I found so alluring about becoming a founder.
|
| Last year, I considered building software for sheet metal
| shops,[0] and people warned me that I'd get bored building
| software for a market I'm not passionate about. But I never
| felt like that would be true because whatever the business, the
| part that's fun to me is getting to play with all the little
| knobs and levers of and seeing whether my choices yielded good
| results.
|
| [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/12/#interviewing-
| mach...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| That infinite horizon of possibilities is both a positive and a
| negative. The negative is that you have highly imperfect
| information and you never know what the optimal thing is that
| you should be doing next. I've been a solo product developer
| for >15 years now I can tell you that feeling of uncertainty
| never goes away. Although I have solved it to some extent by
| factoeing in enjoyment. Whenever I have 2 possibilities and I
| don't have a feel for which one will give the best result, I do
| the one that is more fun!
| tomaszs wrote:
| It is great you use 100% of your talent. The pilot project is
| awesome.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so how?
|
| I'm trying to figure out if going solo would be right for me, and
| I worry that I'd not successfully overcome the activation cost
| without others already relying on me executing something.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so
| how?_
|
| This does happen to me, but fortunately not too much. A big
| part of it is that because I'm choosing my projects, I'm able
| to pick things that I'm naturally excited about working on. The
| other is that I've found a virtuous cycle of:
|
| 1. I build something new or add a feature
|
| 2. I write a blog post explaining what I learned
|
| 3. People read about what I learned and check out the thing I
| built
|
| So, it's a way to frequently attract users, even if it's a
| brand new thing, and then having people test it out is
| motivating.
|
| There are two times I recall struggling with motivation this
| past year:
|
| While working on Is It Keto, it always felt like so much work
| and time before I could see if an idea was viable. Even just
| putting up a landing page for a new product and linking to it
| from the main site, I'd have to wait at least a week to get
| reasonable data on conversion rates. So, I found it hard to
| stay motivated when I didn't feel like I had a process that was
| working and didn't have confidence investing effort anywhere
| would yield results.
|
| The other was toward the end of the year working on TinyPilot.
| I promised a premium version of TinyPilot by the end of the
| year, and I was trying to figure out how to design license
| activation for it. But that's really boring because it meant
| several weeks of work on something that's not useful to users.
| I kept putting it off because I was never excited to work on
| it. Finally, I realized I could basically just go by the honor
| system and ask users to install on one device per purchase, and
| that cut out a lot of boring work and let me work on improving
| the product again.
|
| So my general experience is that when I'm feeling unmotivated,
| something is wrong and I have to make a change that makes me
| feel more naturally motivated to do the work.
| xur17 wrote:
| First of all, congrats on your success!
|
| Do you have any plans to productionize TinyPilot (pay someone to
| manufacture the entire device rather than selling kits)? I'm
| definitely in your target market, but I'd rather have something
| more streamlined looking that didn't require upfront assembly. I
| have seen folks that have had success reaching out to suppliers
| on Alibaba to get custom hardware built like this.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _Do you have any plans to productionize TinyPilot (pay
| someone to manufacture the entire device rather than selling
| kits)?_
|
| Yeah, that's one of my goals for the year. The manufacturing
| and fulfillment process is currently just out of my house and
| too fragile.
|
| It's tough to outsource right now because we're continuing to
| find new ways to improve our processes and the components. The
| advantage of doing it all from my house is that I'm the last
| stop before the product reaches the customer. I can be nimble
| and manage changes quickly rather than risk things falling
| through the cracks trying to communicate to someone else small
| changes in the process.
|
| What will likely happen next is me hiring an extra person to
| come to my house and take on some of the work. Hopefully
| vaccine rollout goes smoothly because I don't want to do this
| until it's safe for both me and the employee.
|
| > _I 'm definitely in your target market, but I'd rather have
| something more streamlined looking that didn't require upfront
| assembly._
|
| I currently sell two flavors. One's a kit, and the other's plug
| 'n play (TinyPilot Voyager).
| swyx wrote:
| > Grow TinyPilot to $600k in annual revenue
|
| what a great goal this is. looking forward to see you update this
| next year!
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading, Shawn! I'm hoping I can make next year's
| update exciting.
| jldugger wrote:
| Awesome; despite having read some of this authors work before,
| somehow the TinyPilot had escaped my attention, despite my keen
| interest in Rasky[1], which didn't seem to ever leave prototype.
|
| So I guess blog post working at intended.
|
| [1]: https://www.nexlab.net/product/rasky/
| arm wrote:
| The TinyPilot HN post1 is a treasure trove of useful
| information as well!
|
| ------------
|
| 1 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927380
| forgingahead wrote:
| Congrats Michael! Great to see the success with TinyPilot, glad
| it's working well for you.
|
| Just some questions/thoughts about your revenue/expenses
| breakdown: sales is sales of course, but what does _materials_
| mean? Is it the cost-of-materials-for-what-you-sold, or cost-of-
| everything-you-bought (including _both_ sold items and inventory
| you 're still holding?)
|
| The reason is that it's usually more common to only count the
| former (cost of materials for what you sold) when tracking
| profit/loss. Materials you used for inventory that are not yet
| sold are counted as assets on your balance sheet, since the
| expectation is that you'll be able to turn that into cash at some
| point.
|
| The other practical reason (besides the potential benefit of
| seeing "profit" in your revenue/expenses breakdown) is that you
| can better see:
|
| 1. If you need to raise prices (and I'm sure patio11 would say
| "yes")
|
| 2. How to handle your inventory, especially if there is a shelf-
| life. Eg: doing a sale to clear things quickly, or when you need
| to invest in more materials to build more inventory. You'll start
| tracking "turn", how quickly you sell out an existing batch, and
| can better plan for purchasing more to keep a healthy level that
| is in that Goldilocks-zone of enough-to-fulfill-orders-quickly,
| but less than holding too much that ties up cash.
|
| Congrats again and looking forward to the next update.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _what does materials mean? Is it the cost-of-materials-for-
| what-you-sold, or cost-of-everything-you-bought (including both
| sold items and inventory you 're still holding?)_
|
| It's the latter, cost-of-everything-I-bought.
|
| > _The reason is that it 's usually more common to only count
| the former (cost of materials for what you sold) when tracking
| profit/loss. Materials you used for inventory that are not yet
| sold are counted as assets on your balance sheet, since the
| expectation is that you'll be able to turn that into cash at
| some point._
|
| Thanks, this is helpful feedback! This is my first time
| managing an inventory, so I still have a lot to learn about
| bookkeeping for it.
|
| I should mention that the numbers so far are preliminary based
| on my own bookkeeping, so I'll talk to my accountant about how
| to better map the transactions to my balance sheet and income
| statement.
|
| > _You 'll start tracking "turn", how quickly you sell out an
| existing batch, and can better plan for purchasing more to keep
| a healthy level that is in that Goldilocks-zone of enough-to-
| fulfill-orders-quickly, but less than holding too much that
| ties up cash._
|
| That's interesting. I'm curious to see how much this will
| affect the inventory I keep on hand.
|
| Right now, each product consists of several components that
| have different properties, so when I choose how much to stock
| each item, it's a function of:
|
| * How many orders could conceivably happen during a sudden
| surge of interest?
|
| * How long does it take to restock this item? (some items take
| 2 months to be manufactured overseas, others ship overnight)
|
| * How much space does this item take up in my house? (easy to
| store 5000 ribbon cables, not so easy to store that many
| Raspberry Pis)
|
| * How much does this item cost? (easier to err on the side of
| caution for cheap items)
|
| * How confident am I that I'm going to keep using this
| component?
| forgingahead wrote:
| _I should mention that the numbers so far are preliminary
| based on my own bookkeeping, so I 'll talk to my accountant
| about how to better map the transactions to my balance sheet
| and income statement._
|
| Definitely good to get professional help so you can focus on
| the business. That being said, don't let them overcomplicate
| it. The thing about business, especially one that involves
| inventory, is that you're always looking at _both_ accounting
| profit /loss, and cashflow.
|
| Cashflow is the more important one, especially if you'd like
| to hit your 600k revenue goals as mentioned elsewhere. You
| can run an accounting loss almost forever as long as your
| cashflow is positive. This is how Amazon did it - they paid
| their suppliers (cash going out) less frequently than money
| coming in.
|
| Interesting about the different component aspects - to get to
| 600k, I think you will certainly need to build some
| standardisation into your inventory, in terms of how many
| finished units you're holding, and establish a buying
| cadence.
|
| One other element that can help plan is what you end up doing
| for the sales effort. If the sales is consistent (ie, you're
| blogging and that pulls in a relatively-consistent amount of
| traffic/sales), then you know your inventory level to plan
| for, and can just add a buffer. Same with ads/etc, there are
| ways to make the sales generation more mechanical, which
| helps with your inventory planning, which is the main driver
| of your profit.
|
| I can share a few books via email if you're keen.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, book recommendations would be welcome.
|
| The struggle I've had so far is that I feel like I'm in a
| weird in-between space between super simple and super
| complicated. When I look for inventory software, some
| solutions are for the basic case of people selling t-shirts
| or sneakers with no concept of subcomponents. And then when
| I look for software that supports bills of materials or
| "kitting" it's ultra-complicated and assumes I have
| multiple warehouses and do everything through purchase
| orders.
| casylum wrote:
| I'd be interested in any book recommendations on this topic
| too.
| tompark wrote:
| It's very fun to read your annual reviews. This one was
| especially interesting now you've got a hardware product.
|
| It sounds like you already have figured out a lot about
| dealing with inventory, but if you haven't already, you might
| be interested in reading up on operations management, or
| watching some youtube videos/lectures about it (e.g. Q,R
| inventory model vs Newsvendor model).
| z0r wrote:
| Been following along as your posts have hit the front page ever
| since I read your epitaphs entry. Very cool product, kind of wish
| I needed a KVM over IP box now.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _Been following along as your posts have hit the front page
| ever since I read your epitaphs entry._
|
| For a second, I got scared that you somehow know the date of my
| death, but then I remembered that it's something I filled out
| before leaving Google. At least I hope that's what we're
| talking about. : )
| tristanperry wrote:
| Nice work Michael, awesome to see such a big growth in your
| business this year.
|
| Interesting that it came from a specific (but clearly very
| useful) physical product too, instead of a software based
| solution.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| Yeah, that surprised me as well. I think of myself primarily as
| a software developer, so for the first few months, I kept
| thinking, "How do I get out of the physical part of this
| business and just sell the software?" But as time went on, I
| felt like it gave me an advantage because my willingness to
| sell hardware gives me an advantage over developers who don't
| want to deal with it.
| mattlondon wrote:
| The author's success commercializing something that _he needed_
| chimed with me.
|
| I feel like this is a common thing - kinda like the old adage
| you'd hear at school that goes something like "if you have a
| question about something, chances are at least a couple of other
| people in class have the same question".
|
| I wonder how many startups that are "think of it as an uber-
| for-...." are there because of actual genuine & real needs that
| people have, or just that people think will make them rich.
|
| A decade-plus ago I was in the same situation as the author - a
| problem that _I had_ and no obvious simple solution that I could
| find. I ended up admitting that the thing I was looking for didn
| 't exist, so I made it (website in this case so very small
| risk/outlay). It made a boat load of income from ad revenue back
| when CPMs were better (still exists these days but revenue is way
| way down on what it was - perhaps less than <5% - and my regular
| work salary these days totally eclipses even what it was at its
| peak anyway).
|
| There must be so many of these sorts of stories on HN - someone
| scratching their own itch, only to find out that others have the
| same.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Scratching your own itch is def a path, but not the path all of
| us take.
|
| Like I doubt anyone has ever had their own itch for "garbage
| truck fleet management software ", but I'm sure there is money
| in it. Or I suppose people have parents / family in the garbage
| truck industry, so you can "scratch a relatives itch".
|
| Personally my SaaS has nothing to do with myself nor anyone I
| know, but it's an opportunity of weak software I found. I
| assume this is also a path people go down...
| jimcsharp wrote:
| >scratch a relatives itch
|
| I count myself extremely lucky to have found an 'ideas guy'
| (and people person, and bookkeeper, money raiser, etc etc...)
| who came out of the world of the 90s and 2000's where he'd
| fly around the world implementing copies of high touch
| software.
|
| From day 1 his vision was clear, we had an in-house subject
| matter expert, and the customers were there when our SaaS was
| ready.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's interesting that nobody really talks about this.
|
| The experience or knowledge of a problem seems like an
| extremely important aspect of starting a business, but it's
| often talked about as being "generated" or thought up.
|
| The more I've worked on my own idea, the more I've realized
| that I needed to better understand the problem space and
| refine my vision.
| hksh wrote:
| I realize your example that no one has the itch for garbage
| truck fleet management software, but I found myself (via my
| wife) in that exact situation about 3.5 years ago. She had
| founded a company providing food waste collection with
| composting on the backend and it became apparent very quickly
| in the market-testing phase that the challenges were rooted
| in logistics for consumer pickup and less in converting
| customers or processing (at least for our area in New
| Hampshire).
|
| After a couple weeks of her manually designing pickup routes
| for the "fleet" I hacked together a demo using TIGER data and
| OR-tools that planned routes (with autogen'd tick-sheets) and
| calculated a rudimentary cost-per-mile. While it wasn't
| saving game-changing amounts of time over her initial route
| optimizations, removing the manual overhead of generating
| routes on a daily basis was a big win.
|
| I would say it became a "fleet management" project (if you
| can call 2 cars, a trailer, and the occasional rental to pick
| up the slack a fleet) after one of the drivers suddenly heard
| a "grinding" sound while on route 5 miles from the nearest
| gas station. Based on the description I guessed that the
| transmission was dying and had them check the fluid. It
| didn't register on the dip stick so she dispatched another
| vehicle to tow back the trailer while the other one limped to
| the shop. The offending vehicle was one of the fraudulent VW
| TDI's that just had to get to the dealer's lot for the trade-
| in value (our goal had been to _barely_ get there under it's
| own power and it seemed we went a bit too far :) ). "Too far"
| was using it to tow ~1200# of compost 4 days a week for 6
| months with what we determined to be one oil change at the
| beginning of that period. This experience led to adding a
| step to the route planning calendar events for maintenance
| checks for the vehicles in the "fleet" based on their current
| and expected mileage.
|
| There were a bunch of things that I (in my night-time,
| engineering resource capacity) wanted to add to the system
| (tracking with GPS built into car, RFID readers in car and on
| bucket/totes to remove driver's manual annotations, CANbus
| diagnostic readout to identify early issues) but before any
| of those got off the ground she sold the company (hooray!)
| when we found out she was pregnant with twins and she
| realized she was way more interested in the physical
| composting work than the cost-center minimization of the
| drivers and the fleet anyway.
| justwalt wrote:
| There's another in-between case, where the people who decided
| to make garbage truck fleet management software noticed that
| there was a massive inefficiency firsthand, and decided to
| fix it. I imagine this is a great avenue for people who have
| both programming knowledge and experience in a separate
| domain.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback
| about this post.
|
| HN has been a huge part of my experience bootstrapping my
| business. I've learned a great deal from articles and discussions
| here, and I've received tremendous support and advice when I
| share updates about my projects. I hope you enjoy this summary of
| my third year.
| shubik22 wrote:
| Great blog post, thanks for sharing. I've enjoyed following your
| journey over the past year or two, really happy to hear about the
| success of TinyPilot. Good luck hitting $600K!!
| mdorazio wrote:
| I'd love to see an opportunity cost side note in here. I.e. how
| much is the author _not_ making by being solo instead of still
| working at Google. That, of course, is the reality for the large
| majority of solo developers: if you include opportunity cost
| you're probably losing massive amounts of money and need to be
| sure the trade off is worth it to you personally.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| As far as I can tell, OP is already basically financially
| independent, so extra money doesn't have much utility for them
| (this may also be why it's taken them 3 years to make money off
| businesses, though -- no real urgency!)
| avrionov wrote:
| How is he financially independent? A serious question. He
| said that he worked for 3 years in Google. IS there anything
| which I'm missing.
| whateveracct wrote:
| it's kind of hard to quantify though
|
| working at Google requires time. it's a full-time job and
| requires expending focus and energy. and outside of PTO and
| managing your workload a bit, you pretty much are bound to it
| week-over-week.
|
| there's something to be said for reclaiming 40+ hrs/week of
| time back for yourself
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _I'd love to see an opportunity cost side note in here._
|
| I'd estimate that if I stayed at Google or transferred to
| another FAANG-type company, my annual comp would be ~$500k at
| this point.
|
| But it's also important to note that I'm optimizing for life
| satisfaction rather than wealth. I'd take $80k/yr working for
| myself over $800k/yr working for someone else because I love
| working for myself and can support my basic needs with my
| existing passive income.
|
| Realistically, there's some price where I'd take a job working
| for a big corporation, but it would have to be _extremely_ high
| ($2M+) or an unusually good learning opportunity for me to be
| willing to give up my current lifestyle.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Amen.
|
| "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to
| bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do." --
| Bob Dylan
|
| I wrote about my take on being a 'lifestyle programmer' here:
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-
| programm...
| jka wrote:
| Another (atypical) way to look at it is to consider the dual
| meaning of the word "compensation".
|
| What is such high _compensation_ for?
|
| It's possible to interpret it as compensation for the other
| things that you could have been doing instead; which in your
| case, you are: so congratulations :)
| z3t4 wrote:
| Funny that a supermicro motherboard (MB) is used in the
| demo/example as supermicro MB has this built in via IPMI.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Yeah, someone told me that later, and I felt silly, but it
| worked out for the best.
|
| The IPMI is not documented, as far as I can tell. There's no
| mention of IPMI functionality in the SuperMicro X10DAL-i spec
| sheet or manual.[0] I actually didn't believe it was really
| there until I saw Serve the Home show screenshots of it in
| their review.[1]
|
| [0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10DAL-i
|
| [1] https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x10drli-review-
| small...
| z3t4 wrote:
| There was one time I had to drag a monitor and keyboard to
| the server though, when I had disabled the LAN. A possible
| upgrade to your product could be a 4G modem for remote
| control. And maybe a small battery so it could send a warning
| SMS on power failure, as well as gracefully shutting down the
| server, and later push the start button when power come back.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| Funny that you'd mention a portfolio rebalancer. I need something
| like that right now. Although I wouldn't pay for one I think, if
| that makes any sense: I want it to give me an additional 1 advice
| out of N, to guide my portfolio. I wouldn't pay any of the N
| though, as I'm already paying with my time to do the research.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Fantastic post, love the transparency. Funny how you managed to
| find success in hardware coming from a software background. Until
| recently, I was on a similar path.
|
| Is there a way to add a software layer to your hardware idea to
| bring in recurring revenue?
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading!
|
| > _Is there a way to add a software layer to your hardware idea
| to bring in recurring revenue?_
|
| Yeah, I've thought about that a lot.
|
| The most obvious way to do it would be to add cloud access, so
| customers pay me $5/device/month or something, and they can
| access their device over the Internet through a web gateway I
| manage. But then that gets me into the territory of "it's A Big
| Deal if this goes down," so I'm not sure.
|
| I also sell a premium version of the software with some extra
| features. Customers get it free when they buy a device. They
| keep the software forever, but after 1 year, they can pay some
| amount every month to continue receiving updates. I'm still
| kind of iffy on my strategy here, though. The first renewals
| aren't up until January 2022, so I might do something different
| by then.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Awesome, glad to see you're thinking about it. I understand
| the concern around the responsibility but also remember,
| that's an engineering problem that's been solved many times
| over.
|
| Here's the fear that's driving my thinking: (1) the moment
| word gets out you have a hotcake on hand, others will clone,
| particularly in China and (2) unsteady revenue for you, as a
| business.
| k__ wrote:
| While I appreciate the effort, I stopped reading at _" quitting
| my job at Google"_.
|
| People starting a business after working a few years for a
| FAANGish company are like people with rich parents. They begin
| their startup journey with much more than the rest of us.
|
| --edit--
|
| Sorry, guess I'm just jealous of people who start with
| parents/insurance money, FAANG mentoring/compensation, or such.
| hello_moto wrote:
| > People starting a business after working a few years for a
| FAANGish company are like people with rich parents. They begin
| their startup journey with much more than the rest of us.
|
| I think his situation is different. He didn't ask for VC money.
| He didn't have tons of "business" experience. He didn't
| invented GMail like Paul Buchheit. He didn't have "networking"
| advantages built and ready to serve him post-Google.
|
| I don't know him other than from his blog but I can relate
| because he started from zero (aside from his software
| development skill) after quitting his job. He shared his
| journey: trying to figure things out as he goes along.
|
| I mean... he worked for Google, "cool job, bro!". But have you
| ever worked for a BigCo before? The moment you're out, there's
| no safety net. All the infrastructure (software, hardware, HR,
| knowledge base, etc) is taken away from you.
|
| > FAANG mentoring
|
| What FAANG mentoring are we talking about? He reads available
| books out there just like the rest of us man...
| k__ wrote:
| FAANG companies have smarter people than average and these
| smart people mentor their new emoloyees.
|
| So you learn in a few years what could take you a decade on
| your own.
| hello_moto wrote:
| > FAANG companies have smarter people than average and
| these smart people mentor their new emoloyees.
|
| You clearly put FAANG on a higher pedestal than they should
| be...
|
| There's this thing called "politics" that exist almost
| everywhere.
|
| The mentoring that they get pertains to their job (e.g.:
| "Company-X" Python Code best practice, "Company-Y"
| Deployment checklists).
|
| They don't get mentored how to run your own startup, find
| product/market fit, etc. FAANG companies are "huge". They
| hire specialists: "developer" not "developer, marketing,
| biz-dev, QA, ops, rolled under one hat".
| ronyfadel wrote:
| It's true, I'm ex-FAANG and although I don't have much saved
| (worked in Europe), having it on your CV pretty much guarantees
| you a job in tech.
|
| That being said, it doesn't mean: 1) you should stop reading
| just because he worked at FAANG. 2) you can't take risks
| because you didn't work at FAANG.
|
| The risk/opportunity cost is the same if not more: if he makes
| $300k from a product, it's less than he would have made at his
| previous job at Google perhaps.
| anononom123 wrote:
| People who read the whole article begin their comment journey
| with more as well...
| tristanperry wrote:
| In my experiences so far, people's wealth _often_ has nothing
| to do with business success.
|
| I say _often_ because of course a tiny fraction of wealthy
| people are successful after spending an inherited fortune, but
| more often than not success seems to be genuinely earned
| through hard work and trial and error.
|
| The 'rich parents' argument seems like the same cop-out as "it
| takes money to make money" rubbish that people still spout
| today. After all, it's never been easier to build a business
| from nothing (starting a YouTube/Insta/TikTok channel or a free
| blog). People just need to put their already-owned smartphone
| or laptop to good use.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| In the sense that you need less capital today to be
| industrious than maybe ever before, you are absolutely right.
| You don't have to invest a lot of money to build a factory or
| pay for inventory. But even being in a position like Michael
| Lynch to be able to not having to work for your sustenance
| for three years means that you already are very privileged.
| k__ wrote:
| I believe that more kids of rich parents burn their money
| than making more with it.
|
| I don't believe that money isn't a major reason that people
| are successful.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for this feedback!
|
| You're right that I'm in an extremely lucky position, and I
| likely would not have experienced the success I've had so far
| without several unfair advantages I hold. Google taught me a
| lot that would be hard to learn elsewhere, and I also have
| enough savings that I can try and fail many times without it
| mattering, and very few people have that luxury.
|
| I try to be cognizant of that in my writing and avoid making it
| sound like what I'm doing is easy or accessible to the average
| person. That said, I can only write about the experiences I've
| had, advantages or not. As much as possible, I try to share
| what I did and learned and not tell anyone else what they
| should do.
| k__ wrote:
| Sure thing.
|
| You lost much money, but you could afford it, because you
| saved when you worked at Google.
|
| That's usually the point I think "oh, one of those again".
|
| I mean, there is much to learn from you burning money that I
| don't have, but it always feels a bit disillusoning to me.
|
| So again, sorry for calling that out.
| etherio wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. I loved your post last year and I'm
| happy you managed to do so much in 2020!
|
| Good luck with Tiny pilot and keep us up to date :)
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