Ask HN: What's the big deal with startups anyways...

In low variance career paths, things are pretty straightforward so there is little blog about.

You are asking this on HN, which is run by a startup funding company and started out as "Startup News" ( http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html )

"Oh, son, don’t overreach! Go for the dented car, the dead-end job, the less attractive girl!"

There might also be more involved than just making money. It's also about work satisfaction.

But oddly enough, it's usually the entrepreneur that shares interesting things. It's the person who goes out and does new and interesting things that finds new things to talk about. Sometimes they're crap, sometimes they're brilliant... But they're almost always new and interesting.

The '90k dev', by definition, is happy simply to get through the workday and pay his debts. If he was reaching for more, he moves into the entrepreneur class. Sure, they sometimes find nuggets and share them, but more often they either find nothing or don't share it.

I have worked both for startup companies and large corporate entities. While the corporate world does offer some sense of security and reliability (and that is tempting to me sometimes, even now), I have been most unhappy in my career during those times when I was assigned a cubicle and a task list.

Over the years, what I have learned about myself is that I enjoy creating things and applying myself to new challenges. I know this is not the case for everyone. If you were meant for the quiet world of work life, then I strongly agree with you -- it's a surer path to financial security. If you weren't meant for it, then financial security won't matter very much -- you'll be miserable.

It's pure love of the game when you get down to the heart of it. There's a certain love for creating something from nothing.

Sadly, there's too much hype out there from the press/blogging community because that's what gets them pageviews.

Nothing wrong being a salaried 90k .net developer either. This isn't for everyone. It isn't for most to be honest. Now is the best time ever to start something though. The costs to at least see if it will work are close to nothing and if it does work out, the tools to charge are there/raise money to scale are heavily available.

Your parents were lucky to have lived through a time of cheap/free education, steady growth in the economy, and relatively cheap house prices when they were starting out. With good luck they will get a good pension, paid (in your father's case) by earmarked taxpayer largesse.

For the rest of us, we'll start our employment mired in student debt, higher taxes from paying for Boomer retirees, property prices forever beyond our reach, and an economy so bad that young people regard un- or low-paid slavery as a privilege (sorry, "internships").

The government here is cutting back across the board, and banks and other big companies cutting staff. The "job for life" is gone for us, as a generation.

So, what's riskier - starting out on your own, with the chance to make it big, or struggle for years, or decades, on low-paid, short-term employment ?

Each and every day you're becoming less significant. Literally. As world population increase, an individuals worth, his identity, his very core will become less and less visible. We stride to stand out, to achieve - to be visible, appreciated, spoken of. Entrepreneurship is a channel through which we can break out of our shell. As for the models, gaining muscle and eating better... what's wrong with eating better?

From 1980-2005, nearly all net job creation in the United States occurred in firms less than five years old. Your job security wouldn't exist without startups. The risk-takers are the exploratory outliers changing economic paradigms and promoting growth. If their business model bet succeeds, they have both predicted the future as well as created the future.

We pay them attention even\especially when they say bread-crumb concepts because humans have always been interested in the idea of prophets.

To me, working the same job for 40 years hoping I'll save enough money to be able to retire in spite of unknown but probably increasing inflation is what is risky.

I find it painful to see an opportunity and not take it. I have always sold stuff. When I was 14, there was a civil war where I lived and the prices of everything shot up several hundred percent. The government intervened and subsidized food and gasoline. At the time, I was an A-student: I had the second highest grade in the state and was featured on both radio and television. A good kid by every measure .. BUT! I found a contact at a cigarette factory who would sell me cigarettes at 80% discount. He just meant to sell me a pack, because I was a "rich kid". I flipped him over to work for me.

At 14, I ran a cigarette cartel out of my grandmother's house supplying tens of shops and street vendors.

I didn't need the money. My father and all my older brothers and sisters were in America. I didn't do it for the money. I just did it because it was an opportunity.

With some of the money I made I bought a bicycle and decorated it at a carpet shop .. for some reason. I got that idea that, perhaps, draping the bicycle frame in velvet cloth would look more appealing than the bare metal. I took it to the carpet and curtains guy and told him what I wanted done. He was confused, but money is money, so he pimped out my bike in purple velvet; a pair of wheels befitting a dealer.

Every kid in town wanted my bike.

My second venture was bicycle upholstery. A cottage industry unheard of up to that point. I didn't make as much as I did in cigarettes, but to this day, you can go to my old hometown and see kids ride bikes draped in cloth.

You're just born with the bug, I guess.

More often than not, society rewards you in proportion to the value you create for it. And you can't create the amount of value that comes with a startup without taking on a lot of risk. (Look up "risk-reward" in economics).

That's why entrepreneurs are glorified. They are willing to take the necessary risks in order to create unusual amounts of value for society and, yes, for themselves.

Second, you are asking a question with a false premise. It's not either "make a million and be a rock star" or "work a 9-5 job". There are lots of entrepreneurs on here, just like yourself, who are also working jobs. Lots more that are on their own and just barely Ramen profitable. Lots more that are quite happy with having a cottage business.

There is a business and a hype around startups, no doubt. You see a lot of that here, although its usually sub-rosa.

It's the risk-taking superman story. There's a lot of drama. It's the simple cool idea or magic formula that made the weakling into the giant. Business porn. People selling emotion instead of a reality. Some folks trying to help that don't know what they're talking about, they just got lucky once. Some unlucky people who drew the wrong conclusions. Way, way too much fanboyism and hero worship. But that's okay -- startups are all about making a difference, and that usually entails lots of work and risk. As long as folks know the odds going in, why not stay positive about the whole thing? Our enthusiasm for startups doesn't mean that other choices are bad or wrong. Why wouldn't you be excited about the choices you make in life, no matter what they were?

1. I write software: business applications. I love what I do. I love getting something to work right the first time. I love seeing people use the software I wrote to do their jobs and run their businesses. I can't imagine doing anything else.

2. The software I have inherited in all 88 companies I have worked at has sucked. I mean really sucked. Nothing to be proud of. Nothing to want to work on. I think it's because business software is now where medicine was 100 years ago.

So I have a choice. Work on other people's crap or write my own. I have done both, but I have to write my own to be happy in this industry. If I could only work on other people's software, I think I'd rather work in a grocery store.

Starting a software business is the most direct way to do what I really want to do.

I realize that other people have different reasons; this is just one answer to your question.

Ambition. "Educated" risk taking. Non-complacency. A desire to push yourself farther than what society says you should be. To invent something new, world changing. To throw an economic monkey wrench into someones inefficient/crappy invention. To think on your own. To live and die on your own merits.

Many will have different answers as to what motivates them to do it. It's definately not for everyone. You usually "know" if you want to do a startup or not. It's extremely challenging. Not doing one is a perfectly fine choice. Live your life the way you please.

That said, I am a gainfully employed scientist with money in the bank, and I am also a hard-working co-founder. It is not about money or promises of easy-living to me. It is about the challenge of building something that does not yet exist.

I don't read self-help books, and avoid blog posts about start-up strategy. I consider such things as a serious waste of time, and a dangerous distraction from free-thinking. However, some people share actual experiences on HN, and I find that to be valuable.

Also IMHO: 9 in 10 of us are not 'doomed'. I don't believe there is an 'us', and I do not perceive myself to be taking chances. Everyday I am doing something that makes me happy. Where's the chance in that?

If your goal is to accrue money, then for God sake's don't do a startup. As you point out, there are much better ways to do that.

If you think you're in an echo chamber, step outside. It will likely do you some good, especially re: startups.

First of all, some poeple, like me, prefer to shape their own product without serving obediently for years climbing some corporate ladder, executing orders handed down by superiors. That preference, for me, is independent of all economic considerations.

The economic issue seems like a question of risk tolerance at first sight, but actually it isn't. A startup may be high risk, high potential reward, but starting a startup and being an employee are not exclusive choices. You can always look for a job if your startup fails. If you never try to start a startup, you needlessly settle for the low reward without getting anything a startup founder doesn't get. You're just renouncing one of the opportunities that our society provides. Why would you do that?

So my goal for the last year while I have been doing startups my goal has been to get ramen profitable and we did that just a couple of months ago.

The reason this was so important to me is because now, I feel like I am "living off the land" or "surviving in the wild" and answering to literally no one. The amazing part about start-ups is that they make me feel truly alive and independent, while working for someone else makes me feel trapped and dependent. Right now, I'm really happy.

I'm also looking forward to the next part of our start-ups growth, which staying with the analogy, will be like growing a clan of like minded people who want to build on what we started.

Also, I read once in 'Stumbling on Happiness' that people are happy when they can actually have an impact on things. In less than a year, we have already significantly impacted the YouTube space and will be continually impacting the entertainment industry. The exciting part is in my opinion we have done this for the better and that as promised in the book that does makes me happy.

I guess in some ways, I'm some sort of new aged tech-hippy, but at least I'm not alone: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html