Ask HN: What keeps you from beginning your Start Up?

i've said this many times before here, but one of the biggest things that prevent people from starting a startup is the instability of the startup. the family man or person with larger financial responsibilities will usually need the steady paycheck.

some of the pro-big-company arguments that you make are off the mark.

make more money? yes, in the short term. with the risk of a startup, there's potential for great reward, especially if the company gets acquired.

ownership/equity? those are nice, but you typically get more with a startup.

responsibility? career path? sure, you get some control, but not nearly as much as you will in a startup with a small team. you get to do so much more when working on a startup.

influence? again, so few people, your voice counts way more, especially if you're an expert at something.

company benefits/culture? they don't even compare. a company can pay for lunch, great, but that doesn't mean that they understand what the people want (my company is a good example of that). "paid vaccations"? typical startups don't track hours and you take off the time that you need when you need it. just get your work done.

But if he has the bug, he will leave at some point. You can't hold down a ramblin man...

Oh, and to answer your question, what made me go start my own business is I couldn't stand the way things were done in the big corp world.

I'm impatient. I want to get things done. I want to achieve things. I cannot stand the idea of being given orders. I have no respect for authority, only for competence. I want to realise my potential. The tedious and endless game of corporate politics bullshit is just a problem to be solved, as I see it. And one valid solution for it is to get out. This game just isn't worth the candle. What do you get for learning the ropes of the politics game? More politics. It's self-defeating. "The only way to win is not to play".

The corporate world also has a well earned reputation for being bland and boring. All the dishonesty and obsequiousness that comes out of needing to maintain a "normal" image makes it conforming like a mass of grey goo. Embrace weirdness and difference. Accept the idea that exceptional people are not normal. Then maybe it'll be less bland.

I haven't looked back since I quit. Life is so much more varied and interesting. I only ever do things that I think are worth doing. I work at my own pace (which is 10x faster than anything I ever observed in the corporate world). I work exclusively with brilliant people, doing something which I think is worthwhile.

Even if there wasn't more money in the long term, this is an infinitely preferable lifestyle.

What about you, yourself, who asked this question? Why do you stick around in this corporate world? If you're wondering why all these people are leaving, maybe you should go and find out for yourself. Believe me, it's worth it.

I tend to be a jack of all trades (master of all, too) flitting from one thing to the next.

Other than that, little fear about the rest of the stuff you mention. I'm hungry for an idea I can be devoted to.

If you really want to keep the guy around, make it easy for him to do his startup while he still works for you. i.e. have him spend 60% of the time working on your stuff, and 40% of the time are free for him to work on his startup. If he gets that security he'll probably stick around.

And chances are he'll be able to provide the same amount of productivity during that time.

Have you explored with him, with you in a Coaching/Mentoring role, where he sees himself heading; who he sees himself being; what effects he sees himself making over the next year / 2 years / 5 years / at retirement?

Once you have the answers to those (and he may not have fully considered these things himself, to that degree of clarity and detail), you can then work together to see if any options exist where you both get what you want.

1) Chance for a life changing payday, that could free you from the burden of working (if that were desirable - I have a theory that working is more fun when it isn't required).

2) Ability to control how the game is played. You don't want to lose because you were forced to follow someone else's direction - if you lose it should be your own damn fault.

If you can create these two things in a big company, let me know :)

It's hard to lose good people, but even harder to see somebody leave their dreams on the table.

Yeah, you've missed everything. It's a nice idea to try and give an employee what he's looking for from a startup within your corporate environment, but it's just not possible. Corporate employees exist to build wealth for someone else. That's just the reality of the situation. There are a lot of benefits that come with corporate life, primarily stability, but if he wants freedom, he won't get it working for someone else. When I was an employee, I had to remind myself that every benefit and incentive was an addicting trap, designed to keep me from leaving. A steady paycheck will erode an entrepreneur's soul over time, because you come to rely on it and striking out on your own is that much harder.

To be clear, I think it's commendable that you're trying to provide a great environment for your employees, but I think the best case scenario here is that you'll work hard to keep him, and you might succeed, but something inside him will die a little and he'll always wonder if he made the right choice. Why not just let him go give it a shot? I think it'll cost you more in the long run to fight it than it would to just get a new employee.

And I know we don't want to get sidetracked on this, but entrepreneurs do not "quit their boss". They absolutely do quit their jobs because they long for the freedom and rush of creating something on their own, no matter how awesome their boss is. If you disagree, perhaps that indicates more about the difference between a corporate and entrepreneurial mindset than anything else.

In the meantime, I'm honing my programming skills. I've been programming for a while now, I'd say that I'm intermediate. I know Pascal, C, Python, and bits of Java, C# and Lisp (I'll look deeper into this one though). My main objective now is to design and code larger apps.

Do you make him run windows, when he'd rather use a Mac or Linux, because he has to use Visual Studio? Did he ever suggest that you do a project in Ruby or Python, to be told that "we're a Java shop"?

Do you have bureaucratic rules? Do you make him punch in and out, and log time down to the minute? Are certain websites blocked because they are not work-related?

Is the working environment pleasant. Are you six developers and two PMs on cheap chairs and small tables, in a 300 sq ft office, with hard floors and no sound dampening?

Is management not only a step up in salary and responsibility, but also access to unrelated perks like a better chair?

But mostly, I think, it was the "talk the talk" about creative minds, and not walk a single step of the road, that made sick of that place.

This is one mistake employers do. Do not try to retain him. If he wants it enough (and in this case he does) he will sooner or later find a way to make it happen.

Join him. Give him office space. You can still use his brain while he is around.

EDIT: Entrepreneurs should also not be afraid to share their ambitions with their boss. That is only if your boss started his own business. You may find a new partner in your boss. Remember that those who made it always want to help others make it as well. They will see themselves in you and noone can resist that.

Personal time off, and ability to set my own schedule. In a job, my ability to take time off to travel, do volunteer work, do research, whatever, is not so much limited by a lack of money as it is by a lack of formal vacation time. If I want to take two months off a year, and have the money to do so, then I want to be able to do it. If I want to set my own hours to best suit other things in my life, I don't want to be confined to the general expectation of 8-5 M-F.

And yes, money does play a factor. In most jobs, you and your peers make the same salary plus or minus 5%, regardless of how hard you work or how inventive you are. If I can work harder and/or smarter and produce something worth more money to more people, then why should I not reap the financial benefits of my labor?

There certainly are advantages to working at a regular job, among them fairly reliable income and insurance benefits and what-not. But even so, employment can be fickle. If "the economy" turns sour, your job may not be as stable as it seems.

(Actually, I would advocate spending time running multiple diverse business projects, to help balance out "the economy".)

1) The big win. You can heap stock options on him, but your board will block you from giving a dev more than 1% or so, I presume.

2) His baby. His own company. A sense of TRUE ownership.

3) A clean slate. New companies/new products are more fun than existing ones for a lot of people.

4) Having ANY boss. Everyone rolls their eyes at even the best boss SOMETIMES. The irony is that, if he succeeds, he'll be that boss. But it's a great feeling to NO MATTER what, be able to fix something that organizationally broken if you think it's important. To be where the buck stops.

5) Fame/notoriety. Some people are motivated by this. If your startup wins, he'll be an unnamed dev in a winning startup. If his startup wins, he'll be the guy the led it there. Either way, it feels WAY cooler to say "I own my own company" when someone says, "so what do you do?".

Doing a startup isn't a sensible CAREER decision... It's a largely emotional lifestyle decision.

Bureaucracy. I hate that I can't just do something. Ironically, the level of bureaucracy might be less at my job than if I worked for myself because if I work for myself I have to do lots of crap like dealing with laws that govern companies. I could hire a lawyer/accountant, but that gets back to Risk.

Sites like this. They make you think too much about scaling and building for a billion users. Databases don't scale. None of them. You do have to turn to a dumber object store at some point and loose a lot of query power. I'm moving past this mental roadblock.

Winner-take-all economies. A lot of what I would like to create isn't likely to result in money. This isn't because they don't have value. It's because they aren't good without lots of users. This is the most aggravating. Once users are using one thing, even if you're better, they just use that one thing for the same reason that more data trumps better algorithms.