Co-founder of Bubble on the benefits of being broke

I interviewed Emmanuel Straschnov, the co-founder of the nocode platform [Bubble](https://bubble.io/) a while back. At the time, they were pulling in about $150k/mo.

TL;DR: Entrepreneurship is not glamorous, but it's worth it. And being broke can actually light a fire under you.

"If you become an entrepreneur after having had the comfort of a nice salary, it is costly. Personally costly, in terms of comfort. I survived on a combination of savings and a cheap lifestyle — I managed to live on less than $28,000 a year. My first room was less than 8 square meters. I had roommates. You don't want to do that for ten years, but for a year? I actually enjoyed it. And I wanted a little discomfort in my life to make me work harder. The biggest challenge was social. Most of my friends from business school had highly-paid jobs so the fun that they wanted to have was not at the same price point as the fun I wanted to have. Like, I didn't know when I'd get paid again, I couldn't put 80 dollars into dinner. So the people I hung out with changed, but a few very good friends would regularly just pay for me and say, 'You'll buy me dinner when you're rich.' I'm very grateful for that. Three years in, we still weren't making real salaries, we had no vertical traction, we were working a lot, and I was getting too old for the college lifestyle. It was a little tough. I started looking at the opportunity costs and it got to a point where I was like, 'Is this really what I should be doing with my life during my most productive years?' People around me were doing great things and I felt the clock ticking. It actually made me work a little bit harder and scale more aggressively. Soon, the business was making enough money for us to take a decent salary. It wasn't the kind of life I would have had in the corporate world, but it actually felt cooler."