Technical founders have nothing to lose(blog.8thcolor.com) |
Technical founders have nothing to lose(blog.8thcolor.com) |
If you are any good, you have a job and, therefore, the opportunity cost of launching a startup is massive.
Most enterprises/jobs prefer the 'surrender your soul' approach to hiring and contracting, partly to eliminate competition from current and former employees, partly because they prefer to get a stable stream of work from you.
For instance, you still have legal liability risks, which may vary depending on the problems your startup / business is trying to solve. Especially in the early stage, even if you have a corporate entity wrapped around your startup, mounting a legal defense can be financially crushing. This is doubly true if you are augmenting your cash stream by consulting / contracting.
This may not be very likely, depending on the startup - but to say technical founders have nothing to lose seems a bit naive.
Career Trajectory. Job 1: 5,000 users. Job 2: 10,000 users. Job 3: 500,000 users. Job 4: 1,000,000 users. Job 5: 10,000,000 users. How many users does the startup have, how will that destroy my resume, and how long will it take me to recover my career if the startup fails?
Opportunity Cost vs. Peak Production Years Remaining. I am 20 something years old. I only have so many years of peak production remaining before it's time to have a family and a house and all that. Is a startup the best way to spend those years when I am worth $x per hour on the market?
Part of the "nothing to lose" assumption seems to be that doing a startup gives you a learning effect that outweighs the lost revenue you had to give up for doing a (failed/failing) startup in the first place?
I'm probably mistaken on this but isn't your second sentence precisely the very definition of "opportunity cost"?
I mean, the opportunity cost isn't what it's going to cost you to buy ramen and rent EC2 instances: the opportunity cost is the money you're not winning should you be working for a company actually paying you.