Agreed 100%. When people ask me what the best time is to work on a startup, it's always when you have no dependents, living with parents, and perhaps no significant other. It's quite amazing just how much you can skim down your expenses at that point in life.
Minimizing expenses, maximizing runway. The rest is luck. Just blind luck.
If you're in the US, and not living with your parents (and or don't want to do that), one of the best ways to do it is to live in a university town. They're wired for fast Internet, the cost of living (including rent) is often very reasonable, they're among the safest areas in the US on average, and you can work at mundane jobs to pay your bills (30-36 hours per week; telemetry tech at a hospital; cashier or lead in retail making $15-$20/hr; etc). In the typical university town you can rent for $650-$1000 for a 1 or 2 bed + 1 bath apartment in a safe area. Working for a hospital you'll also usually get solid health insurance. The jobs are not difficult, they're relatively easy to get, although they will grind on you when combined with doing a startup (it's part of the trade you're making). Also in these types of jobs you won't have much if anything to worry about regarding intellectual property issues, conflicts of interest, et al.
Source: have done this, it works quite well. It can be exhausting working 80-100 hours per week obviously. The income/job becomes a permanent stream of venture capital, you can just endlessly fund your own way and keep 100% of the pie. I've often chosen to not do tech contracting work while working on a startup and self-funding with outside income, because I don't like the potential IP risks/conflicts and the burnout factor of always working on software/services/sites/whatever.
Yeah, I'm living in one now. My rent is $700 for around 750 sq ft of space in a rather typical apartment complex; one bed, one bath, very safe area (it's a safe city in general), access to 1.2 gbps Comcast (I'm paying $30x for 300mbps). That rent will climb to $750 when my lease renews in 2023, but it's still quite reasonable.
Picked a random university city: Tallahassee, FL (Florida State University). Tons of apartments available across the city for $750-$1000. It'll also work for Gainesville, FL (University of Florida; although it's more expensive than Tallahassee).
You can do it in Blacksburg, VA (Virginia Tech). Although it'll push you closer to $900-$1100 on rent. Charlottesville, VA (University Virginia) is at the edge of affordable for this scenario, although that is also doable.
Lubbock, TX is pretty easy (Texas Tech). It'll work for College Station, TX (Texas A&M). Waco, TX (Baylor) is a bit of a mixed bag on crime, however it also works.
It'll work in Champaign, IL (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).
It'll work in Iowa City, IA (Iowa University). Also in Ames, IA (Iowa St).
It'll even work in Pittsburgh, PA. Which is both a mid-size city and a university city (Pitt, Carnegie).
The same goes for Madison, WI (mid-size city, with University Wisconsin). Although it'll push you closer to $900-$1,100.
It'll work in Athens, GA (University of Georgia).
It'll work in Manhattan, KS (Kansas State).
It'll work in Norman, OK (University Oklahoma).
It'll work in West Lafayette / Lafayette, IN (Purdue).
It'll work in Fayetteville, AR (University Arkansas).
It'll work in Las Cruces, NM (New Mexico St University).
It'll work in Morgantown, WV (West Virginia University).
It'll work in Columbia, SC (University South Carolina). Although the crime is more elevated. The same goes for Tuscaloosa, AL (University Alabama).
It even gets you pretty close for Ann Arbor, MI (University of Michigan). Rent will be closer to $1,100 to $1,200.
There are a lot more options, and that's just among the more prominent university list.
The only ones that typically won't work at all are high cost of living states like MA or CA, particularly affluent universities (getting anywhere near them in location), or smaller towns with few apartments (availability).
I would say it's not JUST luck. You're not going to sell a startup if you haven't created one. So there's requisite work that is then followed by luck.
Not if you consult and find the business needs and only build wher people want and are willing to pay for.
Hitting the startup funding lottery to go on an expedition to find and build something people want is a different matter and maybe what you’re referring to, and if so, I totally agree with.
> Not if you consult and find the business needs and only build wher people want and are willing to pay for.
That's only one part of the challenge. Market research is vital, yet alone is a not guaranteed success. Even if a valuable untapped market is discovered, there's more to success than just building a solution. Sales and marketing have to execute well too. A competitor from an adjacent industry could swoop in. Etc.
I've actually worked at a handful of startups founded by middle aged men with families. I would kill to have coffee with one of their wives or older kids though because there's no fucking way those guys contribute meaningfully to the family life. I know how much they work because I was right there.
Also in every case they were already wealthy, either from early career success or just the traditional path of inheriting it. That takes a lot of the risk out and lets you outsource the domestic labor, reducing some of the burden you're asking your family to carry.
Anyway I've seen that up close and it's not necessarily inspiring.
Elon founded two companies Zip2 and X.com which merged with PayPal, was mega rich and didn’t need to work ever again on his own efforts, before even doing SpaceX and his other ventures
How is this "safety net" relevant? Literally millions of people in America have same or better "safety net". Are they some kind of lazy losers because they haven't earned billions like Elon had?
Consciously or not, having rich parents makes taking big risks in life easier. Even estranged and rich parents could be a lifeline if a crazy plan goes sideways.
Very few in the USA have parents who own emerald mines or an equivalent amount of wealth. So they're not losers. They're just not as fortunate and--understandably--more risk averse.
I'm saying that Elon deserves a modest amount of credit for busting his ass in the early days. But not so much fawning praise since luck and birth also played a outsized role in his successes.
I would guess that in 2023's rankings he will no longer be the world's richest person. That's diminished success, although still an astounding level of it.
That's diminished wealth. Wealth is factored into success, but is not the only unit of it. One can see diminished wealth at the same time as realizing gains elsewhere to no net change or even net gain.
The person I was responding to used wealth as the signal of success. But, unless I mispredict how things will go at Twitter over the next year, we are likely to see a major failure attributed to Elon.
Again, not that he won't be fantastically wealthy or successful. But he will probably take a nasty hit to both his wealth and his reputation because of Twitter.
He alluded to Musk's wealth being the only signal that may have diminished. His presence in the public mind has blown up more than ever as of late, so on that metric alone his success is growing. It would require a substantial hit elsewhere (like his wealth) to see diminishing success overall.
That's not what the poster said. He said that if unless Musk was no longer a billionaire Musk was still successful.
I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive. Most of the news for Elon this year has been: "billionaire tries to back out of ill advised takeover event", "billionaire loses lawsuit", "speed run to twitter's destruction", "advertisers pause relationship with Twitter", "fires half of twitter workforce, then asks some of those people to come back to work", "loyalty oath leaves some twitter teams with 0 or 1 employees", "locks doors of Twitter until Monday following, changes mind and asks all twitter employees to race in Friday night"
Taking the sink into Twitter was lighthearted and fun. Everything since then was a disaster. It hasn't made Musk look like a good leader. Literally doing nothing would have been a better plan, and he still could have made news whenever he wanted by doing anything - after he knew what he wanted to do.
> That's not what the poster said. He said that if unless Musk was no longer a billionaire Musk was still successful.
Yes, exactly. Given his increasing success elsewhere, it is suggested he would have to fall below billionaire status for the net change to run negative. The other commenter was quite clear that a a million dollar loss wouldn't see a net decline in his success, even though a million dollar loss would unquestionably be a decline in wealth.
> I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive.
We're talking about success, though, not positive qualities. Often the people with the most positive qualities aren't even considered successful at all. They are very much unrelated.
Minimizing expenses, maximizing runway. The rest is luck. Just blind luck.