Entrepreneurship

Who are entrepreneurs?

Finally, there is the category of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs range from one-person developer educator businesses and solo “indie hackers” to bootstrapped or indie startups and full-on venture-backed startups. As someone who can code, you can create something of great, scalable value with your bare hands, and that is a mighty power indeed.

Why not start a startup?

Most startups fail

It’s well understood that most startups fail. Bad ideas exist. You might find a gap in the market, but there may be no market in that gap. You know that you are supposed to make something people want, but the problem is that people often don’t know what they want until they see it. You can’t even ask them.

As David Ogilvy once observed:

“The problem with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”

You don’t get rich

Even for those that do succeed, there are long, lean years of nothing while you build a business. Gail Goodman famously called it the Long, Slow Ramp of Death. Your opportunity cost— what you might otherwise earn instead as a senior developer if you didn’t try to be a founder— is extremely high, possibly in the millions.

This is one of many reasons why not to start a startup (Here is a longer list, with Paul Graham’s responses.). In fact, it is often said that you should not start a startup to get rich; you should do it because you feel compelled to create something that should exist but doesn’t. If you are right, getting rich is a side effect.

How can we avoid risks?

There are smart ways you can de-risk this, for example, by leaving your current company with a deal ...