I would suggest it's not just a matter of willpower. You should be in a material position to execute effectively - having to start worrying about how you'll feed your family, or pay your rent is a massive distraction.
Build up a buffer so you won't have to worry about it, at least in the beginning.
If you want to really do a start-up, quit your job. If you can't or won't quit your job, it is not yet time for you to do a start-up.
I quit my job with six months in savings to start my company. It took us almost 8 months to get somewhere - we filled the gap with just a little web design work on the side. I have never regretted leaving my job.
If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.
Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.
Exactly. But those services are typically provided to entire families by BigCo - padded margins sound like this is a space where a cost-focused company could stand to make quite a bit of money.
From my own recent experience, there is definitely demand from the side of founders for an AirBnB style deal specifically aimed at a place to live-and-work, especially for start-ups who need to relocate.
AirBnB doesn't accommodate them effectively because this is not their target market - AirBnB is mostly about holidays and residential space. Similarly, 42Floors doesn't do this at all because they are about Co-working and Commercial space.
I would suggest, forget the equity part of this completely. Start-ups are already bad customers without having to wait to recognise any revenue, and also have to go through regulatory implications. Let me rent a place with a sleeping area, a bathroom, a kitchen area and an office area for my whole team for a reasonable price.
It cost me a $4,000 deposit, $2,500/mo in rent and about $1,500 in IKEA/WalMart, and $3000 in temporary AirBnB accommodation to get my team situated in the bay area. Give me a better deal than that, especially one that saves me time.
Ship me groceries weekly, get me a rental car as part of this deal, and have it all ready as soon as I arrive and I wouldn't use any other service ever.
Additional features I would want:
- Connect me to the local hacker community
- Tell me where I can get exercise and where I should shop
I don't think this makes economic sense. Equity in startups who don't have enough cash on hand to pay rent is likely to be more risky than equity in those who do.
Giving away equity for rent at an early stage doesn't make sense for founders either - making a mess of your cap table for office space is a poor decision when you could work from many other places for free, or remotely from home.
This sounds like a bad deal for both parties in the marketplace.
Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.
The best advice I ever got about how to hire people and fill gaps in your team is to do the job yourself first - this applies to everything, not just tech.
The advantages of this approach are enormous - it helps you understand what you're looking for, helps you evaluate candidates and helps you understand the needs of your own company better than anything else ever could. And you're no longer desperate - you can afford to wait until you've found the best person to work with. It means that when you do start talking to people, they will respect you more because you took the time and effort to work out exactly what it is they do and how valuable they are.
It might even turn out that you don't even need that person, that the company is doing just fine because you worked out you can do it yourself more cost effectively than bringing on someone else.
Develop your skills so you can be the tech co-founder until you can get someone better than you.
It's in the interests of the smugglers that tight immigration controls remain in place, just as it's in the interests of Silk Road that regulations on restricted substances remain in place.
They need not lobby directly for these restrictions, they have other organisations that will do that for them.
I'm not sure we disagree here - rent seeking indirectly by the mechanism you describe between police and drug trafficking is still rent seeking behaviour!
You don't need a formal agreement or specific legislation to establish a rent-seeking economy, nor is economic patronage necessary. A black market is not somehow separate to rent-seeking business.
Consider that it's very much in Silk Road's interest that the regulations that currently create the transactional frictions on which it makes a profit remain as they are, or perhaps become even more restrictive. It's rent seeking in the same way that smuggling illegal immigrants is rent seeking. This does not require a broadened definition of rent seeking at all.
Roads are a public good, not a business (despite what libertarian rhetoric would have you believe). All business seek to enforce their position, by the way.
Please elaborate on this? Good work in what sense?
Ignoring the dubious ethics of running a black market, SilkRoad is ultimately a rent-seeking enterprise making money from transactional frictions. It creates no value - hardly the sort of shining beacon of enterprise the founder(s) make it out to be.
Build up a buffer so you won't have to worry about it, at least in the beginning.