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| 5/29 |
| 2005/3/16-19 [Industry/Startup] UID:36720 Activity:moderate |
3/16 http://www.paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html \_ With all due respect, you might as well do this yourself if you really want to do a startup. They give you $6000 a person plus some seed money for equipment and you have to move to cambridge. A much more realistic goal is to get a job during the day and work on your startup at nights. \_ Maybe your experience is different than mine (if it is, I'd like to hear it), maybe your work ethic is vastly superior to mine (congrats), or maybe you can pull three months of 24-hour days fueled by methamphetamines without obliterating your brain (more power to you, I guess), but the idea of holding a day job, even a mindless job slinging coffee at the 'bucks, and seriously working on a startup at nights strikes me as not only unrealistic, but categorically insane. If you're serious about bootstrapping a company from scratch, it's a 60 hour a week commitment minimum. Conversely, stealthily working on your startup while pretending to work your real job has worked out nicely for a number of people. $6000 a person is pretty weak, but if you think the money is their to incentivize applicants, you're missing the point entirely. -dans (been there, done that (poorly I should add), may do it again some time (better I should hope) after I build a suitable startup shelter) \_ Dans, then you must really suck. I've been there, done that, a couple of times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I raised 1.5 Mill during the dotcom boom while holding down part-time jobs for my startup. We incorporated, sold some systems, then went BK like everyone else during the bust. Got another job, got involved in another startup part-time, helped them raise some money, ended up working for them as a contractor. Currently I am involved in my day-time job, go to Law School at night, am starting up another small online business with a buddy (also at night), flipping some real-estate through a REIT, and getting ready to buy a 2nd home. I also volunteer 3 hours every week down at the Pro Bono law clinic in Downtown S.J. I am also trying to hold down a relationship. So I don't watch TV or play Counter Strike for fourteen hours straight or watch Japanese Cartoons during the weekends. It's pretty amazing how much time you waste in a typical day. --PP \_ are you posting on craiglist too \_ ...yet you have no trouble finding the time to post long, angry rants to the motd. \_ Very few people are as OCD or manic as you are. Get some perspective here, son. \_ I don't think dans sucks; I think you're exceptionally motivated and an arrogant ass to boot. \_ you sound like a workaholic \_ Before I launch into, entirely justified, ad hominem attacks, I think I'll point out that you and I appear to be using very different working definitions of the word startup. When I say startup, I mean a nascent business that you hope to grow into something big. Your definition seems to include small businesses that, though successful, aren't really intended to grow into something huge. To use a meatspace example, yeah, you can hold down a real job and run a corner grocery market but not if you're trying to grow into a chain the size of safeway. There's nothing wrong with small businesses, you just can't retire in Paris off the proceeds. Anyway, ad hominem attacks, as an earlier poster indicated, you're an arrogant ass, to that I'll add, and a cunt to boot. We should probably sit down over I beer sometime, I think we'd get along. :) Okay, bact to facts. 1.5M is a passable angel round, but it's not very much money. Yes, a good manager can turn 1.5M into three years operating expenses, but only because they're insane, willing to live off dog food, and will try to make everyone else working under them live the same way. Of course, if three years go by and you're still running of the same 1.5M seed capital, someone fucked up. When you say ``my startup'' do you mean the company *you* co-founded and had greater than 33% (50 would be a more realistic number) of the stock in, or do you mean the company that happened to be a startup that you were shilling for as employee #n (n > 4). There's a big difference. Maybe during the boom there were angels who were crazy or stupid enough to throw money at a startup where: a) the founders are startup virgins *and* b) the startup's only assets are IP *and* c) the founders are only working on the startup part time It strikes me as unlikely to happen again. And no, I'm not counting friends and family as proper angel investors, because grandma rarely says ``no.'' -dans \_ Not to be snarky, but do you actually use words like 'meatspace' in real life? \_ By all means be snarky, I was raised to appreciate snark, and am always happy to see more of it in the world, even when directed toward me. To answer your question, yes I use words like meatspace in real life, but meatspace, in particular, is one I use sparingly. It raises some goofy/gross imagery, and is subject to misinterpretation. In nerd circles, it's a nice, succinct way to disambiguate between the net and the real world (TM). -dans \_ Uh oh. Now some one will hassle dans for using the word "disambiguate", which will lead to another reply with some screwball non-standard word, leading to another snarky reply, leading to... BREAK THE LOOP! \_ Nah, there's nothing ambiguous or non-standard about my use of disambiguate. -dans \_ I concur. It doesn't work. \_ I've done it once before, and I am starting to spin up again. A good friend has managed to self-fund by contracting for for the last 7 years, and she has designed 4 cpu cores, a dozen other ip blocks, plus her own cell library for her business. \_ Your friend sounds very smart and methodical, and (though this may be semantics) the cpu cores, ip blocks, and cell library strike me as preparation before she hits the `ignition' switch to do the startup whole hog. I hope to lay similar groundwork before launching my next startup. When I say that doing a startup and holding down a job is unrealistic, I'm not talking about slowly laying groundwork. To me, there exists a point of no return moment past which one must focus all energies solely on the startup. -dans \_ Her business is licensing ip cores and libraries. |
| 5/29 |
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| www.paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html Summer Founders Program Because we just set up this program, and yet need to make decisions early enough not to mess up people's summer plans, the March 26 deadline is a lready alarmingly close. So if you know friends who might want to start a startup this summer, please tell them about this. How to Start a Startup, I said there could be ten times more startu ps than there are. A lot of people who could start successful startups n ever do. When you're young the prospect seems too intimidating, and as y ou get older you lose the flexibility you need in your life to start one . So I decided I should offer somet hing more encouraging than words. Like a lot of guys who got rich from technology, I've been meaning to giv e seed money to new startups. The reason was that I didn't want would-be startup founders deluging me with pitches. Some friends and I are starting a new venture firm specializing in very e arly stage startups. The company is so new that it doesn't even have a n ame or a web site yet. But I've committed a big enough chunk of money to get it started. The first project is to fund a bunch of new startups this summer. Robert was still in grad school, and he probably wouldn't have had tim e for that initial burst of work during the school year. We're going to call this project the Summer Founders Program, and it pres erves many of the features of a conventional summer job. You have to mov e here (Cambridge) for the summer, as with a regular summer job. We give you enough money to live on for a summer, as with a regular summer job. You get to work on real problems, as you would in a good summer job. Bu t instead of working for an existing company, you'll be working for your own; instead showing up at some office building at 9 AM, you can work w hen and where you like; and instead of salary, the money you get will be seed funding. If your startup doesn't work out, you can mothball or dissolve it, and no harm done. If you want to keep going and we think your company is promising, we'll pro bably be able to help you get more funding. Even if your project fails and you give up at the end of the summer, you' ll be better off than if you'd taken most summer jobs. It will be diffic ult to get into this program, so being able to say on your resume that y ou were a Summer Founder should carry more weight than an ordinary summe r job. You'll learn way more than you would in most summer jobs, and you 'll probably meet more interesting people. If you're accepted, we'll deal with the paperwork for you. We'll incorpor ate you, if need be, get you a corporate bank account, supply simple, ge neric employment agreements for you to use, and so on. We can give some advice about patents, though you don't have to deal with that in the ear liest stages; you have a year after making a discovery to file a US pate nt application for it. We'll have some smart people who are willing to talk over your plans with you, and suggest pitfalls and new ideas. We may also have connections t o companies you'd like to do deals with. But how much you want to take a dvantage of our advice and connections is up to you. We'll organize some kind of dinner once a week for all the Summer Founder s, so you can meet one another and compare notes. We'll try to get some expert in technology, business, or law to speak at each dinner. We don't plan to interfere in your company t he way ordinary VC firms or "incubators" do. We won't insist on being on your board of directors, or that you get a business guy to be your CEO, or that you work in our building. We expect you to work out of whatever apartment you can find to live in. It is probably no coincidence that s o many successful startups have started in apartments; Indeed, the ideal startup from our point of vie w would be mix of some people still in grad school and some who've finis hed. We plan to use the animal test I d escribed in How to Start a Startup, plus, for technical people, the firs t two of the three tests we used for hackers. Blub, and we see no reason the application demands it, we'll wonder if it's because you can only think in Blub. At least till Google crawls down the pipe onto the desktop, and makes the OS underneath irrelevant. If you're developing "enterprise" software, you might even want to writ e server-based apps on NT. But if you propose to write a server-based ap p for the general public (eg a dating site) on NT, you should be prepa red to explain what you know about servers that Yahoo and Google don't. We expect you to have some definite plan for the company you want to crea te, but we also expect you to modify this plan as you go. If at the end of the summer some group is still doing precisely what they said they would, it's probably because they're out of touch with the market, not because they scored a perfect bullsey e with the idea. If you're accepted, we'll write the initia l check to you personally, so you have enough money to get here and rent an apartment. Since you'll be the offic ers, you can spend the money however you like. We want to fund as many startups as possible, so we're not going to give each one much more than you'll need for living expenses. We estimate liv ing in or near Cambridge for the summer to cost about $6000 per person, including travel. If you need expensive hardware, we'll consider it, but the odds of being accepted are lower. It's in your interest to take lit tle money in the earliest stages, because you give up less of the compan y for it. You don't have to have all the founders here for the summer, but you should be missing at most one. I've been writing as if all the startups had to develop software. That's because that's what we know about, and where a lot of the opportunities are now. The original motivation of this proje ct was benevolent, but this is not a charity. If our investments pay off , we can invest in more startups, and if they don't, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We're looking for startups we believe will succeed a ccording to the classic metric of making money. So take care to avoid a common trap founders fall into: starting a compan y you think will be amusing. Trying to solve both problems simultaneously approaches impossible. Startups can be fun at times, but you're doomed if you design one with th at in mind. The function of a company (as opposed to a nonprofit) is to make money. If you stray too far from that, it's easy to cross over into losing money, at which point any company has to stop. So we will have a stricter filter for groups with the default ambition of CS undergrads ( multiplayer games) than for those who plan to build some unromantic but very definite piece of technological plumbing. Propose games if you want , but you'd better be ready to explain what makes you unique. So (unlike the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition, for example) we won't publicize the compa nies that get funded, unless for some reason you want us to. Startups sh ould keep a low profile during the seed stage. Before you have a product you want customers for, publicizing your plans helps competitors more t han you. We don't care if you're US citizens, but you have to be in the country al ready. We know India and China are full of s mart people who'd like to come and contribute to the growth of the US ec onomy, but our government won't let us bring you here to do it. We know you have to decide about summer jobs soon, which is why we're ann ouncing this program before we even have a name. So here's the procedure : 1 Choose the people you want to start a startup with. It will be about April 5 before you get an answer, so don't include anyone who can't change their summer plans that late. The deadline for applications is 11:59 PM EST on March 26. people who move quickly are more likely to succeed in startups. If you want to change something, don't send us corrections; You can resubmit up to 2 times (total 3) before the deadline, but only from the same address. Your application will be credited with the time of the first application. One person can appear in multiple applications, but in that case at most one of them will be accepted. Yes answers will include t... |