Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4925061

by stenmorten • 14 years ago

7 11 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What is is that compels you to start a business of your own? Dreams of freedom? Money? Success? Autonomy? What is the key driver? I mean, you know there are a lot of hurdles and endless hours of work, and no guarantee of succeeding, so why do you feel you still feel you have to do it?

stenmorten3• 14 years ago

Somebody outside of this forum told me the question was pointless: go do something that makes you money instead, he said.

So my answer was something like this:

On the contrary. The answer to this question will make me money. Thus far, I have made $100,000 online, and I am one of those people who "have to" do it, and I know what my motivation is.

Now I am wondering what yours is.

Why do I wonder?

Because I am making a product that targets you, obviously. So this is basic research

...

So there you have it, I guess that was a "full disclosure" that should have been included in the first question.

rauar• 14 years ago

1. Fun (business development)

2. Fun (technology)

3. Self determination

4. Not having to deal with unmotivated employees and their low quality results

stenmorten3• 14 years ago

Fun. I like that a lot :)

In addition to that, I love being a "creator" -- when I do programming and writing (no matter if I'm creating the product or the sales material) -- there's a substantial difference between "creating what I've thought up" and "creating what somebody else thought up". Having creative powers, I would rather make my own "dreams" come true, than somebody elses.

I guess what also drives me is "time freedom" -- that I can choose to work less, and spend more time with my kids, if I want to.

So for me, autonomy, freedom, creativity are at least some keywords.

biscarch2• 14 years ago

It's in my bones.

I'll attempt to clarify. I started a business because I had experiences through school that made me think hard about why I was doing what I was doing at all times. Things like endless piles of homework were forced upon me by authority figures I didn't respect, even though I had already mastered the material.

I have this unending urge to learn more; All the time. I started programming with self-taught ActionScript. Then JavaScript/html/css. I spend a lot of time attempting to master my mind (Thinking in different ways/languages) and this has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.

Show me a company that is receptive to using those languages in production and has a distributed nature. A company that allows it's employees to choose projects and throw their weight behind them. With as few managers as humanly possible. Where collaboration is collaboration and not forced.

The closest I've seen to this mindset is probably Basho. Maybe Valve, but I've never talked to anyone at Valve.

I apologize if I'm not clear or not fully explained. The answer to why my life is forcefully thrust in this direction would require a blog post of massive length that I am not ready to write. An interesting note is that consulting is likely a side effect of not being able to find anywhere I wanted to work.

stenmorten3• 14 years ago

That's quite an interesting take. So do you make your living doing consulting, or do you create products?

biscarch2• 14 years ago

I make my living consulting. I took a couple months off to try and build a product with a friend, but it didn't work out for non-product reasons, so I moved to SF and started looking for new contracts a couple weeks ago.

OafTobark• 14 years ago

I love it. I do it over going out with friends, going to the movies, or just about anything else you can name. And I have. But its not so much the business part as it is inventing and doing something. Business is just the vehicle to get things done and part of it.

dear• 14 years ago

I don't want to work for a boss. I want to control my own destiny.

sharemywin• 14 years ago

I read something in rich dad poor dad that made sense to me. If you owna company you can work on the things you want or are good at and outsource the parts that you don't

abr0414• 14 years ago

I'm driven the desire to be the best at what I do. I get this drive from my dad, who owned a plumbing company. He always told me that he obviously didn't originate the concept of plumbing, so he can't take pride in inventing it, but he took a lot of pride in being the best.

The service that I'm offering is only a tiny bit unique but I take pride in my execution. I don't think that I could feel this level of satisfaction while working for a boss.

csixty4• 14 years ago

I want the chance to do things right. So I guess "autonomy", but it's more than that. Dare I call it "revenge"?

My career started with six years in a legacy development ghetto. I started looking for work in the tail end of the dot-com crash, and the only thing I found after months of searching was a position doing Pick database development. It was a mistake to take that job, but I really wanted to get out of my parents' house. Pick developers are an interesting breed, like a cross between mainframe die-hards and ravenous DBAs. And here I was, using things like "functions" and "templates" in my code like some young thing who just wants to jump on the latest trends.

One shop had an middleware app that put a web-based GUI on top of the Pick database. I got called into my boss's office and told to stop putting   in my pages because it confused the other developers. At another job, the sysadmin refused to install risky open source things like CURL or wget on the server, and Pick had sockets by then but no HTTP library, so had to write my own HTTP client in PickBASIC so we could talk to a partner's API. It was like being stuck in the 60s, only without the drugs. I was writing green-screen apps...in 2005!

Anyway, the point of all this is that my resume was tainted at that point. I could quote Stroustrup with my eyes closed, but nobody would bring me in for an interview for anything other than Pick because that's all my "professional experience" entailed. That changed when I put $1000 of my own money on the line and got Java certified.

My first Java job quickly morphed into a PHP job, and now I've been in that world for seven years. There's lots of cowboy coders slinging PHP, you know. Don't know if anyone's ever pointed that out on HN at all. Version control, classes, prepared queries, frameworks...I've been fighting uphill battles over those for years. Yes, prepared queries were controversial because they're "slow"!

Now that my wife is out of school, I finally have the chance to go & do things my way. I'm giving freelancing a try. I set up my own Git server the other day. I do commits every time I'm done implementing a feature, and it's so damn satisfying -- almost orgasmic after nagging my co-workers for years. I develop on my laptop, not on the production server. I write clean, well-documented code. I use templates to keep HTML out of my code. I'm branching out into Ruby on Rails for a side project and probably some of my client work.

It's stressful as hell, but at least I'm making things I can be proud of, and the product of my work reflects well on me as a developer. I'm actually enjoying programming again.

Ask HN: Why do you want to start a business?

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