jadams

Yes, given a history of testing. I don't want to be the guinea pig, but the simple fact that it's nukuler isn't an issue.

60K seems like good money for an entry-level game programming job. I wouldn't count on any profit sharing or equity to be worth anything. If it is, great, but don't count on it.

The game industry is organized kind of like the music industry. Small studios are the bands to the publisher's record companies. Small studios (typically under-funded and over-ambitious) beg the big guys for money to work on projects. They often get screwed. Fight to get your name in the credits of any game you release. OTOH, many many games never get released.

Hm. Re-reading your post, it occurs to me that the startup may not be a game company.

"Love your work" is often just a way for startups and other small companies to extract unreasonable hours from you, with little payback.

I've done the startup thing. I've worked 9-5 er I mean 9-6, oh, wait it was more like 10-7:30. In the end, any job will require you to put up with things you don't like. Obviously, some jobs are a better fit than others.

I find the startup smugness naive.

They have regional interests, and they need to make sure they can counter any hegemonist's power-projection in the their region.

Nice.

Rocky's Boots for the Apple ][ taught me pretty much everything I needed to know to pass my first digital electronics course.

Nice. Just got two.

One for me, one for my Dad. He's 75, and still writing Mathematica notebooks and software to try to help educate people in developing countries. Rock on dad, this one's for you.

Er, why do you care?

Make sure you do lots of extra-curricular work that you enjoy, and that's difficult. If your grades aren't great, you can show off projects to get jobs. If you want to make your own job, grow it out of your projects.

I failed out of school, and I'm an inconsistent employee at best, but I only know a couple of people who work harder than I do, and they're all business owners.

Not very. Marks anywhere from 40% to 85%. I started when I was fifteen and failed out in my fourth (last) year.

Went back part-time about 5 years later, and failed a compilers course after I decided to forgo the group, write the compiler myself, but got sidetracked leading bots in assault mode on Unreal Tournament.

I really learned how to study about 2 years ago. Sigh.

Spending too much time playing games was a major contributing factor. OTOH I now work in game-development.

I occasionally think about going back so I can some day get a post-grad degree, but don't relish being some profs biatch.

I have a university library-card, read theses and research papers, and generally do whatever I damn well want, while getting paid and hatching product ideas.

removes news.ycombinator.com from marketing plan

Yeah, it's better to trust a liar than a "geezer". What is this, the freaking Cultural Revolution?

P.S. That was something that happened before 1985.

Feasible, no. Terrorism, no. Immoral, yes. Desireable, maybe.

Actually software is so much easier than any other kind of physical engineering, that ridiculously small and inexperienced teams try to solve fiendishly complex problems. That's what makes it hard.

A pointer dereference can make all the difference in an inner loop. As usual, the answer is to profile, then to optimize.

No other dogma really applies.

You have to pay to visit a doctor? That's insane!

I mean, prescriptions, elective treatment I can understand. But are you saying that you actually need to pay just to walk into an examination room?

Wow, TV is stupid.

I have a lot of respect for people who get college degrees.

An MBA is barely a college degree. Compare how much you learn in engineering, or the sciences, to what you learn in an MBA. It's all hype except the networking and resume-filtering.

I keep trying to convince my MBA friends to drop out and start something, but it seems to attract non-entrepreneurial people.

Ooooh, unfortunate name. My wife deals with a lot of pharmaceutical names, so we've come up with the 13-year-old boy test for product names. If your product / service / company name would make a 13 year old boy snicker, then find another name.

What does this even mean? It sounds like something for the Enterprise Market.

Isn't that a bad thing?

This reminds me of the business card scene from American Psycho. God, I love that movie!

So are we going to go back to the days where startups are judged based on how fast they burn through their cash?

This seems like an extraordinary amount of money.

I think it depends on what you want to do. This is a great place for film / video. It's getting better for games, and of course there's financial services. There also seem to be a bunch of mobile companies here, too.

There's a very healthy ecology of small software companies, and a lot of web companies. There's a bit of defence and aerospace around the airport, but I think Montreal and Ottawa are bigger than Toronto, for that.

Kitchener's not too far away, and they're a major powerhouse with U of Waterloo, and RIM.

ATI just got acquired by AMD, and Alias by Autodesk, so there should be some newly minted angel investors around. I haven't sought financing, so I don't know what that's like. Having been through some private-equity as an employee, the funding definitely seems to be out there.

I think we're building a pretty good tradition, but it's going to take time. The seeds are there though, looking back over the last 20 years (god, I'm getting old!). There's nothing like the unholy Stanford-VC-startup triad yet.

So, I'm not really sure what to say. It's probably harder to get funded here than in CA, and you obviously won't get the same buzz as being YC-funded. On the other hand, if you want to work at a startup or small, hip shop then there're lots of places here.

EDIT If I ever move out of my home-office, I'm going to try to set up next to the U of T comp sci and engineering buildings. That's the nice thing about a down-town campus.

You've just listed everything you want out of the future (financially), which is a different question. Remember, this is for a 3 month investment of time.

So, it's good that you know what you want, but if someone offered to take you halfway there, would you turn it down? What about one tenth of the way?

Remember, most businessess fail. Yes, that includes yours, and some of mine. :)

Hehe. The snow in my back yard's almost completely melted. Looks like the raccoons and cats left me some "presents". Mmm.

So, who's in TO? Anyone want to chat, or meet (at a pub, say)?

Going to the original startup school, and watching the YC dinner on Justin.TV has re-inforced how important it is to have a local support network. Even if you're not working on the same stuff, there's an energy that's motivating and focusing.

Whether you're planning to apply to YC, planning to start something locally, or already on the way, let's meet and share the energy.

You can contact me at spameatinggrin at gmail dot com.

Local subdomains, or groups, a-la craigslist. E.g. toronto.ycombinator.com, or somesuch.

I understand YCombinator's rationale for having founders move to Boston, or the Valley.

That said, it might be great for you guys to get local footholds, where people can meet, organize, find co-founders, etc., before deciding to seek YC funding.

Good advice! The biggest mistake I've made in past businesses is to try to do it all alone. That's a recipe for having it fizzle out into an undead hobby project.

Interesting policy. It sounds great, in theory, but would be hard to implement.

A recent employer gave me 3 weeks of vacation. Great! Never mind that they kept asking me to delay it, for a year because each artificial deadline they created ended up slipping. There's never a good time to take vacation.

EDIT Therefore, it's always a good time to take vacation (given sufficient notice).

Well, obviously, this is for some reasonable definition of have.

The numbers work for me. I'm married, and have a mortgage.

I guess I was blurring the line between being retired and semi-retired. Were I to earn such a lump sum, my daily activities would probably look the same. I just wouldn't be working for anyone else, and wouldn't have that mental burn-rate / countdown timer going.

Controlling expenses is a very powerful tool. For every after-tax dollar you save, you're saving like 2 pre-tax dollars. So, it's much more effective to save $1 than to earn an extra $1.

Here's my mental hierarchy of wealth. Each one represents a drastic change in quality of life, and options. It's somewhat logarithmic.

1) Stop living month-to-month. I.e. at the end of the month, you have enough to pay another month's expenses in the bank.

2) Pay of all debt, except mortgage.

3) Stop living year-to-year. I.e. at the end of the year, you have enough money to not work next year, possibly having to reduce your quality of life, but not to poverty.

4) Semi-retirement. If you didn't work for the next five years, you'd still have enough money to start a business at the end of the period.

5) Retirement. You can maintain your current lifestyle, or a slightly scaled-back one indefinitely. Mortgage is paid off.

6) Rich. Your kids could do (5), if you decided to fund the lazy brats.

7) FU money.

Okay, I missed the humour.

Regarding (2), though. I think making $3M in 3 months has a lot more to do with luck and hype than any inherent skill. So, obviously those numbers were pulled out of thin air. The likelihood of that happening is extremely low.

Also, having a job you enjoy is no panacea. Whenever you're working for someone else (even the customer), there are things you won't enjoy. The discipline that allows you to do these things is the same discipline that makes it possible to work at a job you don't really enjoy.

Having said that, I agree with the approach of sacrificing quality-of-life for, say 5 years in order to never have to work again. Doing this for something you mostly enjoy will allow you to put in the effort without killing yourself. Unfortunately, this can become self-perpetuating. There's no inherent good in working.