Do the math - how much of that $500M are you going to be getting once you're diluted with other founders and several funding rounds?
At the 40 thousand foot view, you're signing up to burn years of 80-100 hour weeks with a ~90% chance of failure. You need a bigger payday than you think to make that worth it.
> This mental definition you ostensibly have of what a startup must be is narrowing.
Yes, I also explicitly talked about smaller, "mom and pop" style businesses in the post, worth only million to tens of millions, which is pretty much the "don't get VC / other founders / 100 hr weeks" case you're talking about here.
I said they were a great angle if you have a good idea and can derisk it, so not really sure we're as at-odds as you're implying here, we probably agree overall.
> Life is much more than about money.
Amen! I think both the "quality of life" aspects of doing / not doing a startup AND the "your personal impact is 10k magnified" are both important considerations, and should be taken into account.
This is a truly excellent summary of why I chose not to do a start up! There's a lot there, including temperamental risk aversion, but the opportunity cost is the real nail in the coffin. No business idea I could come up with came close to the EV of "keep working for the man".
> but the opportunity cost is the real nail in the coffin. No business idea I could come up with came close to the EV of "keep working for the man".
Yep, this is a real cost most people don't consider. I actually think it's a big part of the young / old founder split - the reason most founders are young is because they have less opportunity cost overall in terms of kids and spouses, but ALSO, they just plain don't do the math (lol, it's ME - I'm the one who didn't do this on my first startup).
There's probably also something like young men valuing high variance strategies more, even if the EV isn't really there, because coming out on top, even if low likelihood, would mean a lot more to their imagined future than staying in a boring 6 figure job and living lean and investing a lot of their net income.
> You were this close to the trillion dollar idea; Instagram, but for feet.
Ha! Isn't there some famous musician who makes like 10x more from an OF "feet" channel than Spotify and her actual music? Deepseek says it's Iggy Azalea, whoever that is.
> Unrelated but I wonder why I don’t hear about more porn startups. I guess OF counts, but from what I remember that wasn’t their original plan.
I have a good friend who was seriously considering one, but it definitely seems like it's adjacent to "starting a dating app" or something, because it's *completely* dominated by Aylo group and OF (where dating apps are all Match group). So I assume there's some serious scale advantages, and they're probably at a point where they buy out any competition now as soon as they get any traction and are still small, just like Match group does. But that means the ultimate top-end is limited - you can only get a "buyout when small," and getting any bigger will require fighting goliath companies with deep pockets and lots of domain expertise. So that really limits your potential returns, and probably diminishes the "startup contender" landscape.
I do hear that there's a segment that's basically "girls explaining science / academic stuff" in fully clothed and vanilla ways, and they say they make like 3-5x as much by posting those videos on Pornhub vs Youtube, because the advertising revenue pays so much more.
That's hilarious. I don't know much about her either, other than the genre of music she makes, but I think it actually makes me think higher of Iggy, as at least she doesn't have any pretensions.
It seems like such an obvious industry to disrupt, as porn sites in general are so terrible. I haven't watched much porn in a while, but I know the vast majority of ads are basically just scams, and this is the primary monetization method of these sites. I've been subject to a rant about how PornHub's search engine has just gotten worse and worse, and no longer actually shows relevant results, just popular videos.
It's a product a huge portion of men consume every day, with terrible legacy players, so you'd think it would be absolutely ripe for disruption, but you're probably right that it's a tarpit. Someone intelligent would probably have figured a better product out by now if it was as lucrative as it looks, which hasn't happened.
Well I definitely don't meet those criteria lol. My current strategy for transformative AI is just being a bit more risk-averse and maybe having a higher discount rate.
Making a costly high risk bid to get wealthy now seems weird if you expect the world to get much wealthier anyway. Like rushing to sow in winter. Just wait until spring.
I could see a world where capital takes all the gains from AI, maybe it's worth making a mad dash to get out of being a worker now for that reason. Even then I'd want to be more diversified than owning one business that could get undercut by AI-powered entrants.
> Making a costly high risk bid to get wealthy now seems weird if you expect the world to get much wealthier anyway. Like rushing to sow in winter. Just wait until spring.
Yeah, I think the urge is probably driven by fundamental uncertainty (will the US gov *really* UBI everyone?) and the potential loss of relative status (right now I'm on top with my degree and white collar job, but in the future that will be plumbers and electricians!).
Also, this might be one of the last times you CAN use your ingenuity and grit to create something new! Maybe in an AGI future, all that will be snaffled up by much smarter / faster machine minds connected to deep private equity and hedge fund capital reserves that you can't compete with.
> Probably the least anyone who can make six figures should consider is a company that has the potential to be worth $500M.
This is quite simply the most insanely incorrect logic I've read on the internet in a long, long time.
If you've run several startups and still think this way, I pity you.
Do the math - how much of that $500M are you going to be getting once you're diluted with other founders and several funding rounds?
At the 40 thousand foot view, you're signing up to burn years of 80-100 hour weeks with a ~90% chance of failure. You need a bigger payday than you think to make that worth it.
Don't have other founders.
Don't get funding.
Don't work 80-100 hour weeks.
(And don't fail.)
This mental definition you ostensibly have of what a startup must be is narrowing.
Life is much more than about money.
> This mental definition you ostensibly have of what a startup must be is narrowing.
Yes, I also explicitly talked about smaller, "mom and pop" style businesses in the post, worth only million to tens of millions, which is pretty much the "don't get VC / other founders / 100 hr weeks" case you're talking about here.
I said they were a great angle if you have a good idea and can derisk it, so not really sure we're as at-odds as you're implying here, we probably agree overall.
> Life is much more than about money.
Amen! I think both the "quality of life" aspects of doing / not doing a startup AND the "your personal impact is 10k magnified" are both important considerations, and should be taken into account.
This is a truly excellent summary of why I chose not to do a start up! There's a lot there, including temperamental risk aversion, but the opportunity cost is the real nail in the coffin. No business idea I could come up with came close to the EV of "keep working for the man".
> but the opportunity cost is the real nail in the coffin. No business idea I could come up with came close to the EV of "keep working for the man".
Yep, this is a real cost most people don't consider. I actually think it's a big part of the young / old founder split - the reason most founders are young is because they have less opportunity cost overall in terms of kids and spouses, but ALSO, they just plain don't do the math (lol, it's ME - I'm the one who didn't do this on my first startup).
There's probably also something like young men valuing high variance strategies more, even if the EV isn't really there, because coming out on top, even if low likelihood, would mean a lot more to their imagined future than staying in a boring 6 figure job and living lean and investing a lot of their net income.
“everyone trying to create “Uber for dogs,” “Doordash, but for chimps,” and “Instagram, but for knees”
You were this close to the trillion dollar idea; Instagram, but for feet.
Unrelated but I wonder why I don’t hear about more porn startups. I guess OF counts, but from what I remember that wasn’t their original plan.
> You were this close to the trillion dollar idea; Instagram, but for feet.
Ha! Isn't there some famous musician who makes like 10x more from an OF "feet" channel than Spotify and her actual music? Deepseek says it's Iggy Azalea, whoever that is.
> Unrelated but I wonder why I don’t hear about more porn startups. I guess OF counts, but from what I remember that wasn’t their original plan.
I have a good friend who was seriously considering one, but it definitely seems like it's adjacent to "starting a dating app" or something, because it's *completely* dominated by Aylo group and OF (where dating apps are all Match group). So I assume there's some serious scale advantages, and they're probably at a point where they buy out any competition now as soon as they get any traction and are still small, just like Match group does. But that means the ultimate top-end is limited - you can only get a "buyout when small," and getting any bigger will require fighting goliath companies with deep pockets and lots of domain expertise. So that really limits your potential returns, and probably diminishes the "startup contender" landscape.
I do hear that there's a segment that's basically "girls explaining science / academic stuff" in fully clothed and vanilla ways, and they say they make like 3-5x as much by posting those videos on Pornhub vs Youtube, because the advertising revenue pays so much more.
That's hilarious. I don't know much about her either, other than the genre of music she makes, but I think it actually makes me think higher of Iggy, as at least she doesn't have any pretensions.
It seems like such an obvious industry to disrupt, as porn sites in general are so terrible. I haven't watched much porn in a while, but I know the vast majority of ads are basically just scams, and this is the primary monetization method of these sites. I've been subject to a rant about how PornHub's search engine has just gotten worse and worse, and no longer actually shows relevant results, just popular videos.
It's a product a huge portion of men consume every day, with terrible legacy players, so you'd think it would be absolutely ripe for disruption, but you're probably right that it's a tarpit. Someone intelligent would probably have figured a better product out by now if it was as lucrative as it looks, which hasn't happened.
Well I definitely don't meet those criteria lol. My current strategy for transformative AI is just being a bit more risk-averse and maybe having a higher discount rate.
Making a costly high risk bid to get wealthy now seems weird if you expect the world to get much wealthier anyway. Like rushing to sow in winter. Just wait until spring.
I could see a world where capital takes all the gains from AI, maybe it's worth making a mad dash to get out of being a worker now for that reason. Even then I'd want to be more diversified than owning one business that could get undercut by AI-powered entrants.
> Making a costly high risk bid to get wealthy now seems weird if you expect the world to get much wealthier anyway. Like rushing to sow in winter. Just wait until spring.
Yeah, I think the urge is probably driven by fundamental uncertainty (will the US gov *really* UBI everyone?) and the potential loss of relative status (right now I'm on top with my degree and white collar job, but in the future that will be plumbers and electricians!).
Also, this might be one of the last times you CAN use your ingenuity and grit to create something new! Maybe in an AGI future, all that will be snaffled up by much smarter / faster machine minds connected to deep private equity and hedge fund capital reserves that you can't compete with.