Planning for Aliens

By day I’m your average enterprise developer. I develop in Windows. I write VB code on .NET. I write standards-compliant Javascript. When I head home for the day I’m just glad I haven’t literally died of boredom. By night I’m a dual-wielding Python/Django hacker battling my foe  with a stream of commits to GitHub. I’m an entrepreneur bent on market domination.

I struggle with this dual identity. In the startup community quiting your day job is tantamount to seeing God on the road to Damascus. Having a day job and starting a company are like water and oil. Paul Graham says my day job is why I’m going to fail. This dude says I’m not an entrepreneur because I have a day job. For me and others like me there is little choice. I’m married. My appetite for risk and my lifestyle are not self-determined, they are negotiated. So I need a job or a great big pile of cash.

Assuming a reasonable padding of cash, working full time on my startup would be optimal. Perhaps my time would be better spent tracking down investors. Certainly I’m constantly evaluating this option. But for one reason or another, here I am and I’ll likely be here for a while yet. So to make myself feel better here are list of the advantages that come with having a day job.

No Investors

I’m a fan of startup war stories. Over the years I’ve likely read hundreds. Perhaps I’m coming to an erroneous conclusion, but based on this pile of stories I’ve been left with the impression that much of the pain in starting up stems from bad relationships with investors. There seems to be a correlation between the success of startups and their skill at managing their investors. My working theory is the possible number of extremely painful endings increases exponentially with the amount of equity owned by investors. Programs like YCombinator seem to be exceptions to this rule. I don’t have investors because I don’t need investors and I’d say on the whole this is an advantage.

Plenty of Room for Errors

I’m new at this whole startup thing. It’s nice to know if I screw up the only cash I burned through was my own. How is this an advantage? Wouldn’t it make more sense to risk another person’s money? I’ve always felt that the value of the relationships I have with friends and family, (my most likely source of angel money, maybe you are different), vastly exceeds the few thousands of dollars I might raise from them. If I don’t ask them for money I don’t have to worry about irreparable damage to a relationship. I used to play a lot of poker, and the saying is “scared money is easy money.” Never sit down to play cards if the stakes are outside your bankroll. I’m never worried about money, because as long as I keep my job, there’s always another paycheck.

There’s Never Enough Time

The number of things to do in a startup is approximately infinity. Having a job constrains me to roughly 35 hours per week spent on my startup. If I want to make measurable progress in a reasonable amount of time I have to be really good at prioritizing what I’m working on. I’ve put great effort into learning skills and methods for focusing my energy on the right tasks. I’m pretty good at it. In the past I would have just thrown more hours at the problem, and now I simply don’t have that luxury. This is why having an externally imposed constraint on my time is a good thing.

Starting up is hard enough without giving up a big chunk of your week to a job. Maybe it’s impossible, I’m not sure. But this is where I find myself. How could I call myself an entrepreneur if I didn’t make the best of it?

Next post: Tips for starting up while working full time.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 6:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.