Stop selling your stuff to corporate jerks. It never works. They always wreck what you’ve spent years making.
Don’t go for the quick payoff. You can make money maintaining your content and serving your community. It won’t be a fat fistful of cash, but that’s okay. You can keep living, keep growing your community, and, over the years, you will earn enough to be safe and comfortable. Besides, most people who get a big payoff blow the money within two years (because it’s not real to them, and because there are always professionals ready to help the rich squander their money). By contrast, if you retain ownership of your community and keep plugging away, you’ll have financial stability and manageable success, and you’ll be able to turn the content over to your juniors when the time comes to retire.
—We Didn’t Stop The Fire
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All I want
I love this post by Andre Torrez.
A rough recounting of what goals I wanted to achieve:
- Make money (duh)
- Like and respect the people I work with
- Really enjoy my day and feel like I got something done
- No pointless meetings
- Making something I’m proud of
Another thing: getting enormously wealthy selling your company for ten million or fifteen million dollars is obviously pretty freaking awesome, but having had a bit of money in the bank the past couple of years I have come to realize what I really wanted in life was a job I liked going to every day and people I like working with. Because if I did end up fabulously wealthy that’s pretty much what I’d end up doing, so why not just do it now?. (emphasis mine)
Read the whole thing of course and it also fits in very well with this I’ve seen passed around recently.
It seems it’s a John Maeda quote but can’t find it anywhere on his blog or old site.
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don’t confuse someone that has strong design sensibilities with strong design skills. Recognizing and appreciating strong design, and being able to create strong design, are very different things.
—The CEO as Head of Product
HackFwd
An interesting new Y Combinator like model out of Europe. HackFwd takes a lot more equity than existing models (27% vs 2-10%) but also offers quite a bit more money and a much more flexible model.
Startups will get funding for one year, with the aim of roughly matching the founder’s current yearly salary. Founders keep 70% equity, with 3% going to advisors and 27% to HackFwd. However, that said, they then take care of “legal and admin stuff… so you can focus on your product.” Help is given with UX, marketing and brand “through us or our partners”. Since it is not an incubator, the startups they invest in are created wherever the founders are. “Quarterly un-conferences in cool places so everyone can share and learn,” are arranged instead to allow everyone to meet up. That should appeal to the distributed nature of European startups where distances are an issue.
Funding amounts to up to €191,000 (depending on the size of the team).
—XING founder Lars Hinrichs launches HackFwd, a product-oriented pre-seed fund
Check out their excellent intro video which explains the concept better.
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Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company, and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes. A small number of people—maybe in the high hundreds or low thousands—have the knowledge of how to start and run a tech company, and things change so fast, only people in the thick of things have a sense of what is going on. Take a few years off and you’re behind the times.
—Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.
