[danbmil99]

This advice may make sense if you're either independently wealthy, or young enough and unencumbered enough with life's obligations that you can afford to work for a year or two without a salary.

Actually, I think Silicon Valley uses this as a bit of a filter. It filters for people with a background and social network where a couple hundred thousand dollars, or working for a year or two without pay, are not a big deal.

Exercise for the reader: what cohort of people does this filter exclude?

[throwaway2016a]

A MVP does not take a couple hundred thousand dollars or years without pay. Many people here on HN have built apps and gotten traction in their free time.

The real trick is getting a job where your contract does not try to claim your employer owns things you make in your free time...

[mindcrime]

The real trick is getting a job where your contract does not try to claim your employer owns things you make in your free time...

Just work in a state where state law doesn't allow the "we own your brain" stuff. Those employment agreements don't trump applicable state law.

Of course there will always be a bit of subjectivity around the whole thing... as well all know, the law is always a bit non-deterministic until it reduces to a particular case, on a particular day, in front of a particular judge and jury, etc. But from a risk management standpoint, you can rely on some general truths most of the time.

For that matter, you could even go with "damn your employment agreement, do it anyway, and just don't tell anybody at $current_employer what you're doing, now or ever". Unless you say or do something to bring attention to yourself, it's probably fairly unlikely that they'll ever pay you any attention at all, especially if you don't "make it big" until after you quit.

[jonreem]

In California at least, regardless of what’s written in your employment contract, you own anything you produce on your own time and with your own equipment as long as it doesn’t directly relate to your employer’s business.

[jboggan]

It's difficult to get something started on the side when you work for Google for that reason.

[brucephillips]

Not really. Can you cite any instance of Google suing a company founded by ex-googlers that wasn't founded on the basis of the work those founders did at Google?

[Kelbit]

Has anyone ever been successfully pursued in court over that? You don't own employees when they're off the clock.

[jboggan]

I'm currently building an ML-powered debugging tool for automatically correcting code based on error messages. It's actually fairly difficult but doable, and we are working towards getting our first product out in the next few months. It has been difficult supporting ourselves during this phase however since we are both from middle class backgrounds and didn't go to prestigious schools. For years I thought I was smart for turning down Princeton and taking a scholarship to a state school and not having any student loan debt. Now for the first time I see the other side of that decision and think about the connections I could have been making during college and how much easier our current road would be. That early friends-and-family money is really important in getting yourself to a state where seed funding is interested in you.

[anon_cs493]

I'm confused by this anecdote. Princeton has one of the strongest financial aid programs in the world.

Why didn't you take the offer?

Students do not have to pay tuition if their parents make less than $140K a year. Students receive a full-ride (including tuition, room & board, and a stipend for misc costs) if their parents make less than $65K

Sources:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financia...

https://www.princeton.edu/admission-aid/affordable-all

Personal anecdote: I recently graduated with zero debt from Princeton (in fact, with a net positive gain in capital) and I come from a upper middle class family.

[jboggan]

They certainly didn't when I was accepted in the fall of 1999. I had enough money in my college fund to pay for 1.5 years of tuition, room, and board at Princeton so getting paid to go to a good state school seemed like a no-brainer. I would mostly attribute it to a middle class mindset of education being a necessary cost to be minimized, rather than a very large investment in your future with outsized returns.

[phonon]

In 1998, they substituted grants for loans for students from families earning less than $46,500.

In 2001 they replaced all loans with grants :-(

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/nytimesJan2801.pdf

[yazr]

Sounds super interesting.

But i keep hearing funding can be really hard for developer tools. Ironic, or something..

Which language are you finding easiest to handle? (Or rather, which compiler is most error-message friendly .. ?!_

[ThrustVectoring]

>what cohort of people does this filter exclude?

People unlikely to have the connections and social capital required to get future rounds of funding.

There are many venture capital filters that are Keynesian beauty contests like this. Venture capitalists aren't optimizing for funding financially sound businesses. They're optimizing for funding in round N companies that they believe have a good enough chance to get funded in round N+1, and so forth.