[tptacek]

Andy, what I'm objecting to is the binary notion of living an absurdly pared down lifestyle versus starting a company. It's not a tradeoff. Apparently, it's not even currently a tradeoff if you want to take venture capital (taking VC improved my prior fulltime salary by about $40k the one time a company I founded raised it, but that was during silly season)... but I know it's not a tradeoff if you can sell.

I'm not crazy famous guy like Joshua. We bootstrapped 5 years ago. Sorry, dude, I never had to eat ramen. Or, look at Patrick. He's not living on ramen either. He flies back and forth from Nagoya to Chicago on a semiregular basis. He just launched a product. How many hours do you think he worked this week? I betcha it isn't 40. And this is his launch week.

I'm going to go way out on a limb: the $50k salary bit is just macho BS. Have at me, Andy, I can take it.

[anamax]

> Andy, what I'm objecting to is the binary notion of living an absurdly pared down lifestyle versus starting a company. It's not a tradeoff.

In some cases, that is the decision that folks have to make. In others, it isn't.

It depends on lots of things, including, but not limited to what the funders are willing to do and the founders' resources.

More power to the folks for whom this isn't an issue. I think that other folks shouldn't make the decision thinking that you can't live on less than $50k in SV. I'm not saying that anyone should make that decision, I'm just pointing out that it's an option for a lot of folks who might think otherwise.