| I have been reading Hacker News for the past couple years... anyway I am currently working as a product manager in my day job and am interested in starting a startup / small business. And let me underline the "small business". Many cofounders are too keen on tackling big billion dollar ideas, but I think there are many low-key ideas that can generate good revenue without even getting VC funding. I am presently making $144,000 salary as a Director of Product Management, but I really feel it is futile to continue serving the corporate masters. There is this void that I feel in going to work every day -- dealing with commutes, bad stress (not good stress), dumb co-workers, and the office politics. And I realized that while the paycheck sounds to be good on paper, the salary after taxes, living expenses, etc - it is really not that much. I really don't have that much real work per se ( so are the other peers -- no one would want to admit) - a lot of it is really busy work ; preparing Powerpoints, replying to emails, etc. But we all show our face and warm our chair from 9 am to 6 pm because everybody is afraid of being labeled a 'slacker'. Having been through one layoff and one micro-manager, I realize that working in a company is really not that stress-free, secure, or financially viable in the long run.There's no such thing as job security. I am looking to create a startup / small business (funding can be optional) where we can be the sole owners and make good income over and above what we could earn from working at a day job. Ideally, we will start doing this on the side until it matures. For the past two years, I currently have a side online business where I net about $38,000 per year so I have some experience in starting an online small business, but it is not enough for me to quit my day job yet. I am not shooting for millions or billions, simply a small business where we could earn $400,000+ so each of us can get $200,000 and then stop working at our day job and then grow the business. I attended a lot of events and talked to a lot of people and read a lot of books. Some of my favorite business / work philosophy comes from: . Founders of Atlassian (Jira and Confluence) -- try Google them . 37 Signals' Getting Real
. David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY . 37 Signals' Re-work . Blue Ocean Strategy book My background: . BS in Computer Science ( graduated with perfect GPA) . Worked as programmer (software design engineer) at Microsoft . MS from Stanford . worked over 10 years as engineer and later product managers at various high tech companies in the bay area (Yahoo, PayPal, etc). . strong SEO, online marketing, web app, viral, affiliate marketing, etc. . smart and organized What I am looking is: * programmer / coder that could build beautiful web applications from scratch , say in RoR * programmer / coder that wants to be owners * you want to be in charge and are looking to break free from your modern day slavery ( day job ) Ideally:
* you have enough free time on nights/days to do coding, perhaps aside from your not too-demanding day job * you have the know-how and skills to build medium-scale to large web application from scratch If all this sounds interesting to you, let me know please.. my email is: productguy09 (at) gmail dot com Thank you for your time! |
Also, I'd encourage you to solicit people that have similar interests (possibly expertise in something you wished you knew more about & enjoy), which can potentially turn into your product/business. If you want to spend a significant portion of your life working on something, it might as well be something you enjoy (cause you can grind out a living doing things you don't care about for anyone). When recruiting engineers, let them know what spaces / ideas you are considering. From my experience, passion for a space gets more responses then delineated qualifications.
Best of luck.