[fleitz]

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is what I think.

I don't care about the 'glory' of a startup, glory is something you tell stupid 18 year old kids so they feel good about going to die for 60 year old kids.

If you can make money with out risk you're an idiot to go and find a business with lots of risk controlled by someone else.

Don't dig for gold, sell shovels!

Did you know that the people who sell plastic wrap for hard drives have a higher profit margin than those who make hard drives? Think about the ramifications of that for a second.

Laugh inside when you get made fun of for not having the stomach to risk digging for gold. Enjoy your life find your esteem from yourself and not from the opinions of the masses, it's you who has to live your life, not the others commenting on it. If raising VC makes you happy, then raise VC. If a lifestyle biz makes you happy run a lifestyle biz. If being a programmer in a cubefarm at a megacorp makes you happy, do that!

[guylhem]

"I don't care about the 'glory' of a startup, glory is something you tell stupid 18 year old kids so they feel good about going to die for 60 year old kids."

Beautiful :-) But what about passion?

"Did you know that the people who sell plastic wrap for hard drives have a higher profit margin than those who make hard drives? Think about the ramifications of that for a second."

No I didn't, but that's very interesting. Yet I doubt anyone here would be funding a company making new plastic wraps.

[fleitz]

I'd put passion largely in the same category of glory. It's an emotional good used to get people to accept lower returns.

I'll use the video game industry as an example, people are passionate about writing video games, their not passionate about not being able to see their family and friends for weeks. People are told they need to sacrifice to follow their passion but really they are sacrificing so the company can hit some arbitrary date and extract more rev from each employee, eventually to be discarded by the company when they are no longer profitable.

If your passionate about video games it's probably better to get a iPhone / Android / XNA dev account and make video games than to go work for a video game company (or your VC).

People are passionate about leaving their mark on the world via a business, not making sure their VC gets their 2X earn out.