[opportune]

I would love to do something like that, but I wouldn’t do it for a 70% paycut like I’d get as a founding engineer, unless I had founder-level equity.

I’m actually considering bootstrapping but in this day and age, it’s a hard prospect. You’re getting out advertised by everybody and many domains (AI, SAAS) have high inherent costs. It only works if you put in a lot of your own money, and are OK with a slow ramp to ramen profitability (within a domain where such a domain exists; forget about ML or nontrivial SAAS).

The whole “get some pizzas and hack” I am pretty sure is still how many profitable startups are getting created up to the MVP stage, just not necessarily the “three randoms and an accepted YC application” startups.